Looking Back at Vintage Baseball Glove Ads
Beautiful Ads from Baseball's Golden Era
For several years in the late 70s and early 80s I was a Cub Scout / Boy Scout. One of the benefits of being a scout was a subscription to Boys’ Life magazine. As the official magazine of scouting, Boys’ Life boasted a circulation of over 2 million at its peak. Issues featured content aimed not only at scouts but also subject matters of interest to young boys in general. The advertisers within the magazine reflected this, with sporting goods manufacturers, especially baseball glove makers, historically having a strong presence. The magazine’s long history gives us a glimpse into the various ways glove makers have marketed their equipment. While not touching on every glove ad, nor even every type of advertising message, what follows is a brief look at some of the ways glove manufacturers have promoted their equipment.
Over the years glove makers have used several different formula to promote their wares. Glove ads have run the gamut, from simply showing kids using the glove to detailed explanations of the latest in leather technology.
Ads have instructed readers to ask their Dad for a specific brand of glove, even going to so far as to feature an area of the ad to be used to tell the Old Man exactly which model you wanted, as in this 1960 Wilson ad. Through these ads, readers have learned the history of the evolution of the baseball glove and have been presented with an almost life-sized photo of one of the game’s most beautiful gloves, this 1972 Rawlings World Series Special. Featuring red, white and blue leather, along with autographs of the MVPs of the previous two World Series, Brooks Robinson and Roberto Clemente, the World Series Special perhaps could have only been produced in the years leading up to America’s Bicentennial in 1976.
Variations of all of these marketing messages, and more, have been used over the years. However, there was one type of ad that glove manufacturers would return to time after time - the celebrity endorsement.
Early on, glove makers hit upon the idea to use celebrity endorsements to peddle their leather. In 1954 Wilson featured New York Giants bat boy Bobby Weinstein in an ad and in 1964 MacGregor used Chicago White Sox Manager Al Lopez to literally talk to kids about their gloves. But other than a few instances similar to those, the vast majority of celebrity endorsements in glove ads were from the ballplayers themselves. Practically all glove manufacturers at one time or another used players to promote their gloves. Even smaller brands like Nokona, MacGregor and Kennedy used players to not only brand their gloves but to appear in their ads.
But for baseball star power, and overall coolness factor, the smaller companies couldn’t compete with the big three of Spalding, Wilson and Rawlings. Those three companies not only featured the game’s biggest stars, they typically portrayed them in the biggest, boldest ads. Although Rawlings was featuring St. Louis Cardinals stars Marty Marion and Stan Musial in small space ads as far back as the late ‘40s, by the mid-to-late ‘50s the use of ballplayer endorsements in glove ads was reaching its peak. In 1956 Wilson had Detroit Tigers star Harvey Kuenn in a full-page advertisement explaining why he used Wilson gloves, while also name dropping teammate and fellow star Al Kaline. The fact that both were members of the “Wilson Advisory Staff” is noted with an asterisk. This is one of the earlier instances of a full-page ad from a glove maker but it was a sign of things to come.
Over the course of the next decade and a half the major glove manufacturers increasingly used the game’s top players in their ads. And as those ads got larger and bolder, the player names got bigger as well. Although Rawlings had been featuring Mickey Mantle in some of their ads for several years, by the early sixties Mickey’s star was large enough to command a full-page ad. Like the Yankees themselves, Rawlings didn’t expect Mickey to do it all himself. This 1964 ad for the Rawlings “Big 8” glove features 7 other stars along with Mantle, to tout the glove’s “8 big fielding features”. Wilson countered by using Detroit Tigers star Al Kaline, in a series of ads promoting their A2000 model, that featured a checklist for young players to gauge whether they were ready for a professional model glove.
By the latter half of the decade, Wilson had begun featuring Chicago Cubs star Ron Santo as their spokesman for their A2000 glove, in ads that typically offered Santo’s tips for fielding. In true advertising fashion, those tips always included using a Wilson A2000. Not be left out, Spalding used the celebrity endorsement game as well, although in a slightly different fashion. Spalding created this beautifully simplistic 1964 ad that features the signatures of some of the current days’ stars who use their gloves, alongside a couple of Hall of Fame earlier endorsers - Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Another manufacturer that used celebrity endorsement in an unconventional way was Sears, who signed Ted Williams as a consultant for their entire sporting goods line. This made for some interesting ads for everything from shotguns to fishing equipment, including this glove ad from 1962 featuring Ted showing a group of little leaguers his personal model glove.
By the early 1970s, as football and other sports continued to gain in popularity and the country moved on to other hobbies, glove ads became less common in Boys’ Life. Ads that were seen usually failed to live up to the creativity and star power of earlier ads. Although there was the occasional bright spot, such as this 1971 Rawlings ad featuring artistic depictions of Johnny Bench, Brooks Robinson and Billy Williams,
and the earlier mentioned 1972 World Series Special, the heyday of baseball glove ads in Boys’ Life had passed. Looking back at these vintage glove ads one gains an appreciation of how the game evolved during the middle of the last century and insight into how the game’s stars began to be used to promote merchandise.
A version of this article previously appeared on Uni Watch. Thanks to UW Editor Phil Hecken for allowing me to republish it here in a slightly different form.
Great piece!
Outstanding piece. Took me a few years of pestering the hell out of my mom… but I finally landed the Rawlings Brooks Robinson Fast Back model and man did I just wear that thing OUT!