Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

Hey guys here is a picture of a glove i just recently picked up and i was wondering if anybody had a glove and its leather looked like this? If so i have the orange bottle of lexol and brown bottle of conditioner, and fast orange, and nokona conditioner. any help with getting this leather back into playing conditon would help.

thanks
John

That looks like a condition that I've always heard refered to as "alligatoring". It does resemble an alligator skin.

I assume it is from the outer layer of leather drying and cracking. I don't usually see this on newer gloves, but it isn't uncommon on really old ones. This glove doesn't appear to have chunks of leather flaking off- that is a more severe condition that I also see on some really old, really dried out gloves.

Your cleaning and conditioning efforts won't repair the cracks, but it can go along way toward keeping the leather from getting worse, plus it will even out the color (darken the lighter areas where the underside of the leather is showing through). I've had gloves like that where the "cracking" was much less noticable after treatment.

Go ahead and clean and condition it like you would your other gloves and it should look a lot better.

That condition is 99.5% of the time caused by spitting into a glove....

One of the reasons to spit on the dirt.

That condition is 99.5% of the time caused by spitting into a glove....

One of the reasons to spit on the dirt.