One day this month, Jake McCarthy, an outfielder for the Arizona Diamondbacks, opened a large drawer inside his locker and tried a quick accounting of its contents. Inside, piled haphazardly on top of each other, were several boxes of Franklin batting gloves.
“I got eight boxes of batting gloves” to start the season, McCarthy said, and each one contained six pairs of gloves. That’s 48 sets of gloves for a campaign lasting about 27 weeks. What’s left in that drawer represents the last third of his supply, and by the end of this season, they’ll probably all be gone. Under normal circumstances, a pair of gloves can last McCarthy around 10 games.
Changing them is easy. After all, since making the majors two years ago, he hasn’t had to pay for a pair.
McCarthy isn’t a star — in fact, the Diamondbacks recently optioned him to the minor leagues — but he’s used to the good life in the majors. When it comes to batting gloves, the big leagues are the land of abundance. Almost every big-league hitter has an endorsement deal with a glove manufacturer that gives them more free gloves than they can shake a 34-ounce bat at.
Good thing, boy, are they going through it. Other than the ball, which no player truly owns, no piece of baseball equipment is as fungible as a pair of batting gloves. Many hitters go through them like Tic Tacs, in no small part because the supply is inexhaustible. The moment a pair shows any sign of imperfection — a loosened grip, a small tear or, heaven forbid, a cold stain on the plate — they’re gone in favor of a crisp replacement.
“We’re very spoiled,” McCarthy said. “You go 0 for 5 or something and it’s like: ‘Not me. These are the batting gloves.'”
Among major-league hitters, batting glove peccadilloes run the gamut. McCarthy can’t stand when he starts to feel sweaty, while James Outman, a rookie outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is bothered when the palms of his gloves start to stretch. For Juan Soto, a star outfielder for the San Diego Padres, it’s mostly about wrist stiffness. “You start to feel the strap get longer and longer,” Soto said, leading to frequent adjustments between pitches. And for almost every hitter, a hard slide into the base usually means a torn pair of gloves.
Perhaps no player changes his glove as often as Garrett Cooper, a first baseman acquired by San Diego at the trade deadline. On average, he goes through a pair every two days. His issue is not grip loss or stretching but crunchiness. He coats his hands in sticky spray before slipping them into his gloves, and soon they harden like metal gauntlets. When the leather started to crack, he called Franklin to get back up.
“They probably hate it when I ask for another order,” he said, “because they seem to send me one every few weeks.”
Glove manufacturers don’t care. It’s good business to keep even the most persnickety of big-league batters flush in supply. That’s been the case for 40 years, since the introduction of Franklin’s first glove made specifically for handling the bat. That glove, Franklin’s Pro Classic, was designed in 1983 in consultation with Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. Hitters have tried wearing gloves before — Ken Harrelson is often credited with starting practice in the 1960s by using a golf glove, although there are earlier instances of gloved hands — but soon after the introduction of the Pro Classic, almost every hitter wore a Franklin glove.
Franklin has been the official batting glove of Major League Baseball since 1988 and still has a stranglehold on the big league market. Of the roughly 400 hitters on opening day rosters this year, Franklin’s president, Adam Franklin, said 250 wear his company’s gloves. Franklin has deals with another 450 players who started the year in the minors. And while the company offers a variety of models, some costing $40 or more for retail buyers, many players wear gloves that function similarly to the pair Schmidt introduced.
Other companies have gotten into the game in recent years. The biggest sporting goods companies — Nike, Adidas, Under Armor — make batting gloves and have a presence in the majors. So are boutique outfits like Lizard Skins and Bruce Bolt, the latter started in 2017 by a then 16-year-old Texas high schooler. Some players have jumped on those newer gloves, but many prefer to stick with what has become familiar. Kiké Hernández, the versatile utility player, is an example. He spent a year getting paid well to endorse Lizard Skins before returning to his trusty old Franklins.
“I have decided that I will not change brands for money,” said Hernández. “I’d rather make money on the field.”
Hernández spoke a week after being traded back to the Dodgers following more than two years with the Boston Red Sox, a change that meant he needed a resupply of Dodgers-colored batting gloves. And if anything has changed in the four decades that batting gloves have ruled the sport, it’s the advent of the batting glove as a fashion statement. An initial offering of just a few colors blooms in every shade in the spectrum.
There are color schemes for each team’s uniform set. Bright neon colors are all the rage, a trend that Adam Franklin traces back to Red Sox slugger David Ortiz wearing a glove with bright yellow piping during the 2013 World Series — even Rickey Henderson, who was ahead of his time in so many things, wore neon green Mizuno gloves while leading the Oakland Athletics to the 1989 World Series. There are also pink gloves for Mother’s Day and powder blue for Father’s Day, as well as special sets for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Jackie Robinson Day and Roberto Clemente Day. Most of those are worn for one game only, although they may make nongame appearances.
“You’ll see me with weird batting gloves in batting practice,” McCarthy said, “not necessarily for the swag purposes.”
Gloves may be in plentiful supply — “If there was an issue,” McCarthy said, “I feel like I’d have a new box in my locker within 48 hours” — but players are really trying to make them last. Many of them have one pair for batting practice and one pair for the game, a rotation necessary to keep both pairs fresh and dry. Luis Gonzalez, who was the lone winner in the 2001 World Series for Arizona, will hang up his glove in front of a dugout fan between at-bats. Other hitters take preventative measures. San Francisco’s Robby Thompson and Will Clark hermetically seal their gloves in freezer bags between games to prevent deterioration.
“They pull them out the next day,” said Matt Williams, a former Giants infielder and current Padres coach, “and they’re still soft.”
Most hitters have no qualms about ditching a pair of gloves the second they lose a step, but some stick with a pair until the soles are bald. Breaking in a new pair meant blisters for Corbin Carroll, a rookie sensation for the Diamondbacks, so he went through a season wearing three or four pairs, meaning they were used until they were threadbare. this. “I’m embarrassed about it all the time,” she said. Superstitions lead others to cling to them. There’s grip and fit, and then there’s results.
“If I like the pair and the pair gets hits,” said Hernández, “the pair will be worn for a while.”
But one tear, Hernández says, and even the most productive pair of gloves land in the trash, a fate that highlights the essential irony of a good hitting glove. It should be grippy and durable, but it should also be light and offer what Franklin calls a “second skin” feel. (There are still some gloveless players, like Matt Carpenter of the San Diego Padres, who prefer the first skin, themselves, but they’re missing out a bit.) Good gloves should also move like the hand does. while remaining tight around it.
There have been advances in technology since the Pro Classic. Bruce Bolt hypes the unique stitching it uses around the wrist, as well as their glove’s long, compression wrap-like wrist strap, a feature Franklin recently incorporated. Later this year, Franklin will introduce gloves with built-in guards for the back of the hand, and Adam Franklin says 2024 will bring “some more unique designs that happen with wrist compression and fit and feel.”
Players will always look for any slight performance improvements they can get, but it’s unlikely that any change will significantly reduce churn. If pitchers know they’ve hit the show when every baseball is a flawless white pearl, and learn to toss it aside at the sight of any small scuff, then hitters will have the same realization when it comes to in their batting gloves. As unpaid novices and poorly paid farmers, they had to make them last longer. But when you can regularly put a new pair in your pockets without breaking the bank for them, you know you’ve made it.
“When you’re the big leaguer making all the money,” Gonzalez said, “that’s where you get all the free stuff.”
