OK Mfg. Co. Ada Ohio Crescent Pad First Baseman's Mitt, Webless Steerhide, c. 1938–1950

The Piece

A first baseman's mitt from the last years before the modern glove, stamped by the O.K. Manufacturing Company of Ada, Ohio, and worn to the color and softness of an old saddle. It is the crescent-pad pattern: a broad flat pocket of tan steerhide with a horseshoe of thick wool padding stitched around the heel and up the sides, a separate padded thumb, and no web at all, just the single continuous rawhide lace that runs the whole perimeter of the mitt through brass-set eyelets and holds the two faces together. The back is plain leather with a simple strap, the kind of mitt a man pulled on at first base in the 1930s and 1940s and caught with two hands, because the pad was for stopping the ball and the hands were for holding it. The pocket carries the maker's stamp, the script OK over MFG. CO. and ADA, OHIO, with the model number 050 and a U.S. mark below, still legible in the leather.

Condition is honest and as found, which is how a mitt like this should be: the leather supple with a deep, mottled caramel-to-chestnut patina and the darkening at the pocket where a thousand balls landed, the perimeter lacing complete and tight, the eyelets present, the stitching sound. The thumb has split at the tip and along its upper seam, exposing the wool felt padding beneath, and the leather there is dry and frayed; the pad has settled and taken a permanent cup. No repairs, no replaced lace, no oil or conditioner. It is a display and collector piece rather than playing equipment.

History & Provenance

The first baseman's mitt is the oldest specialized glove in baseball. The catcher and the first baseman were the first players allowed a padded mitt, in the 1890s, and for the next fifty years the first baseman's model kept its own shape: a flat, round-faced pancake with a crescent of padding around the heel, separate from the fingered fielder's glove and from the heavily padded catcher's mitt. Through the 1920s and 1930s the pocket deepened and the perimeter lace replaced the stitched edge, and the webless crescent-pad mitt in this form was the standard of the Depression and wartime years, until the laced web, the trapper hinge and the split finger of the late 1940s and 1950s turned it into the long-fingered scoop used today. A webless crescent mitt is the earliest type a collector is likely to find in usable leather, and the form is the thing: it is a sculpture of the game before the modern glove.

The maker is documented. William Sonnett, who had run the baseball glove department at P. Goldsmith Sons in Cincinnati, founded the Ohio-Kentucky Manufacturing Company in 1933 to make gloves under the OK name. When the 1937 Ohio River flood wrecked the Cincinnati plant, the town of Ada, Ohio raised the money to refit an empty factory, and the company moved there in 1938, making baseball gloves and mitts, softball gloves, footballs, basketballs and boxing gloves, and during the war gloves and gauntlets for the armed services. Wilson Sporting Goods bought the company in 1954, and the Ada plant became the Wilson football factory that still makes every ball used in the National Football League. The dating rests on the mark and the construction rather than style alone: a glove stamped ADA, OHIO was made after the 1938 move and before the 1954 Wilson purchase, the U.S. stamp beside the model number is the military and institutional marking the company used in the 1940s, and the webless crescent-pad pattern was superseded by the end of that decade. The mitt is dated c. 1938–1950.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

An old mitt is one of the few pieces of sporting equipment that reads as sculpture, and this one, flat, round and laced like a drum, is the best shape of them all. Stand it on a shelf in a study, a den or a boy's room, lay it on a stack of books on a coffee table, hang it by its strap on a hook in a mudroom or a cabin, or set it in a shop window beside a wooden bat and a worn ball. It belongs with leather club chairs, oak, brass and old photographs, in a man's office, a sports bar, a lake house or a collected modern room that wants one object with a story. It is the gift for a father, a coach, a first baseman of any age, or an Ohio family. For a designer client it is the authentic vintage accent that no reproduction can touch; for a shop it is the piece every man who walks in picks up.