A really good baseball glove is one of those "buy it for life" purchases. My dad played college ball in the late 50's and had a Nokona glove. When we played catch and he was teaching me baseball in the 90's, he used the same glove as in college.
But, I would bet that the biggest threat to Nokona is not cheaper gloves produced overseas, but the decline in youth baseball participation compared to other sports. Though perhaps a rapid decline in the number of kids participating in football could mean some of them playing baseball instead. I suspect that my kids would end up playing soccer since it's the only sport I watch these days.
Yeah, baseball participation seems WAAAAY down. Kids play in leagues (I don't know if participation is increasing or decreasing) but almost never play pickup (ie, informal, unorganized) baseball "for fun" anymore which I think is a leading indicator of a sport's future.
I saw some kids playing a pickup game a few months ago and it blew my mind. Hadn't seen that in years, or since.
When I was a kid in the 1980s it was not uncommon to play baseball or whiffleball on a pickup basis with one's friends.
When my dad was a kid in a major US city in the 40s and 50s he said you didn't even need to gather friends; there was pretty much always a baseball game or three being play amongst kids at the park that you could get into.
It's sad, in a way, but (as much as I love it) baseball's kind of an awkward sport because you need so many people to play anything resembling an actual game.
(I know you can have a lot of fun playing catch with two people, or just pitching and hitting with two or three people... spent hundreds of hours doing these things myself)
I coached youth baseball for a long time and every year I would ask for a quick show of hands for how many kids had actually been to a major league game, and then how many kids had watched baseball on TV. The numbers for both dropped every year, but the TV numbers were in free fall. Talking to the parents, most reported that they were unwilling to subscribe to premium channels to watch baseball, and that they wanted to limit the amount of time that their kids spent on electronics.
The net effect was that we had to work with every player as if they had no previous exposure to the game. Every rule, every strategy, and every technique had to be explained from scratch.
Kids were more likely to bring a soccer ball to practice and want to kick it around the outfield before a game than take batting practice.
The other thing killing the sport is time. We see lacrosse teams arrive at the field next to us, play a game, and go home just in the time that we are stretching out, throwing, doing batting practice and infield warmups before a game. The lax kids (and parents) are home firing up the BBQ before the first pitch has been thrown.
Oooof. Doesn't bode well for the future of the game :-/
The net effect was that we had to work with every player as if they had no previous exposure to the game. Every rule, every strategy, and every technique had to be explained from scratch.
Yeah! And kids can't even throw a baseball any more. That used to be the one "basic" sports skill every kid had: even if you didn't play baseball you could throw a ball because we played "wall ball" and other games.
But, even though it's sad, I'm fine with it. Things change. Really, as long as kids are playing sports... I think that's fine. Baseball (as much as I love the game) is arguably one of the worst sports for kids because you spend 90% of your time waiting for your turn at bat, or waiting for the ball to be hit to you.
I still think baseball has the best simple pleasures of any sport, though. Hitting a baseball and catching a baseball. Still my two favorite things in sports.
The other thing killing the sport is time. We see lacrosse teams arrive at the field next to us, play a game, and go home just in the time that we are stretching out, throwing, doing batting practice and infield warmups before a game. The lax kids (and parents) are home firing up the BBQ before the first pitch has been thrown.
Yeah. People are busier these days. I think we're way too busy these days, but regardless of what I think, the reality is that kids and parents need sports that fit into this new reality better.
Grew up a Red Sox fan, watching free games on broadcast TV every week and attending games for less than $10. At one point in the mid-80s bleacher seats were $2.
Left Boston, came back 8 years later, found that you can only watch games on cable and tickets are unbelievably expensive. The Red Sox's new owners want to make a lot of money and hire top talent to make them a winning team. But not all fans can afford to go along for the ride.
Now I have a family. We don't have cable so my son can't watch 95% of games on TV. The one time four of us went to Fenway it was nearly $400 about 15 rows back from the third base line. How can anyone keep that up? He never got a chance to be a fan like I did.
We did play catch and did some batting practice in the park when he was about 8 or 9, but that dropped off as he tried different sports and didn't have the connection with professional baseball. Now, for him, the only sports he watches are football and basketball, and the only sports he plays for fun are basketball, touch football, soccer, and ultimate frisbee.
