COMMENTARY : A Traditional Baseball Glove, It Was All He Really Wanted

Christmas shopping, a customer entered a mall sporting goods store the other day and said he wanted to see the baseball gloves. A teen-aged sales clerk said, “Right over here, sir.”

“No plastic gloves,” the customer said. “I like leather.”

“What color do you want?”

“Color?”

“We’ve got blue, red, black and white.”

“A nice tan will do. And I want one made in the United States.”

“They’re all made here, aren’t they?”

“Not even close. They’re from China, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. It’s marked on the glove.”

“Oh, I see. Which hand, sir, do you wear it on?”

“I’m right-handed.”

“You want one for your right hand?”

Had the conversation gone on another few minutes, the clerk might have offered the customer a blue plastic Taiwanese left-handed catcher’s mitt. But the customer ended it before such a disaster could occur. As politely as possible, he told the clerk, “Civilization is coming to an end and this conversation is proof.”

The clerk said, “Huh?”

Once upon a long time ago, all a kid wanted for Christmas was a baseball glove or a ball bat. Failing that, he would settle for a Hopalong Cassidy six-shooter. When the former kid went to the mall the other day, he told his wife, “Now it’s lasers and death rays. They don’t have any cowboy cap pistols. Whatever happened to Hopalong Cassidy?”

The wife laughed more than somewhat before saying, “Get in the 21st century, old fella.”

At the threshold of the millennium, computers have replaced cowboys. One whole aisle at the toy store was filled with computer games, featuring football as orchestrated by John Madden, Joe Montana and Bill Walsh. You could buy boxing games with the damage done by Evander Holyfield and George Foreman. You could race Formula One cars, spike volleyballs, play soccer, challenge the Harlem Globetrotters, go one-on-one with Michael Jordan or strap on wheels for “Street Rebels Roller Hockey, The Radical Roller Rod Hockey Game.”

A thousand dollars would buy enough computer games to simulate enough reality that you would never have time to put your hand in a baseball glove.

Still, the old fella had gone shopping for just such an artifact: a real baseball glove. He wanted to find a Wilson A2000. One day in the summer of 1962 it cost $35 to buy the A2, hailed by major league players as a revolution in glove design. How sweet the smell of leather in Red Ringeisen’s store that day; how natural the feel of the glove as it became part of an infielder’s hand. All these years later, that glove, with its golden glow, sits within reach on the former kid’s desk, the best glove ever made. Boys want to be men and men want to be boys.

So, just before the old fella told the teen-aged clerk to leave him alone, he asked one more question: “Where are your A2000s?”

The clerk said, “What are those?”

“Never mind.”

The store had one A2000. It was leather and it was tan and, alas, it was disappointing. It was smooth and slick and stiff and clunky. It seemed all artifice, no character. It cost $119.99.

Real baseball bats once were icons turned by craftsmen from trees proud to have done their part in making America great. You could put your hands on a Louisville Slugger and feel better for it. You could trace your fingers over the autograph burned into the wood. The bat cost maybe $5. A kid could go to sleep with an Al Kaline beside him.

Now they’re all space-age metal. You go to the mall and ask to see a bat, and a teen-aged clerk takes you to a rack of alleged bats. They are not bats. They are hollow tubes of aluminum. They are graphite. They may be titanium and boron and Kryptonite. They are cylinders of high-tech despair. To move your hands over a metal bat is to feel the absolute perfect smoothness of nothingness, the triumph of seamless sterility. It would be like sleeping with a garden tool.

“It’s been a while since I shopped for bats,” the old fella told a sales clerk. “Do you sell any wooden bats?”

“Wood?” said the clerk, who at age 18 may never have touched wood in his life, not in a baseball bat, a pencil or a toothpick. He was solicitous, as if his customer wore the identifying clothes of an earlier century, a creature deposited before him by a time machine. “No, sir, no wood. We special order wooden bats. Hardly anybody uses them now. Look at this one, it’s real nice.”

He handed over a graphite tube with a zippered cover that slips over the barrel to protect the thing from scratches. The garden tool cost $89.99.

So the old fella bought no glove and bought no bat. Nor did he buy any of the other sports stuff in the store, such as “Electronic Hot Shot Basketball With Motorized Moving Backboard” and “Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles Poppin’ Pins Bowling” and “Super Spike V’ball” and “Super High Impact Bone Crushing Arcade Smash Football.”

He asked a sales clerk, “Do you have any Hopalong Cassidy stuff?”

She said, “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Hopalong Cassidy. The movie cowboy. Had his sidekicks named Lucky and California. Rode a great white horse called Topper.”

She said to follow her and we walked three aisles over. There she pointed to a shelf on which there was a basketball game called “Hop-A-Long Hoopster.”

The clerk said, “Is this what you mean?”

The old fella said no, not quite, but thanks for looking. And you have a Merry Christmas.