Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

Thought I throw in my Play it Again Sports find that I also picked up today. Its a Rawlings Heart of the Hide Black Trap-eze glove. It's a PRO TF-B model Gold Glove Series glove. It's made in the USA with the Fastback and Holdster trademarks on the back of the glove. It also has OE001 and Blem marked on the thumb. this glove looks like it has hardly caught any balls as all of the silver is still on the glove! Anyone familar with this model glove as far as when it was manufactured and what the OE001 mark might mean? I'd just about given up on looking at these stores as usually they stop accepting gloves this late in the season. Just goes to show that persistentce pays off. If I have time this weekend I'll post some pics.

Great find! I am pretty sure it was made in 1990, from the really good Horween leather.

July 1990, and Horween...nice pick-up!

B L A C K H O R S E

Sadly, my visits to the "Play it Again" outlets in my area have never turned up any gloves of note.

When I first started collecting I found a Whitey Ford left handed glove and a Brooks Robinson import at my local Play it again. It was winter so I asked them if they would discount the gloves. They did and I got both for $14.00. Not bad. Other than thet about 5 visits back to the store and nothing.

I could put a couple of chapters of my glove book on the Play It Again Sports stores. They have two or three here in Dallas. The closest, only a few blocks away from me, opened about 1992 or so and immediately I picked up a nice near mint USA Mantle and a really stout Bob Allison Wilson gloves. Since those days, I've probably bought 40 or 50 gloves from PIAS stores in the last 15 years, usually at very fair prices. I've let the stores know what I do and even provided them with guides as I want to treat them right. They'd hold gloves for me with their new guide information and the relations ship was a close and honest one. I even got the owner's Berra mitt signed by Yogi for h im.
It paid off big when the PIAS owner discoverd a warehouse find of about 100 bats, H&Bs all in the H&B boxes, unpacked, mostly Little League sizes but plenty of Mantles and Maris bats in the mix. He figured out a price for me that was still a swell bargain and he doubled his investment.
It pays, or at least for me it did, to make friends with and open an honest relationship with the owners and managers of these stores.