The game day only sale of bleacher tickets for $2 was a gift from the Baseball Gods to the City of Boston.
Our boys are three sport athletes in high school and it still takes serious bribes to get them to watch any sporting event with me. The one positive note is that they are just as interested in watching women compete as men. I think we have been to an equal number of men's and women's college hockey games, which I am not sure I would have been as open to back in the 70s and 80s.
Most kids can/do play a single sport year-round. Yes football is primarily in the summer/fall, but there are spring leagues for those kids who want to play. Same thing with baseball. My nephew takes the summer off from little league, mostly because it's hot here and his family takes vacations, but otherwise plays the rest of the year in multiple seasons.
It's not a good idea for a kid to play just one sport. It can lead to injury and burnout. You have pitchers blowing out elbows in high school or even younger because they have played baseball year round since they were 6. Kids should play a variety of seasonal sports and not just one.
It is parents with unrealistic visions of scholarships or professional careers who push young kids to play a single sport year round.
As the coach of a fall little league baseball team, no, it's mostly kids who love baseball and just want to keep playing. A lot of kids also play travel ball tournaments in the summer which could mean about 5 games over a single weekend. But the only position a you could get burnt out on is pitcher. We always keep track of pitch counts and it'd be a serious issue if any coach went over. It's baseball, a kid is not going to get injured because they had too many at bats, or spent too much time standing in center field. It's perfectly safe for a kids to play one sport all season, with the exception of maybe tackle football, but that's a whole other discussion.
There will always be a small number of parents who push their kids too hard and it's up to the leagues and other coaches to step in when it could be dangerous. That said, the vast majority of kids still practicing baseball in the summer and fall are out there because THEY enjoy it and they themselves want to get better at their sport.
> American Football and baseball are generally different seasons. Does participation in one have any direct effect on the other?
I would expect only for those families who choose to have their kid participate in only one sport; football and baseball can both be pretty expensive, equipment and training wise.
Where I grew up in the Midwest United States, football was only available in the late summer and early autumn until you were high-school aged. Baseball could be played from an early age in Spring, Summer, and Fall. There seemed to be more opportunity for skills-focused activities (batting cages for instance) for baseball in the winter than football (at least in central Illinois).
Soccer is available year round and has been since I was a child.
If your parents are focused on your football career, there are all sorts of camps, spring leagues, etc.
My son's little league team lost 4-5 players year to year to youth football (!) and soccer leagues at age 6. It's a big time commitment, although I'm shocked that a parent would allow a child that young to play football at all.
I played baseball from 6 to 21 with 3 different gloves. I had a 4th backup glove that was my dad's glove from the late 70s (that I used in the early 2000s and was fine). The glove my parents bought the summer before my freshman year of high school is still fine to play catch with my daughter 16 years later. If I take care of it, I don't see any reason it would deteriorate beyond play for at least another 20 years. My current glove isn't special, just a standard Rawlings glove that I've kept oiled.
I played baseball from age 4 (well, T-ball) to age 18 with three gloves. One was a cheap plastic Mizuno that I started with. I graduated to a leather Wilson about two years after that, and then a couple of years later I bought a Nokona. I've been out of the sport for quite some time, but my Nokona is still going strong. It's still the glove I pull out to play catch with from time to time.
Buying a quality glove is worth the investment. The good ones will last forever.
In the US, Youth (11 and under) soccer leagues have already banned heading the ball. In those leagues, it's the same as hitting the ball with your hand.
I suspect restrictions on older kids will develop in the coming years as well. I would guess it will always be a part of professional play, but college level and under probably should do away with it.
>In the US, Youth (11 and under) soccer leagues have already banned heading the ball. In those leagues, it's the same as hitting the ball with your hand.
This must be new. I refereed youth soccer around 2003 and this was def. not the case then.
>I would guess it will always be a part of professional play, but college level and under probably should do away with it.
Wat. I played youth and highschool Soccer and was never injured or saw someone injured by contact with the call when heading ball... (it was always due to mistaken player contact).
As a combat sports fan who follows the issues with brain trauma (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, being the condition to watch out for): it's gonna be both.
