Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

Hi all, I cant for the life of me find any information on an early glove that I have, I am guessing that its late 20's early 30's it's a Belknap Horsehide glove with the 1 1/2" "spider web" endorsed by Jesse Craddock or Graddock it appears to be a Young adult size glove as my hand fits in with no problem. Any ideas? Any one have a glove endorsed by him?

I think you're glove was made by Belknap hardware. They made just about any tool you can imagine. They also sold sporting goods. I got my hands on a 1961 catalog. By then they were only selling Wilson gloves, but they still offered the Belknap brand on baseballs,Bats, footballs and other sporting goods. I have never seen a Belknap glove, I have seen 1 bat. Sorry this didn't help more, but its a little bit of info on Belknap!

Why did I always think Belknap was a shoe brand? Was it a hardware store that sold shoes along with Belknap gloves? I have always seen them in the shoe brand category along with Red Goose Shoes, Buster Brown Shoes and Peters Shoes, all of which had ball gloves. Good stuff. Thanks.

JD

The 1961 catalog that I looked at was a hardback book about 4 inches thick with 4,000 pages, So I think they sold EVERYTHING!!!!!!!. My buddy that had the book sells a lot of Belknap Bluegrass hammers,Axe heads, hatchets and other tools. His stuff does real well on ebay. The bat he sold went for about $80.00 a couple of years ago. I think that old Belknap glove has to be pretty rare and a GREAT find. Take Care, Kevin

I think Belknap was headquartered in Louisville KY and had been around for years. Even sold a Belknap Lou Gehrig mitt which has turned up. Don't know who made their gloves for them.

Ebay has a Belknap Duke Snider running right now!

Though the Belknap data is pretty slim in the Catalog Source Book, their 1955 offerings sure are interesting!

They featured gloves endorsed by both Dimaggio and Mantle. The Dimaggio even came in two styles- the personal model, which is simply listed as "Dimaggio" endorsed (no first name- could be Vince?) and another "Joe Dimaggio type" which you would assume to be a block letter endorsement.

Their full line-up features gloves signed by known Rawlings, Spalding, Wilson, Nokona, Hutch, Franklin and MacGregor endorsers. Quite a mix! I notice that one model is dubbed "The Magnet" which was also a common Hutch model in the 50's.

Another Belknap glove currently on eBay is the Lou Gehrig first base mitt already posted in another thread.