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Category: Glove Care Tips

The Best Baseball Glove Accessories to Complement Your Mitt

Accessories are hardly necessary for keeping your glove in top-notch shape. However, several of them can certainly make this ongoing process a lot easier. In this post we break down the best baseball glove accessories to make protecting your glove’s shape simple and easy.

Mitt Spit Glove Cleaner and Conditioner: This US-made product is the best conditioner on the market. It both smells good and gives your glove a clean, smooth feel after application. Pick it up here.

Extra baseball or softball: When you are not using your glove, it is helpful to leave a baseball (infield glove) or softball (outfield glove) in the pocket. This helps you maintain the shape of it in a cost-effective manner.

Lacing kit: Laces sometimes snap, leaving you in a tough situation to either send your glove away or fix the lacing yourself. With a lacing kit and a few Youtube videos, you can fix the lacing yourself both effectively and affordably. Here’s our favorite lacing kit, and Wilson sells a full-service one as well.

Glove Mallet: A wooden mallet is a good way to mimic catching a baseball when breaking in your glove. While not necessary, using a mallet is an affordable and effective way to break-in your glove quicker. Buy one here.

Webgem Glove Care System: The Webgem is a carrying case for your glove that keeps it protected and maintains it shape. They have models for fielders and catchers. Albeit pricey, they are a good way to maintain the desired shape of your glove. Get one here.

Accessories we don’t recommend:

Most glove conditioners: There’s a million types of leather conditioners for sale, but most are either a) not for baseball gloves, or b) contain chemicals that are questionable for your mitt. We recommend sticking with what we listed above.

Glove Wrap: Albeit cheap, most glove wraps are largely ineffective. They break-in and shape a glove unnaturally, and we recommend either carrying your glove or putting a baseball in the pocket if you must store it somewhere enclosed.

Sting Pads: Most sting pads are uncomfortable and provide limited benefit. If your index finger is stinging too much, we recommend going index finger-out grip or figuring out why the padding in your palm is failing.

How to Break-in Your New Baseball Glove

Breaking in a glove can be a time-consuming and difficult process. But it can also be a fun and interesting one if you employ the best methods of doing so. In this post we detail the best methods to break-in your baseball glove in the most time-efficient and effective manner:

Best Method: Playing Catch

  • Cliche, but breaking your mitt in by playing catch allows your glove to truly break in to how your squeeze your hand. This makes the glove both more comfortable and easier to close over time.
  • A hack to make this easier is to find a flat concrete or brick wall and throw dimpled baseballs at the wall. They’ll come back at you, replicate the act of having a catch, and help break-in your glove without another person.
  • This is the most time-consuming method, but it truly is the best method to break-in your glove the most natural way. Plus, there are many other skill-related benefits to having regular catches to break-in your glove.

An OK Method: Hot Water and a Mallet

  • Wilson’s Aso has recommended this method for years, in which you pour hot water over the pocket of your glove and hit the pocket of your glove with a wooden glove mallet. Here’s a video displaying the process.
  • This method will break-in your mitt very quickly, but at the expense of slightly damaging the leather of your mitt. Hot water will certainly help loosen the leather, but it harms the long-term durability of it as well.
  • We only recommend this method for players who need their gloves broken-in quickly or who only use their gloves for a short time. If you are looking to keep your glove in-shape for a longer time, we recommend simply playing catch.

What You Shouldn’t Do

Glove Steaming: A process in which you or someone else heats your mitt in a steamer, oven, or microwave. This breaks the glove in quickly, but it damages the leather of the glove significantly. We wouldn’t recommend in pretty much any circumstance.

Running Over Your Glove with a Car: This flattens the glove, giving it a broken-in feel, but it creates an unnatural squeeze that’s going to be uncomfortable. Never recommended.

Glove Wrap: Wrapping your glove with a rubber band and a baseball in pocket is a decent way to store your glove, but a bad one to break one in. This also creates an unnatural squeeze and honestly doesn’t really break-in your glove all that much.