We used to think it was the major concussions that did the long-term damage, and you'd be fine if you avoided the big shots as a boxer (let's say). Modern research shows that the sustained, repeated, sub-concussive blows are genuinely bad for the brain. Training itself can be a major cause of brain damage.
Soccer doesn't focus exclusively on heading the ball, but practicing heading for years, and pushing your limits in games, definitely adds up and has resulted in soccer players with CTE. Major concussive events, like head-to-head collisions, are decidedly no help on top of those training regimes.
My Dad's was also from the late 50s or early 60s, and was still in excellent and very usable condition in the mid-90s, when I unfortunately lost it :-(.
I understand that the quality of a glove is important and people should have the option to pay more for a better glove.
Leaving that aside though, what does it matter where it gets made? American workers are not specially more or less deserving than those in other countries, and that we have managed to coordinate it so the countries with comparative advantages in glove production are producing most of the gloves is something to celebrate, not bemoan.
Ok, imagine Japanese primary school children using Randoseru made in Thailand, or somewhere. It's part of national identity. Imagine Swiss eating American chocolate.
Since you want to bring up Randoseru, consider that children and young people in the Nordic countries have continued using and loving Fjällräven Kånken backpacks even as production moved from Sweden to Asia, and it wasn’t the end of the world. The iconic design still comes originally from Scandinavia, and as long as quality doesn’t decline in the course of outsourcing production, then who the hell cares where it is put together?
The chocolate analogy isn’t quite comparable here. In that example, the Swiss presumably aren’t setting up their own factories in the US and dictating the recipe. The USA and Switzerland have different food labeling laws and understandings of what chocolate is, so if the Swiss just imported just any US chocolate, then sure, it would jar with the traditional culture.
Nestle is a Swiss company with choco factories in the US. If not, we can go with InBev AB.
In addition, the arctic/ mountain fox brand is pretty new. It'd be like the north face shoppers not liking it since it moved prod abroad. Here we're talking about a national symbol as well as a sentimental item. Baseball gloves, Randoserus.
Fjallraven is new to America, but old to Sweden--think of it as Swedish Jansport. But to your point, I don't think Americans have the same level of attachment to school bags as the Japanese do.
By new I meant post WWii. It hasn't had time to become iconic, I would argue. A north face also is not yet iconic. Maybe this is unfair, as most outdoor consumer products didn't come about till around the 60s and 70s... However baseball and children's iconic backpacks have generational nostalgia and have become very iconic. It's possible, I don't know, that the mountain fox itself had become ironic in Sweden in short period of time before production was shipped overseas.
Is Jansport "iconic" or is it just "ubiquitous"? I'd say it's the latter. A better comparison might be Victorinox deciding too offshore Swiss Army knives to Korea or Thailand.
Yes, I think that's a good comparison. German Henckels would be another or British millerain. Jansport I think is more ubiquitous than iconic, but maybe that's just me.
You guys almost get it. Keep going. What if instead of allowing American workers to suffer and businesses to trade capital around regulations at labor's expense, everyone, even overseas workers, were protected instead? Too misty eyed? Dream bigger.
People value tradition. Look how many brands advertise "since 1882" or whatever. There's something endearing about a factory that's been operating for generations. It's sad to see it close and people lose their jobs.
More than that, there's a strong perception that American goods are superior to cheaper foreign made ones. I don't know if that's true in this case but it doesn't seem unlikely. Look at all the people about to get blinded by foreign made solar eclipse glasses.
At some point, a $200 glove become a premier product in that niche. By remaining to manufacture in America, it adds to their brand image that they're one of the few remaining "true American" products, especially if the factory has been producing gloves for 70-some years. So consumers are buying into heritage.
As a newly ex-collegiate player, professional quality gloves are all priced typically the same -- doesn't matter if it Wilson, Rawlings, Nokona, etc. You will still pay out $300-$400+ depending on what you want.
As for kids gloves I used the same gloves from when I was 10 until I graduated high school. If you take care of your gloves most quality leather will withstand yearly wear and tear.
Moral of the story: take care of you stuff. Doesn't matter if you pay $170 to $280. Invest in quality.
