I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find much when I started researching vintage baseball gloves.  I lucked out by finding some videos (I included a couple at the bottom of this post) and websites that were filled with information.  Vintage baseball gloves always looked a little bit goofy to me.  I was brought up with the type of glove you see today, with big, deep pocket and lots of leather. 


Watching those old newsreel clips of professional baseball players wearing baseball gloves that actually looked like "gloves" always made me wonder how the heck they ever caught the ball when it came at them.  It seems to me that it would have had to have been a lot tougher to make some of the fielding plays that look routine today if you were using one of those smaller models without several inches of leather making you reach that much longer.

photo credit: mijori

I've come across a few old gloves in my estate sale adventures.  Unfortunately, I didn't know a whole lot about them.  Since I still have some old baseball gloves sitting here that I need to get listed, I thought I'd do a little research on them.  I found out that there are some serious fans and collectors of these old beauties out there.  I actually found a very cool forum devoted just to vintage baseball gloves that had more information than I could reasonably digest in one or even a few sittings.  If you are a collector, I'd definitely recommend checking them out.  Some of the vintage gloves that sell today go for quite a bit.  The most expensive one I found on eBay recently went for over a thousand dollars.  If you look below, you'll see some of the least expensive gloves currently listed, but you can use the drop downs to sort them however you like.

When I list my gloves, I'm not going to do anything in the way of reconditioning them.  If you are a potential seller of almost anything "vintage" you might want to keep that tip in mind.  It often seems like a natural thing to clean something up before offering it for sale to someone, but with older items, you can end up doing a lot more harm than good.  Sometimes older relics just can't stand up to a good cleaning unless it is done by a professional who really knows what they are doing.  Especially messing with that old leather, the last thing I would want to do is destroy its potential value by using some modern cleaner on it that at best would change its appearance and at worst actually damage the glove.  If you happen by when I've got one of my "estate sale gloves" up, it will probably be the one that looks kind of beat up.  As I mentioned, I personally am just trying to get through my massive piles of "stuff" but some of these guys who deal in these old gloves really give them some love and attention as they recondition them and give them new life.

If you are looking for information, you will probably like these videos I found a lot!

Here is another one for you...