As the baseball season winds down...

I never owned a baseball glove, but as a kid I did play baseball on occasion. I grew up in a kid-filled neighborhood, but most of the families on our street were boy-majority. With a 3-2 ratio, we were girl majority, and there were a couple of tied up families, but in the majority of houses, boys outnumbered girlss: 2-1, 7-0, 3-2, 4-1, 6-1. So if I wanted to play when my girlfriends weren't around for jumprope or jacks, it was "boy games." Thus, I played plenty of war, and plenty of baseball.

I never owned my own glove. I used my brother Tom's or that of one of the other boys. 

But I remember the thrill of a new glove, the TLC. 

I remember Tom, my even younger brother Rick, and the neighborhood boys, doing all sorts of things to break in their new Rawlings, or keep their old Wilson supple.

Wrap glove around a baseball and secure the glove around the ball with rubber bands, creating a better pocket. Sit on the couch watching a game, hand in glove, repeatedly whacking the pocket with your fist, perhaps in hopes or dreams that a ball would somehow sail through the TV screen and you'd make a brilliant catch. Oil glove with 3 in One Household oil to keep it from drying out. Because we'd all been in our grandmothers' back hall closets and seen those shirveled up gloves our fathers had played with. 

Ah, baseball. There's nothing like it, and all these many years after I first, as a two-year-old, uncomprehendingly "watched" a game on our b&w Philco, toddling over to the screen at my father's direction to pick a runner off base, I have loved watching this game (and, back in the day, even playing it a little).

So I was delighted to see a mention on Twitter a while back that led me to an article on Jimmy Lonetti, a retired Minneapolis mailman who makes a living repairing baseball gloves 

Lonetti never expected his retirement hobby to grow into a brick-and-mortar business in the Longfellow neighborhood. He took care of his son’s Little League glove so he didn’t have to keep buying new ones, and teammates began asking for tune-ups on their own gloves, which continued as his son traded the Little League field for the diamond at his high school and later at St. Mary’s University.

His circle of clients grew along with his son, eventually leading to the birth of D&J Glove Repair in 2010 with the help of a friend in advertising and an eighth-grader who set up the website. (Source: Twin Cities Business)

And now Lonetti is running what may be the only baseball glove repair shop in existence - where, among other things, he hosts Twins watch parties - where folks (and his repair jobs come from around the country) bring their gloves because they'll find a level of expertise they won't find in, say, a shoe repair shop that sidelines in glove repair.

Posted in Lonetti's shop is a vintage ad/sign, dating from the 1950's, when I first fell in love with the game. 

“A baseball glove is a beginning and an ending, a boy’s first sure step toward manhood, a man’s final lingering hold on youth. It is a promise, a memory,” the sign reads. “A baseball glove is a dusty badge of belonging, the tanned and oiled mortar of team and camaraderie. In its creases and scuffs slots sunburned afternoons speckled with thrills … 1,001 names and moments strung like white and crimson banners in the vast stadium of memory.”

Corny? Yep!  But cornball, history, nostalgia have long been part of this venerable game.

And there's Jimmy Lonetti, with a last name worthy of the Golden Age of Baseball, when team rosters were peppered with Italian names like "Poosh 'em up" Tony Lazzeri, Joe and Dom DiMaggio, Scooter Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Joe Garagiola,  Rocky Colavito, Tito Francona...

As the baseball season winds down, here's wishing Jimmy Lonetti and his shop an successuful Hot Stove League season, with all sorts of gloves in terms of a bit of professional TLC pouring into his shop.