Vintage Spalding Carl Yastrzemski 42-5375 Baseball Glove, c. 1967–1978

The Piece

A full-size fielder's glove in top grain leather, gone the colour of honey and dark tea, with a three-bar laced web, leather lacing throughout and a row of metal-grommeted eyelets closing the heel. It is a right-hand thrower's glove, worn on the left hand, and it holds its shape open on a table without help.

The palm carries Spalding's longhorn stamp reading FORM POCKET, TOP GRAIN LEATHER and CHROME TANNED, with the Carl Yastrzemski signature and ADVISORY STAFF stamped alongside it in the thumb panel. SPALDING runs the length of the little-finger side in heavy block letters. The back is stamped 42-5375 across the wrist and carries the oval Spalding S in black and gold.

The leather runs pale through the finger stalls and deepens across the heel and the back of the hand, with the lacing still supple and the pocket properly formed rather than flat. One name is stamped into the heel beside the lacing: STEEN. That is the boy or the man who owned it, marked at the counter the way gloves were.

History & Provenance

Carl Yastrzemski played twenty-three seasons and all of them for Boston, from 1961 to 1983. He took over left field at Fenway from Ted Williams, which is close to the least enviable assignment in American sport, and answered it with 3,419 hits, 452 home runs, eighteen All-Star selections and seven Gold Gloves. In 1967 he won the Triple Crown and the Most Valuable Player award while carrying a ninth-place club to the pennant, and in the last thirty-seven at-bats of that season he hit .541. He went into the Hall of Fame in 1989.

Spalding put his name on this glove under its Advisory Staff program, the arrangement by which a manufacturer contracted a working major leaguer to endorse and use its equipment. The signature stamped in the thumb panel is part of that endorsement. It was applied at the factory to every glove of the model and it is not an autograph. Nothing here is hand-signed and none is claimed.

The dating runs off the endorsement and the build, and both ends can be drawn reasonably close. Yastrzemski reached Boston in 1961 and took his first Gold Glove in 1963, but it was the 1967 Triple Crown and Most Valuable Player season that made his the name a manufacturer puts on a glove nationally, and that sets the floor. Spalding ran its Advisory Staff line from the nineteen-fifties into the nineteen-seventies, and the 42-series model numbering runs through that same stretch. The build agrees: leather throughout, a laced heel closed on metal eyelets, no wrist strap and no hook-and-loop closure of the kind that became standard on American gloves from the late nineteen-seventies, no import legend and no synthetic component anywhere. Those absences carry a ceiling only. On that evidence it is offered as c. 1967 to 1978.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A worn glove is one of the few objects that reads as a portrait of a person. This one holds the shape of a hand that is not there, the pocket is where someone put it over years of catching, and the leather is darkest exactly where it was gripped. Nothing designed can do that.

The colour does a great deal of work in a room. Honey and russet leather against green, against dark paint, against raw wood or white plaster, is a reliably good pairing, and the object has enough structure to sit open on a shelf, a mantel or a desk without slumping. It belongs in a study, a bar, a boy's room or anywhere a Boston fan will see it, and the stamped name at the heel gives whoever owns it next a small mystery to keep.