by Steve Rushin
To think it was once exactly the opposite.
The baseball glove was born in 1870, the year the New York Times first called baseball the “national” pastime. “In summer there is an endless variety of out-door amusements and exercises which all can engage in more or less,” the paper reported, “the most prominent of which is the national game of base-ball for men and boys, and that of croquet for girls and women.”
Crucially, baseball was the national game for men. And man was not a fully evolved creature in 1870, any more than he is now. Charles Darwin spent the whole of 1870 writing The Descent of Man, in which he stated, “There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties,” a sentiment especially true of baseball catchers. They stood, stooped, several feet behind home plate—“Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”—to catch the ball barehanded on the bounce. That ball was thrown from only fifty feet away, to catchers who wore no hand protection of any kind.
The first written evidence of a player having the sense to don gloves came on June 29 of that summer, in the Cincinnati Daily Commercial’s report of the previous day’s Red Stockings game: “Allison caught to-day in a pair of buckskin mittens, to protect his hands.”
If Doug Allison, the Cincinnati catcher, used gloves the next day, there is no record of it. There is, rather, a graphic record of the time he’d spent not having done so. As a baseball retiree, Allison had his hands photographed for pathological posterity at least twice—in 1889, and again in 1908. In both photos, the fingers meander at every joint. The palms are discolored and wizened. Allison’s looked like the gnarled and grasping hands of the malevolent trees in The Wizard of Oz, and there is little wonder why. “To shake hands with a catcher,” it was said at the time, “feels like grabbing a handful of walnuts.”
As a nineteenth-century male, Allison—a marble cutter by trade—knew that pain was to be concealed. He was one of thirty-two thousand casualties in the Civil War Battle of Spotsylvania in May 1864. Exploding ordnance had rendered him partially deaf, which is why—years later—he’d occasionally get to third from first on foul fly balls, oblivious to teammates and fans screaming at him to return before he was doubled up. “Allison was a gunner in Fort Sumpter [sic] during the late war, and is the only survivor of three batches of gunners of six men in each batch,” the Boston Globe noted in 1876. “His service during the war accounts for his impaired hearing.”
Palms of Doug Allison’s hands, 1889. (National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology)
Backs of Doug Allison’s hands, 1889. (National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology)
Another combatant at Spotsylvania, Robert E. Lee—who died four months after Allison wore those buckskin mittens—wrote: “A man may manifest and communicate his joy, but he should conceal and smother his grief as much as possible.”
And so Allison set about doing that after the war, when he joined the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, for $15 a week. He had been discovered by a team executive named John Joyce, who went for a long walk in Philadelphia one day and wound up watching a sandlot game in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. After the game—in which Allison had hit a long home run to center field—Joyce took the boy by carriage back to the Continental Hotel. There, Joyce summoned Cincinnati president Alfred T. Goshorn from his room.
“Allison was sitting there in the carriage, a tanned and freckled country boy whose boots and clothes were covered with brickyard clay,” according to a contemporary account, typewritten on stained paper and filed away at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library. “On his head was a 25-cent straw hat with half the rim gone. Joyce & Goshorn bought him a suit and made him get a haircut and took him on the train back to Cincinnati.”
These were the men who invented the modern game. “When I started in to catch, gloves were unknown and a team which carried ten men was well supplied with material,” Allison said in 1908, when he was sixty-one. “So there was no laying off for slight injuries. The ball we used then contained an ounce and a half of rubber and would fly through the infield when it was hit.”
Compared to a whistling cannonball, that flying baseball was a trifle, and wearing gloves to catch it made one a sissy. “We know that if we fearlessly grasp a nettle, it is harmless,” wrote John Brookes in his book Manliness, published in 1875, which turned out to be the baseball glove’s annus mirabilis. “Touch it timorously, and it stings.”
Barehanded players continued fearlessly grasping the nettle until that very year, 1875, when Charlie Waitt of the St. Louis Brown Stockings had the courage to be timorous and wore a glove with the fingertips cut off to play first base at Boston.
