by BretMan » July 5th, 2011, 11:17 pm
A rare weekend without any baseball or fastpitch tournaments to umpire gave me a chance to hit a big flea market and a huge antique mall around the Cincinnati area (went down for the weekend to see the Reds/Indians interleague series).
The flea market actually had a lot of gloves- just not the sort of things we look for or anything especially interesting or collectible. My rough count was that I saw at least 50 gloves, all modern junk for the most part. A few mid-quality Wilsons and Rawlings with HOF endorsments, like a Reggie Jackson GJF36 (the predecessor to the venerable RBG36) and a Catfish Hunter. Quite a few gloves that, with a little work, would have been great for a kid that needed a glove and also some big softball models.
The antique mall was so big that it took a couple of hours to see everything. There was a smattering of older gloves, nothing to write home about. Probably saw about 20 gloves total. Did see one Rawlings G500 Roy Smalley split-finger that I liked the looks of. It was in good to very good shape with a ragged Rawlings patch...and tagged at $65 (about 2-3 times more than I'd want to pay for that condition). So I passed...
Did buy one glove there that doesn't really fall into the pre-1970 vintage catagory. A mid-late 80's Rawlings XPG-RC (I've seen the XPG-RF model before and this appears to be identical). This was Rawlings exact copy of a Wilson A2000, right down to the hinged web and unique lacing pattern. Glove is in excellent condtion. I've always wanted one of these and couldn't pass it up for nine bucks!