Buying a baseball glove

Last night I have to say I had a one of a kind experience buying a baseball glove.  Now, I’ve bought a few baseball and softball gloves in my time but last night was the first time that it took 3 people, two cell phones and 1 hour!

Let me back up a minute and give you the background on this.  Tom is currently in Virginia at AIT.  His battalion gets weekends off but they don’t get to go off base.  So they find things to do to keep themselves busy and in shape.  Specifically sports. 

Tom called last week wanting us to send his baseball glove to him as they were planning a game on Sunday.  His glove is buried in with all the rest of his stuff in the shed down at the property.  First off I was not going to make it down there until the weekend and second it was too damn hot to go crawling around the shed looking for a baseball glove.  Fortunately, for him the game got changed to an ultimate Frisbee game and later a football game both of which he gladly joined in (he was the captain of the ultimate team in high school.)

So the game was rescheduled for this coming weekend.  Tom called to see if we would buy a new glove (using his money of course) and send it to him.  He was very specific in what he wanted – Rawlings, 12 inch.  Seems his old glove was about done anyway and he needed a new one so off Erik and I went to Johnny Macs sporting goods to look at gloves.

When I first entered the store I found the gloves right away near the door, but no Rawlings.  I looked and looked and found not a Rawlings glove in the bunch.  There were plenty of Mizuno, Wilson, and TPX brands but no Rawlings.  Erik and I hunted around and found a reasonably nice one in his price range so I called Tom.  I explained that we couldn’t find any Rawlings gloves but Erik had found a Wilson that might do.  Erik took a picture and sent it to him while I stayed on my phone and talked. 

Tom checked out the picture and said it would do so while still on the phone, Erik and I started to wander around the store a bit.  We found a clearance rack – and there was a Rawlings glove.  So we took another picture and sent it to him.  He wasn’t fond of it but it might work.  Then we wandered further and found the Rawlings gloves… an entire section of them!  So, we started the search all over again. 

We discovered that I have an uncanny knack for finding left handed gloves – seems that almost every glove I picked up was a lefty.  Tom is not left handed.  Finally I found one that I would have liked and sent a picture despite the fact that Erik didn’t like it as well.  Guess which glove Tom chose… mine.  *tee hee* 

So an hour later, two cell phones and 3 people – Tom has a new glove.  Now I just have to ship it to him at lunch time today.