A couple weeks ago, longtime Albany resident Joe Frazier — no, not the boxer — got ahold of me asking if I, as a collector of baseball gloves, would like to have the Wilson catcher’s mitt he used in Little League. He’d been cleaning up at his mom’s and found it in a shed.

Joe, one year older than I, apologized that it was missing its webbing — that happens with old mitts sometimes; the web breaks off, gets separated from the glove itself, then gets lost — but that didn’t matter much to me because I figured I could either sub in the web off an otherwise spent old glove I keep for parts, or just make one.

An aside here: Joe and I were baseball teammates for years after being opponents for a few seasons. In my very first game in Men’s Senior Baseball, in fact, at Philomath High in 1994, Joe hit an absolute tape-measure home run, the first of many I would watch him hit. He’s a big guy who before retiring a few seasons ago swung a very live bat; during one Little League season, he admitted, he hit something like 15 homers in 14 games.

Another aside: Joe grew up in McMinnville and was a high school basketball teammate of OSU legend Charlie Sitton.

Anyway, back to the glove, a Duane Josephson signature model …

Joe dropped it off at the DH the very day he asked me about, and I was pleased to see that, aside from the missing web, it was in outstanding shape for a glove that was at least four decades old.

I love repairing baseball mitts — the work itself is sort of soothing, and it’s highly satisfying to see the finished products, history coming back to life as it were — so with anticipation I took the glove home and gathered the tools and leather I’d need for the job. I also grabbed another Wilson catcher’s mitt of a similar vintage for comparison purposes.

The webbing on my “parts” glove wasn’t quite the right size or shape, so I decided to make one instead, using the comparision-purposes Wilson as a guide. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of my efforts and gave it the same stamp of self-approval I bestow every time I do any kind of job that looks as good as the manufacturer could’ve done.

“That’s a factory job right there,” I said when I showed it to one of my fellow baseball-fan friends.

Here’s a pic — what do you think? And as a matter of fact, I do have nice veins, thank you. I’m a favorite of every Red Cross phlebotomist who’s ever made my acquaintance.

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