Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

In circa 1886, Peck and Snyder sold a tipped finger glove with no thumb tip. I believe Spalding did the same.
This may be the earliest version.


One can see the tips on the Spalding glove below were made beforehand and sewn on.
This applied to both outseam and inner seamed gloves.


Here's another early example.


I thought how can the tips be sewn on after the glove is made? I don't believe they were hand sewn.
There had to be a sewing machine with a very narrow base that could fit into the finger stalls.
After a little digging I found this industrial Singer machine from that time period.


The thumb tips were incorporated by 1888.
Below is a cut from a 1888 Spalding catalog.


Below is are two Spalding gloves, one with full tips and the other
with the tips worn off.


Somewhere along the line, an improvement was made to stabilize the tips from wearing off.
This may have been done by Ratsch at Chicago Sporting Goods. The improvement entailed sewing sole
leather pieces to outseam gloves during manufacture. Below is an ad from a 1902 Hercules catalog.
The glove on the left has premade tips that are sewn to the glove after the glove was made.
The glove on the right has sole leather pieces that were applied while the glove was being made.


Here are a couple real nice examples.

A collector contacted me recently about the glove below and why it wasn't included in the initial write-up. The reason I gave was that I couldn't find any documentation through old catalog illustrations. The glove is certainly worthy of more research and was a revelation when it was first displayed in Joe Phillips Glove Collector Newsletter many moons ago. The glove is interesting in the way the crescent pad bluntly ends at the base of the thumb tip. Also, the back of the forefinger has a transverse seam unlike the earlier examples.


So if I couldn't find documentation the next best avenue is to find any existing relevant examples. The two examples below seem to fit the bill. One is a Wright & Ditson model and the other is an A.J. Reach. Both examples have the one piece face, transverse forefinger seam and similar crescent pads. My opinion is the crescent pad of the glove discovered by Joe Phillips was modified/shortened at the factory to accept the thumb tip. It is possible that the glove is a Spalding product or a Spalding owned company, either Reach or Wright & Ditson.


Below is a cut from a Reach catalog describing the tipped finger option on their gloves.

Here's one you don't see every day. Check the player lower right.

The glove looks to be a full web tipped finger model.

Here's a similar model from http://www.baseballglovecollector.com

The ad below is a web thumb Pennant model from Butler Brothers.