All You Need Is Glove! A Look Back at Vintage Baseball Glove Ads

Good Friday Monday morning Uni Watchers. I hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Looks like I’m back up and running, after some kind of glitch prevented me from accessing UW (both the back end and the home page) Thursday through Friday. Hopefully everything is back to speed now. But as I read the comments over the weekend, it seems that a number of you also were unable to access UW, some for long-ish periods of time. If this ever happens to you again, please e-mail me (phil.hecken@gmail) or UW (uniwatching@gmail) to let us know if you can’t access the site. This will help us to diagnose if there are site problems. My apologies to anyone whose access had been temporarily unavailable.

Also — at 12:00 noon (ET), I’ll be announcing a new uniform design contest, similar to last year’s collaboration with the University of Hawai’i. The winners of the contest will each receive a really nice cash prize and the winning designs will be worn during a pair of conference games of the D-I university which is partnering with Uni Watch for this one. That’s all I can say for now, but check back at noon ET for all the details!

Now then.

The post I had planned to run on Friday will run this morning. And I think you’re going to really enjoy it — it isn’t often (ever?) that UW writes favorably about ads — but as you’ll see, these are 1) vintage, and 2) NOT seen on uniforms. As we’ve said countless times before, we here at UW are not opposed to advertising, just advertising where it doesn’t belong (such as on uniforms, school buses, municipal buildings, etc.). But old time print ads? Yes please, and twice on Sunday.

Let me now turn it over to UW pal/contributor Jimmy Parker, who authored many articles for Uni Watch over the years, and when I took over the editorship from Paul back at the end of May 2024, I asked Jimmy if he’d like to contribute more articles, on about a monthly-ish basis, and he heartily agreed. Jimmy is the proprietor of the most excellent Beauty Of A Game website, and he also goes by that handle on Twitter/X and Bluesky. Jimmy also has a Substack, which is a place for him to share some of his old UW pieces as well as items that fall outside the realm of UW interests. Check it out and if you enjoy his articles on here, you’ll be sure to enjoy his Substack.

Here’s Jimmy!

• • • • •All You Need is Glove: A look back at Vintage Baseball glove ads
by Jimmy Parker

Long-time readers may recall my affection for Boys’ Life magazine, as it’s been referenced in a few of the pieces I’ve done for Uni Watch over the years. For those unfamiliar, a brief recap: for several years in the late ’70s and early ’80s I was a Cub/Boy Scout. One of the benefits of being a scout was a subscription to Boys’ Life magazine. As the official magazine of Scouting, Boys’ Life boasted a circulation of over 2 million at its peak. Issues featured content aimed not only at scouts but also subject matters of interest to young boys in general.

The advertisers within the magazine reflected this, with sporting goods manufacturers, especially baseball glove makers, historically having a strong presence. The magazine’s long history gives us a glimpse into the various ways glove makers have marketed their equipment. While not touching on every glove ad, nor even every type of advertising message, what follows is a brief look at some of the ways glove manufacturers have promoted their equipment.

Over the years glove makers have used several different formula to promote their wares. Glove ads have run the gamut, from simply showing kids using the glove to detailed explanations of the latest in leather technology. Ads have instructed readers to ask their Dad for a specific brand of glove, even going to so far as to feature an area of the ad to be used to tell the Old Man exactly which model you wanted, as in this 1960 Wilson ad.

Through these ads, readers have learned the history of the evolution of the baseball glove …

… and have been presented with an almost life-sized photo of one of the game’s most beautiful gloves, this 1972 Rawlings World Series Special. Featuring red, white and blue leather, along with autographs of the MVPs of the previous two World Series, Brooks Robinson and Roberto Clemente, the World Series Special perhaps could have only been produced in the years leading up to America’s Bicentennial. Variations of all of these marketing messages, and more, have been used over the years. However, there was one type of ad that glove manufacturers would return to time after time — the celebrity endorsement.

