Albert Goodwill Spalding’s sporting goods company may have been the dominant early player in getting baseball gloves to players, but by his own admission he didn’t invent the glove. Arthur Irwin might have though. After he injured two of his fingers, in 1883 he added padding to a buckskin driving glove and took it out on the field when everyone else was still playing barehanded. By 1884 nearly everyone joined Irwin, and soon thereafter he and Spalding (also a former player) officially endorsed gloves.

We called this series “The Heroes” series for a reason: the signature on a glove is a reflection of the admiration regular folks like us have always had for big league legends. So it’s fitting that the two most significant early signature model gloves were the Draper & Maynard Babe Ruth “Lucky Dog” and the Ken-Wel Lou Gehrig zipper-back first baseman’s glove. Talk about larger than life baseball heroes.

In the 1960s, both “Sears” and “Ted Williams” were about as big time as brand names got. So as Sears transitioned its baseball gloves from the “J.C. Higgins” brand to its own name, they partnered with Williams in a sweeping marketing deal in 1962: not only would his name be on their gloves, but Williams would be the chairman of the “Ted Williams Sports Advisory Staff,” apparently personally testing not only baseball gear, but equipment for hunting, fishing, camping, boating and more. If he approved, his name went on lots of it.

As signature series gloves grew in popularity over the years, so did the number of name options. As long as your taste in ballplayers isn’t too obscure, you could still almost certainly get the name of your favorite player from your favorite team on a glove. For us, this is the underlying idea behind this series: you may have idolized a different player than we did, but we know the feeling, and it’s expressed uniquely in putting your own hand in the glove with his signature on it.