Rawlings Baseball Gloves

Rawlings Baseball Gloves

Rawlings currently makes and markets over one hundred and sixty-five different kinds of baseball and softball gloves for children and adults, ranging in price from ten dollars for a children’s tee-ball glove to over three hundred and fifty dollars for a customized “Pro Preferred” series glove, a model made to the specifications of professional baseball players, along with the “Heart of the Hide” and “Gold Glove” series. Ordinary Gold Gloves cost around ninety dollars, Heart of the Hide gloves cost one hundred and sixty and Pro Preferred cost two hundred and fifty dollars. Today, over seventy percent of MLB players use Rawlings gloves, including Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. They were one of the first companies to make leather baseball gloves and they were the first to make gloves with a webbed “pocket” to make catching easier.

Rawlings Heritage Baseball Gloves

The Rawlings Heritage Pro series of gloves is a line designed to emulate vintage leather ball gloves. The glove boasts, according to their website, an “oil-tanned Pro Soft steerhide leather shell and a deer-tanned cowhide lining,” and is designed to look like older, faded leather. The leather used in this line is softer than that of other gloves, making it easier to break in. The line is priced somewhat on the high end of things, with gloves costing about one hundred and twenty-five dollars.

How Rawlings Baseball Gloves Are Made

Rawlings gloves are made of the finest cowhide leather, the most commonly used material in baseball gloves. The leather is first sent to a tannery, where it is treated with chemicals to increase its durability and flexibility. Un-tanned leather would begin to dry and deteriorate rapidly, after a very short period of time. Rawlings has its own tannery that it entirely relies upon, buying out its entire stock, although it also maintains its own separate tannery to treat the leather used for the laces. The leather is then cut into several pieces designed to be sewn together into the glove. Each cowhide provides enough leather for three or four entire gloves. The gloves each have four separate sections: the shell, the outer leather; the lining, the inner leather; the pad, two pieces of leather sewn together between the shell and the lining; and the web, the interlaced strips of leather between the thumb and forefinger. The pieces are then sewn together, which is usually done with a single strip of leather lacing that is over seven feet long. So far, no synthetic material has been able to duplicate the quality of leather, and there are no plans to replace leather as the main material.