“The glove worn by [Waitt] was flesh color, with a large, round opening in the back,” recalled Albert Spalding. “Now, I had for a good while felt the need of some sort of hand protection for myself. In those days clubs did not carry an extra carload of pitchers, as now. For several years I had pitched in every game played by the Boston team, and had developed severe bruises on the inside of my left hand. When it is recalled that every ball pitched had to be returned, and that every swift one coming my way, from infielders, outfielders or hot from the bat, must be caught or stopped, some idea may be gained of the punishment received.”
Spalding asked Waitt about his homemade glove. “He confessed that he was a bit ashamed to wear it,” Spalding wrote, “but had it on to save his hand. He also admitted he had chosen a color as inconspicuous as possible, because he didn’t care to attract attention. He added that the opening on the back was for purpose of ventilation.
“Meanwhile, my own hand continued to take its medicine with utmost regularity, occasionally being bored with a warm twister that hurt excruciatingly. Still, it was not until 1877 that I overcame my scruples against joining the ‘kid-glove aristocracy’ by donning a glove. When I did at last decide to do so, I did not select a flesh-colored glove, but got a black one, and cut out as much of the back as possible to let the air in.”
Here was a watershed in baseball: one of the game’s greatest stars, near the end of a glorious career, adopting conspicuous protection for his hands. “Happily, in my case, the presence of a glove did not call out the ridicule that had greeted Waite [sic],” wrote Spalding. “I had been playing so long and had become so well known that the innovation seemed rather to evoke sympathy than hilarity. I found that the glove, thin as it was, helped considerably, and inserted one pad after another until a good deal of relief was afforded. If anyone wore a padded glove before this date I do not know it. The ‘pillow mitt’ was a later innovation.”
Spalding wore that single black glove in 1877, the year after he opened his sporting-goods store in Chicago. By removing the stigma from gloves, he could sell them to a new and burgeoning market, which he promptly did. Not everyone adopted them—some players thought gloves a hindrance to good fielding, no more appropriate to playing shortstop than to playing the piano. And even those who did wear them were hardly out of danger. While fielding a ball in 1882, shortstop Mike Moynahan broke a finger on his throwing hand and had to have it amputated at the first joint. An inconvenience, to be sure, but Moynahan did hit .310 the next year for the Philadelphia Athletics, and his 268 assists ranked second in the league—and first among men with nine fingertips.
In short, baseballs were dangerous weapons. Gloves protected players, and soon players grew protective of gloves, treating them almost gynecologically. To this day, you never put your hands in another man’s gamer. And is it any wonder why? Players are wedded to their gloves—at least one was wedded in his glove—and have been since at least 1884.
Cornelius McGillicuddy’s baseball journey began with a single step—and a pair of mitts—in East Brookfield, Massachusetts. “When I walked out of my old home town in 1884,” he wrote, “my sole worldly possessions were a pair of buckskin gloves with their fingers cut off to make catcher’s mitts.
I was on my way to fulfill my promise to myself. I was going to try to make the big leagues, and to make my dreams come true. For this was America, the land of opportunity.” If this sounds like the start of a Horatio Alger story, well, McGillicuddy grew up twenty-five miles from Alger’s hometown, at the peak of the author’s popularity. And it was a Horatio Alger story of sorts: McGillicuddy played or managed for sixty-six years in the big leagues, but even at the end of his life, those first buckskin gloves remained a kind of Rosebud to the man who became known as Connie Mack.
In the late 1800s, gloves were still just that: gloves, a slightly larger version of the human hand. “You had to catch the ball two-handed because the glove was so small,” said Casey Stengel, who was a young boy in the 1890s, by which time gloves were advertised amid dropsy cures in baseball’s bible, Sporting Life. “You wouldn’t believe how small those gloves were. Why, when I got married I couldn’t afford dress gloves, so I wore my baseball mitt to my wedding and nobody even noticed. That took care of my right hand and I was smart enough to keep my left hand in my pocket.” Edna Lawson Stengel was, in more than one sense of the phrase, a good catch.
Pillow gloves, those fat-fingered (often four-fingered) gloves that look to modern eyes like the Hamburger Helper mascot, were pioneered by catchers, for whom padding was most urgent.
