Matt Treanor wasn't sure what to expect when Gary Tuck, the Marlins' catching instructor and bench coach, reached into an equipment bag on the first day of spring training and pulled out a pair of antique mitts.

 

One of the vintage gloves was close to 80 years old and shaped like a robin's nest, round with a small pocket and a recessed area in the center that was just big enough to cup a baseball. Tuck bought it for $50 at a flea market in Texas a few years ago.

 

The old mitts were barely larger than the hands they were intended to sheathe and much smaller than the modern-day catcher's mitt, which is so massive that one can comfortably sequester several baseballs at once.

 

The catchers who gathered for the first practice drills that February morning in Jupiter were intrigued by Tuck's ``props.''

 

''I thought he was going to give us a little history lesson about catching,'' said Treanor, who shares the Marlins' catching duties with Miguel Olivo.

 

But that wasn't Tuck's intention. Instead, Tuck had each of the Marlins' spring training catchers try to catch a thrown ball while wearing one of the old mitts.

 

The idea was simple: if you could catch a baseball with a small, antique mitt, you should certainly catch one with the huge gloves catchers now use.

 

The drill produced comical results.

 

Recalled Tuck, holding up one of the mitts to prove his point: ``When they first got them they dropped everything because, as you can see, there's only one spot to catch it.''

 

Olivo said it was like trying to catch a baseball with a tablespoon.

 

''I don't know how anyone could catch with them,'' said Olivo, who discovered only a few days ago that the mitts he and Treanor have been using in their daily pregame drills since spring training weren't designed specifically for practice.

 

Much to Olivo's surprise, they are game-used mitts.

 

CHANGE OF TIMES

 

Laughed Tuck: ``All the young kids find that hard to believe. The game has changed. Back then, because the gloves were so small and didn't have much padding, that they caught everything with two hands. Now it's a one-hand art.''

 

One of the mitts is a Denkert-brand model that Tuck said was used during the 1927 major-league season, though he's not sure by whom.

 

''When I bought it, it was torn up, ripped up, and the padding was bad,'' Tuck said. ``It looked like, well, it is on its last leg. But the leather was so good back then that it comes right back to life.''

 

Tuck said he enjoys showing the gloves around to current players and old-timers alike.

 

''I showed the glove to Yogi Berra once,'' said Tuck, who spent the nine previous seasons with the New York Yankees as a catching instructor.

 

'And Yogi [who played from 1946 to 1965] said, `This is old. I never used this [stuff]. Hell no.' ''

 

Tuck has been collecting antique gloves, bats and wire catchers' masks for years. He said he shops small-town flea markets and antique stores near his home in southern Indiana, looking for the old baseball relics. He said he bought a mitt for $5 last summer that, after he took it home and polished the leather, he discovered that it had once belonged to Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter.

 

''I was pretty pumped up,'' Tuck said.

 

But Tuck said he didn't start using the old gloves as instructional tools until about 15 years ago.

 

`CAN'T MISS'

 

''You can't miss with them,'' Tuck said. ``If you miss, you'll get hurt. So you have to focus on catching the ball. Then, when you put your regular glove on, it's easy.''

 

Said Treanor: ``If you can catch with them, you can catch with anything. They're not something you could ever say you had no passed balls with at the end of the year.''

 

Tuck said he repairs each glove after the season to keep them in shape.

 

''I take them apart every winter because guys are so big they tear them up,'' he said. ``So I take them apart, take all the padding out, re-sew them with all new laces and seams.''

 

Then it's back to spring training and the cycle repeats itself.

 

''Nobody else does it,'' Tuck said. ``But we do, from the first day of spring training to the last day of the World Series.''

 

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/15355835.htm

that's a kool article. I just read a book on the history/evolution of baseball gloves, it was really interesting.

Thanks, that is a nice article. My cousin had a glove from years ago.....there was nothing to it, I can see why you want to use both hands to help catch.

And the old time catchers have some of worse-looking hands you ever want to see....the throwing hand takes a beating when you don't have it "tucked" away while catching.....

that's a kool article. I just read a book on the history/evolution of baseball gloves, it was really interesting.

 

my friend you have alot of time on your hands...