As mentioned on another part of the thread, baseball gloves can be somewhat like Japanese schoolchildren's randoseru. You buy it once and maintain it well. It lasts forever and it's part of your identity.
That's utterly impractical for a baseball glove that a kid will outgrow in a handful of years.
Kids' baseball gloves last as long as they need to: a few years. Because that's how long it will take for your kid to outgrow it. Investing megabucks into an heirloom-quality glove for an 8 year-old kid is insanity.
Now, maybe a baseball glove could be a treasured thing you hand down from kid to kid in the family or the neighborhood. But hand-me-down baseball gloves are a little nasty.
Your hand, which is invariably covered in lots of unsavory stuff (dirt, sweat, spit, sometimes sticky substances from the baseball bats) gets stuffed inside the glove for loooong periods of time, during which it sweats profusely. Being "gifted" with an "heirloom" baseball glove as a kid would have grossed me out. I would have enjoyed such a gift about as much as a hand-me-down jock strap.
I also hate to say this (because I like the idea of buying American) but unless you're playing a hell of a lot of baseball, $50-$100 gloves made in China also last a loooooooooooooooooooooong time if you oil them once a year or so. Unless you're playing baseball full-time, you do not need to spend hundreds of bucks to get something that will last you decades. Making a baseball glove is not rocket science. It's leather. Made into a glove.
Yeah those leather ties also go before anything else, haha.
My experience is that if oiled (I like mink oil, though some say it's too heavy) any reasonable grade of leather glove, stored indoors, will last at least a decade of occasional use. My Ken Griffey Jr. glove (Wilson? Rawlings? I forget) has lived such a life. I think I bought for around $40 in 2001; I remember it being roughly one tier up from the cheapest glove you could buy. I've admittedly not played a ton of ball with it, but the leather's in great shape, no cracking anywhere... this thing might outlive me unless I get off my butt and join an old man's league every summer.
Recently threw out some gloves I owned as a kid in the 80s. The leather was dry but not cracked; I was tempted to oil them just to see if they could be brought back to life.
What's your experience been?
Not saying you do this, but I think a lot of people store their gloves in their garages or some other place where they bake in the summer and freeze in the winter. That'll kill a glove for sure and while ultra-high-quality leather will surely survive this kind of treatment longer than cheap leather, it's no way to treat a glove of any kind.
I'm sure that inexpensive gloves that see plenty of honest use (2, 3, 4+ practices or games a week) don't live forever either.
I believe the cheap glove I first had as a kid was not even real leather. At least, it didn't feel like leather I was used to (Saddles, boots, horse tack, etc) but the cheap leather you find on well, anything cheap. Almost like a plastic.
We had them for 3-4 seasons before they got stowed. When I stowed mine, the weave for the net between the first finger and thumb was coming undone and a few years later, the gloves were incredibly stiff and tore. We ended up pitching them (no longer played baseball and they were cheap) but when we did, I found my father's glove and it still worked (it was stored with the cheap ones). A little oil and it was back like new (or at least, new when I got it from him)
That's not at all how I read the parent comment. Buying into the product, and into the quality of that product, is how they can get a glove that will last long enough to become a part of their identity. A cheap glove that gets replaced every season does not result in the same identification.
I feel like I'm going mad as I read these comments. Kids outgrow their baseball gloves every few years. How in the world is one supposed to buy some kind of "lifetime" baseball glove for a kid?
I absolutely and unsarcastically adore the concept of buying things for life. I really do. When I read this article, my first thought was: "I want one of those gloves." However, that concept seldom makes any sense when it comes to anything that a child wears.
I'm pretty sure most of the people expressing the "buy your kid a quality baseball glove for life!" sentiment have no experience with (a) baseball (b) baseball gloves (c) children.
I'm thinking of my high school glove, and the glove my dad used to play with me - his was from his high school days. I still have mine, and will play with my son (who is outgrowing his salvation army clothes as fast as we can buy them) when he's old enough. And when he's old enough, I'll teach him to take care of his glove, and when he's grown, I'll get him a good one.
Yep, I always wanted a Nokona glove when I played, but couldn't justify the cost. They were somewhat of a status symbol in my high school playing days.