Like Edison with the lightbulb, Albert Bushong wasn’t the sole inventor of the catcher’s mitt, but he made the most famous contribution to its creation. They were contemporaries, Edison and Bushong, and both would soon have towns named after them. In the history of modern innovators, the Wizard of Menlo Park is now somewhat better remembered than the Wizard of Sportsman’s Park, and Edison, New Jersey, slightly more robust than Bushong, Kansas.
But it should not be forgotten that the great St. Louis Browns catcher Albert John (Doc) Bushong was—more than any who went before him—a man who knew squat.
An 1882 alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania dental school, Bushong was the first catcher to catch one hundred games in a big-league season, in 1885, while playing for those Browns, winners of four straight American Association pennants from 1884 to 1887. So beloved were Bushong’s Browns that railroad executives—as the railways expanded west—began to name towns and stations and post offices after much of the team’s roster. Or so claimed a persistent Kansas legend of the early twentieth century, abetted by credulous sportswriters. Comiskey, Kansas—population 28 in 1910—was a station on the Missouri Pacific Railroad unambiguously named for Browns manager Charles Comiskey. Latham, Kansas, on the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway, shared a name with Browns third baseman Arlie Latham. Boyle, on the Union Pacific Railroad, was inspired—according to a century-old story I have always wanted to believe—by my great-grandfather’s brother Jack Boyle, who replaced Doc Bushong as catcher for the Browns and was described in Sporting Life as “almost a copy of Bushong.” In 1887, Boyle caught in eighty-seven consecutive games, an absurdity even for that age.
In fact, the towns of Boyle and Latham appear not to have been named for the ballplayers but for more local—if less prominent—bearers of those surnames.
But Bushong, on the Missouri Pacific—like Comiskey, seven miles to the west—was unambiguously named for a St. Louis Brown. It literally did for Doc Bushong what the catcher’s mitt had done for him. It put him on the map.
Bushong lost his job to my great-great-uncle Jack Boyle when “an inshoot jellied the fingers of good old Doc Bushong.… The disabling of the dentist gave Jack Boyle the opportunity he needed to show his stuff.”
The dentist/catcher had a twofold professional interest in keeping his fingers healthy. And so Doc Bushong’s most significant fillings were the sponges he put into his glove, padding it out and patching it up “until it was as soft to his hand as a pillow,” according to an 1887 account in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “and it was his best friend while he was up under the bat.”
Doc Bushong, both hands gloved, 1888. (Library of Congress)
In that same year, two brothers opened a sporting-goods store in St. Louis, with designs on manufacturing products. One of those brothers, George Rawlings, had already received a patent, two years earlier, for a baseball glove modestly padded in the palm and fingers. By comparison, Bushong’s was a burlesque of a baseball glove, what Sporting Life called “a spring mattress on his left hand.”
“The Doctor was proud of this affair, and would not allow anyone to use it,” the New York Times recalled from a twenty-five-year remove in 1915. “Out of Bushong’s idea grew the idea of the mitt.”
While a catcher’s mitt afforded a measure of comfort, Bushong believed in a far more powerful piece of equipment, one that would also become ubiquitous in baseball: the mustache. According to Brian McKenna, Bushong’s biographer for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bushong believed that a mustache improved one’s eyesight: “When I shave my upper lip it always makes my eyes discharge more or less water and a man can’t see in such a condition. The day that I had my finger broken in Louisville by a pitched ball I had no moustache. It had been taken off the day before, and I truly believe that this alone was the cause of the accident. I am an advocate of hairy lips in the profession.”
When you recall that Pete Browning, the original Louisville Slugger, thought bathing his eyes in buttermilk and gazing directly into the sun improved his eyesight, you’re left with two visionaries—early innovators of bat and mitt—who knew nothing of actual vision.
Before they were products on many hands, gloves were the products of many hands. In 1889, Joe Gunson of the Kansas City Cowboys stitched the fingers of a leather glove together, rigged a wire frame around it, stuffed that frame with sheepskin, and wrapped that sheepskin in buckskin, dressing his hand like a French-Canadian fur trapper of the day, in the skins of various animals.