Early on, glove makers hit upon the idea to use celebrity endorsements to peddle their leather. In 1954 Wilson featured New York Giants bat boy Bobby Weinstein in an ad and in 1964 MacGregor used Chicago White Sox Manager Al Lopez to literally talk to kids about their gloves.

But other than a few instances similar to those, the vast majority of celebrity endorsements in glove ads were from the ballplayers themselves. Practically all glove manufacturers at one time or another used players to promote their gloves. Even smaller brands like Nokona …

… MacGregor and Kennedy used players to not only brand their gloves but to appear in their ads.

But for baseball star power, and overall coolness factor, the smaller companies couldn’t compete with the big three of Spalding, Wilson and Rawlings. Those three companies not only featured the game’s biggest stars, they typically portrayed them in the biggest, boldest ads. Although Rawlings was featuring St. Louis Cardinals stars Marty Marion and Stan Musial in small space ads as far back as the late ’40s, by the mid-to-late ’50s the use of ballplayer endorsements in glove ads was reaching its peak.

In 1956 Wilson had Detroit Tigers star Harvey Kuenn in a full-page advertisement explaining why he used Wilson gloves, while also name-dropping teammate and fellow star Al Kaline. The fact that both were members of the “Wilson Advisory Staff” is noted with an asterisk. This is one of the earlier instances of a full-page ad from a glove maker but it was a sign of things to come.

Over the course of the next decade and a half the major glove manufacturers increasingly used the game’s top players in their ads. And as those ads got larger and bolder, the player names got bigger as well. Although Rawlings had been featuring Mickey Mantle in some of their ads for several years, by the early sixties Mickey’s star was large enough to command a full-page ad.

Like the Yankees themselves, Rawlings didn’t expect Mickey to do it all himself. This 1964 ad for the Rawlings “Big 8” glove features 7 other stars along with Mantle, to tout the glove’s “8 big fielding features”.

Wilson countered by using Detroit Tigers star Al Kaline, in a series of ads promoting their A2000 model that featured a checklist for young players to gauge whether they were ready for a professional-model glove. By the latter half of the decade, Wilson had begun featuring Chicago Cubs star Ron Santo as their spokesman for the A2000, in ads that typically offered Santo’s tips for fielding.

In true advertising fashion, those tips always included using a Wilson A2000. Not be left out, Spalding used the celebrity endorsement game as well, although in a slightly different fashion.

Spalding created this beautifully simplistic 1964 ad that features the signatures of some of the current day’s stars who use their gloves, alongside a couple of Hall of Fame earlier endorsers — Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Another manufacturer that used celebrity endorsement in an unconventional way was Sears, who signed Ted Williams as a consultant for their entire sporting goods line. This made for some interesting ads for everything from shotguns to fishing equipment, including this glove ad from 1962 featuring Ted showing a group of little leaguers his personal model glove.

By the early 1970s, as football and other sports continued to gain in popularity and the country moved on to other hobbies, glove ads became less common in Boys’ Life. Ads that were seen usually failed to live up to the creativity and star power of earlier ads. Although there was the occasional bright spot, such as this 1971 Rawlings ad featuring artistic depictions of Johnny Bench, Brooks Robinson and Billy Williams and the previously mentioned 1972 World Series Special, the heyday of baseball glove ads in Boys’ Life had passed.

Looking back at these vintage glove ads one gains an appreciation of how the game evolved during the middle of the last century and insight into how the game’s stars began to be used to promote merchandise.

• • • • •Thanks, Jimmy! Awesome stuff — as always.

I recently began the arduous task of going through my mom’s personal effects as I began the task of cleaning out my childhood home of everything — of course, I had left many things there myself, including my very first little league glove (I ended up tossing it, as it was in terrible condition, and is too small for my hand anyway). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Readers? What say you — did you own any of the gloves shown in the vintage ads (or any similar models)? Most of the ads pre-date my childhood, but I vividly remember seeing similar ads in the magazines I read growing up.