> Plus, modern factories rely more on automation than ever, so even if production comes back, it might be done by robots.
I feel this is the most important sentence in the article. The important question is not about individual products for end-users, but about intermediate means of manufacturing automation.
I really don't know which countries are most advanced in this area, but it makes the question of human labor less important. Or, at least it moves it up the skills ladder, from "making a glove" to "designing a robot".
Disagree. This argument is a huge straw man. We are still a long way off from 100% lights-out factories being the norm for most industries. Even in IT manufacturing which is highly-automated, Foxconn employs hundreds of thousands of people in China. Most automotive factories employ several thousand workers.
That's fair. But I guess I think of it as a somewhat continuous transition from human to machine manufacturing. Yes, currently manufacturing uses lots of humans, but that is changing, and the pace of change has not, AFAIK, reached any plateau.
What I think matters, is where we are going, not where we are. You give China as evidence of the human dominated state of manufacturing. I give it as evidence of the shift toward robot dominated manufacturing: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601215/china-is-building-...
Many years ago there was a startup which did web-storefront on-demand laser-cut custom-fit khakis. They did the largely-manual stitching in the US, rather than deal with the cost and delay of shipping further.
My fuzzy recollection is they sold out to Levi's, which mismanaged it into nonexistence. The patents prevented replacement. And the stitching factory used eventually died.
So at least some partially-automated traditionally-low-margin industry is/was possible in the US. But the usual issues of losing needed industry infrastructure still apply.
Machine learning has improved by leaps and bounds in the last half decade. Much of that progress has yet to make it out of the lab. But that's typical for new technologies, and will happen eventually.
It's not a huge technological leap from "robot learns to play Dota" to "robot learns to stitch baseball gloves". Machine vision and reinforcement learning were always the technologies holding back interesting applications of robotics. And now they are basically solved problems.
When visiting NYC, I was a little sad to have so many issues finding some "made in the USA" souvenirs. So finally I bought some stuff online and had it delivered to the hotel. I did not want to bring back home (Switzerland) made in China things I can already find everywhere. Not a very convincing experience. :(
Thankfully not that way in my part of the USA. While we have shops that stock imported goods, there is plenty of local made wares, and not just crafty trinkets. In theory, I could go to one of the local leather crafters and get a decent glove made. Still, as the article states, this is not always economically feasable always, but the community thrives when we pay the 'local tax'.
By my reckoning it's like that everywhere. Just recently it took me an hour of walking and a good half hour of furious Googling to find authentic Venetian glass in Murano.
My wife went to Wisconsin (not exactly a tourist destination, I know), and happened to visit a dairy. As a cheese lover, I asked her to bring back some Wisconsin cheese, maybe a nice, sharp, hand-made Colby? Knowing I like to try things, in a gesture of love, she brought back a sampler pack of various sharp cheeses from the dairy's gift shop - English cheeses, made in England. I never told her, never will.
I wanted clothing. I had hoped to buy "special series" made in the USA and only sold in the USA. (Converse, Harley, NYC police from their museum, etc). I love Japan for that strategy: usually they have a special serie made in Japan which is better quality (and more expensive).
I think buying artwork (or prints) from local artists is one idea. You can find them in gift shops or art shops, and can be fun things like magnets, small knick-knacks or large posters.
Why go to a souvenir shop? In one place, I took home a map as a souvenir. Don't care where it was made but it was in the historic (now little used) local language so it was interesting.
Side question. Why do you guys play baseball with gloves? I'm from a Commonwealth country, so we don't really have baseball, only cricket. Growing up we never used any gloves (although typically we were poor and played only with old tennis balls).
Usually in cricket only the keeper will use gloves. Is it just a surface area thing?
Nokona gloves are almost comically well made. I've used mine for over 20 years at this point and outside of a once a year oil'ing it has held up remarkably well. My dad has his from the early 60's and while it looks worn ( he hasn't taken care of it ) it's still very usable.
But, I would bet that the biggest threat to Nokona is not cheaper gloves produced overseas, but the decline in youth baseball participation compared to other sports. Though perhaps a rapid decline in the number of kids participating in football could mean some of them playing baseball instead. I suspect that my kids would end up playing soccer since it's the only sport I watch these days.