Gunson failed to patent his mitt, but a half century later, in 1939, at the age of seventy-six, he sent a version to the brand-new Baseball Hall of Fame, along with seven affidavits attesting to its authenticity. But Gunson wasn’t the sole inventor of the catcher’s mitt any more than Bushong was. Very few baseball inventions sprang fully formed from a single genius. Bill Francis, library associate at the Baseball Hall of Fame, advises caution and skepticism when declaring “firsts” in baseball: “Many times, when you read of the ‘first’ something, you dig a little deeper and find one that came before it.” Of almost all apparent breakthroughs, it is wiser to write of the “earliest known record” of a thing.
Unlike other men in the Age of Invention that closed out the nineteenth century, Gunson never became synonymous with the catcher’s mitt as Rudolf Diesel did with the internal combustion engine, or even Melville Bissell with the carpet sweeper. It was Gunson’s misfortune to help invent something at a time when grander devices, of greater use to many more people, were being invented. Lightbulbs were appearing—literally and figuratively—over countless heads. Everyone was an Edison, not just Edison. Telephones, motion pictures, roller coasters, escalators, and zippers were among the manifold novelties making American life easier. The glove, more than any other invention in baseball, allowed players the luxury of—in the words of the age’s greatest chronicler, Mark Twain—“doing your duty without pain.”
In that era, the catcher’s duty was pain: ignoring it, managing it, absorbing and delivering it. These last two were often done in rapid succession, as happened on December 15, 1891, when two catchers were drinking in a Cincinnati saloon, as ballplayers were inclined to do on a winter Tuesday.
One of the catchers, Jack Boyle of the New York Giants, was nursing a sprained ankle suffered in an off-season football game. The other catcher, thirty-two-year-old Jim Keenan—newly retired from the Cincinnati Reds—thought it would be amusing, in an idle moment, to “playfully” kick Boyle in his injured ankle.
To men who’d become nearly insensate to physical pain, such casual violence was meant to be “hilarious,” in the word of one contemporary account of the incident. But Boyle didn
’t take it as such. “Boyle is fond of a joke,” the Toronto Daily Mail noted, “but this was going a little too far.” Boyle, an amateur boxer, hit Keenan with a right jab, knocking him to the ground and blackening his eye, after which—per the custom of future baseball fights—onlookers jumped in and prevented further fisticuffs.
Which isn’t to say that Honest Jack Boyle didn’t have a vertiginously high pain threshold. On the contrary. One December evening, in 1898, Boyle was walking home at midnight—from another Cincinnati saloon, we’re left to presume—when a stranger jumped him from behind. There is no record of the catcher having been robbed, nor was the assailant ever apprehended, but the mugger did plunge a knife deep into Boyle’s left (or catching) shoulder, “making an ugly wound.”
By then, Boyle was a member of the Philadelphia Phillies. His left shoulder bothered him into the spring of 1899, at which time he consulted a physician, who made “a startling discovery,” as the wires put it. “Dr. Walker, in probing the left shoulder of the ball player, found imbedded in the flesh near the bone the broken blade of a knife.” The business end of the blade had snapped off when it hit bone, and Boyle evidently hadn’t bothered to have the shoulder carefully examined. And so he set about training with a dagger blade in his shoulder. Needless to say, this somewhat impeded his preparation for the 1899 season, which was perhaps the whole point of the stabbing. For reasons lost to history, many of Boyle’s friends believed that the man who jumped him intended to end his playing career.
If so, he succeeded. After thirteen seasons—after 1,087 big-league games and 4,232 at bats—Boyle never again played in the majors. As the last summer of the nineteenth century arrived, he made plans to open a saloon on Seventh Street in Cincinnati, setting them up and knocking them back with a pair of hands burled and knotted like driftwood.
As the twentieth century dawned, gloves, bats, and baseballs were becoming household items, sold by mail order, a business that began in 1872 when Aaron Montgomery Ward of Chicago sent out a single-sheet catalog offering 163 items. By 1904, Montgomery Ward had three million customers, and “sporting goods”—like dry goods and canned goods, the phrase is a vestige of the nineteenth century—were burgeoning.