To break in a new first baseman’s glove, Pete Alonso, the Mets’ rookie slugger, sat down at his Citi Field locker, slipped his left hand inside and punched the pocket with his right fist six times. He then paused to assess the mitt’s malleability.
“Just have to beat the hell out of it,” he said. “I don’t rush the process.”
He wasn’t done. He applied bat wax via a rolling stick along the glove’s inside. He sprayed Tuf-Skin, which is typically used as a tape adherent, on top of that. He scrutinized the laces before ambling out of the Mets clubhouse and into a hallway, where he picked up his bat and used it to pound the glove’s pocket 11 times. He shook his head.
“I remember my dad once put shaving cream all over my glove and put it in the oven and then kind of ruined it,” Alonso said. “We had to go buy another one. Some people are kind of weird with how they like it.”
It is the quirkiest craft in baseball. Major leaguers are selective about their leather, and most agree: Breaking it in is hard to do. As technology has revolutionized the way clubs approach the game, this essential process remains steeped in traditions both brilliant and bizarre.
Some players run over their gloves with trucks; others place balls inside the pocket and wrap the glove tight with a rope, belt or rubber bands. Buckets of water, steamers and hydrocollators are employed; so are creams, oils and conditioners. Mallets are in vogue; pitching machines can also be used to pummel the leather. Some gloves now come with tags warning against placing them in microwave ovens, but even major leaguers still use them to soften their leather.
The Mets, who were officially eliminated from playoff contention on Wednesday, may have been let down by their gloves on occasion this season — they ranked last or second-to-last in the National League in several advanced defensive metrics — but it wasn’t for lack of treating them. As Daniel Zamora, a Mets relief pitcher, noted, each professional has a unique approach.
“Twenty-five guys, 25 gloves,” he said. “And 25 ways to break ’em in.”
Kevin Kierst, the team’s clubhouse manager, is the go-to person for glove work. By his desk are three glove tools: a letter opener, pliers and forceps. There are also scissors and needles that he uses when restitching gloves. His hands are large, so when he works with a player’s glove, he observes the golden rule of not placing his hand fully inside; he goes a maximum of halfway.
To treat leather, Kierst makes sure to have a spray bottle of Lexol cleaner on hand, and he suggests using shaving cream with lanolin, a natural skin softener. He has fielded requests to “pancake” the glove, or to make it completely flat. Requests for stretched pockets range from the size of one ball to two.
On a recent afternoon, Kierst picked up infielder Todd Frazier’s glove, played around with it and informed Frazier it would have to be relaced because the leather had dried out.
“That’s where broken laces come in,” Kierst said.
Frazier, 33, is a baseball lifer, but do not ask him how to break in a mitt. As the youngest of three brothers, he wore hand-me-downs as a youth. In high school, a coach did the job for him, and then his college team’s equipment manager handled the process, too. Now, Frazier refers to Kierst as “the Magic Man” for his ability to get gloves game ready. With his son, Blake, playing tee ball, Frazier is getting a crash course on the difficulty of breaking in gloves.
“It’s coming back to bite me,” he said. “I put it in the sauna and sit there with it, but you don’t want it to get too heavy. You have to be careful. Tried putting it under the couch the other day.”
Most laugh at procedures they have tried in the past. Outfielder Keon Broxton would use his football helmet as a mallet, slamming it against the glove. Catcher Wilson Ramos remembers a teammate in Venezuela rubbing the inside of a banana peel against his glove, hoping to transfer the moisture. In Northern California, the utility fielder J.D. Davis would oil up his glove, put it in a paper bag and run it over with a car. He and his father would then throw a belt around the glove with a softball in the pocket, and place it under a couch for a week or two.
“I would just sit there, stare at it and ask, ‘Can I play catch yet?’” he said. “I may throw it in the oven to warm it up, but no cars nowadays.”
For relief pitcher Jeurys Familia and utility infielder Adeiny Hechavarria, the sheer number of gloves in the majors, as well as their quality, is hard to fathom. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Familia cut his glove out of cardboard. In Cuba, Hechavarria did not own a glove until he was 17; on his youth teams, gloves had to be turned in at the end of workouts and redistributed the next day. When he looks around M.L.B. clubhouses, he laughs at all of the leather each player has.
“In Cuba, two would be a lot,” he said. “Five or six gloves would be insane.”
But that still wouldn’t be enough for Jeff McNeil, the Met with the most mitts. On any given day, there might be as many as eight gloves in his locker stall. He has played left field and right, third base and second this season. He keeps a first baseman’s glove in his stall, just in case, and recently had his nickname, Flying Squirrel, stitched into his leather. His teammate Brandon Nimmo went a simpler route, having his name threaded into his glove.
“It’s quite the art,” Nimmo said. “I switch every year, but I don’t like to switch during the season unless I just don’t like the way the glove is broken in.”
Second baseman Robinson Cano, the Mets’ second-highest-paid player this season, even has his name stitched into his training glove — a smaller version that infielders use to hone the fundamental skill of seeing the ball into the pocket. First baseman Dominic Smith, who likes to tell shortstop Amed Rosario that he is his equal in nimbleness (he is not), appreciates the challenge of the training glove.
“It shows who’s really got the hands,” Smith says. “It will expose you quickly, for real.”
More important than embroidered names, of course, are the threads holding the glove together. One day in Class AAA, reliever Drew Gagnon mentioned that he could mend mitts. When he arrived the next afternoon, there were five waiting in his locker. He now spends summer’s dog days tightening teammates’ gloves when needed.
“It’s something to do,” he said. “It’s peaceful.”
Gagnon’s own gloves can be tough to track. Though he throws right-handed from the mound, he also uses a southpaw’s glove when shagging fly balls during batting practice. Gagnon and Zamora are known to engage in sleight of hand before games.
“Sometimes I’ll switch gloves with Gags, and he’ll be left-handed and I’ll be right-handed,” Zamora said. “He has big hands, so I like that when I’m breaking in my gloves. I’ve got these little hands that don’t break in the glove as good.”
For that, there’s always Kierst, who follows the laces wherever they lead him.
On a recent day in the clubhouse, Kierst walked by Gagnon, who was at work on his latest project. The two discussed the finer points of finding the right hole and proper length of the tool to get the laces through to the other side. Gagnon needed to move quickly: His throwing schedule called for a game of catch. Checking his stitching, he admired the effort.
“Surgery at its finest,” he said.