Baseball fans who are also memorabilia collectors have many different ways to celebrate the Great American Pastime. Some collect baseball cards, or bobbleheads. Maybe caps and jerseys. For others, it’s programs or ticket stubs.

For Denton’s Tony Gianninoto, it’s baseball gloves and mitts. He’s not in it for the money, but for the memories. Those memories take him all the way back to his childhood, when he used to play catch with his father.

“Pops (his dad) played on the Greensboro baseball team in the Marydel League for 10 years (from 1950 to 1960). I was a young boy at the time,” said Tony, who was a good enough player to play at Salisbury State University in his college days.
“The first glove I got was my dad’s catcher’s mitt. He gave it to me when I was a young kid and it really meant something to me,” said Gianninoto, whose collection numbers 25 historical gloves, but is set to increase by two gloves when his latest purchases are delivered.

“My latest purchases are a George A. Reach glove made in Greensboro and a Rawlings Brooks Robinson glove,” he said, adding that his collection is comprised of gloves almost entirely from the 1970s and older.

“There are not any really valuable gloves in my collection. Their value is in the sentimentality they mean to me, not in how much they are worth in dollars,” he said.

Gianninoto has purchased gloves at auctions, flea markets, on the internet and on E-Bay. He looks for heavily-worn gloves that need to be repaired and then reconditions them.

“I buy gloves in a lot of different conditions, at least 20 years old, then recondition them. That’s where I get a lot of the enjoyment from my collection,” he said. “I try to get as many vintage gloves as I can. That’s where I get the pleasure, bringing them back to life.”

He said he recently attended an auction at American Corner and saw a couple of gloves for sale there, but they were too expensive.

“I have a limit of what I will spend,” he said.

Tony said his hobby of collecting baseball gloves and mitts- a glove has fingers, a mitt does not – comes from his love for baseball and the fact that his dad was a shoe repairman and worked a lot with leather.

Tony and his wife, Karen, make several trips a year to Springfield, Ohio, where he has found a few of his mitts. He will often bring a few of his gloves with him to work on during the trips.

“When I was older, dad gave me his catcher’s mitt. That’s the one I started with,” said Tony, who still has the first baseman’s mitt he played with at Chesapeake College and Salisbury University.

The first glove he bought was a Johnny Bench’s catcher’s mitt.

His mitts are not autographed by the player personally, but rather, are the model manufactured by the glove maker with the player’s facsimile autograph on it. Among the gloves he has are a Brooks Robinson third baseman’s glove, circa 1962, a Richie Ashburn glove, a Harvey Kuenn glove and a Johnny Vander Meer model, significant because Vander Meer pitched back-to-back no-hitters in 1938. He also has a Sears glove with Ted Williams’ imprinted logo on it.

“Ted Williams had a (sporting goods) contract with Sears, so there are a lot of Ted Williams gloves out there,” said Gianninoto. “The gloves were actually made for Sears by the J.C. Higgins Company.”

He has a number of lefthanded gloves, not surprising because Tony is a lefty.

Included in Gianninoto’ s collection are gloves manufactured by the George A. Reach Sporting Goods company in Greensboro. The company – formerly the A.I. Reach (Sporting Goods) Company of Philadelphia, operated in Greensboro from 1917 to 1958 when it was sold and moved to Ohio and Japan. Some of his gloves were likely made in Greensboro, while others bore the Greensboro stamp but might have been made elsewhere.

“When I was a kid, they (The Reach Company) had a factory in Greensboro,” he said. “About 10 years ago I picked up a glove in Springfield, Ohio that had stamping on it from Greensboro. I paid $20 for it. I also found a Reach baseball glove with the Reach/Philadelphia stamp on the glove, but it was in a box that was stamped as being from Greensboro.

Gianninoto said he is always keeping his eye out for new additions to his collection, especially Orioles gloves from the sixties and seventies, and has his collection stored neatly into a large blue plastic container. Keeping it all in the container enables him to carry his collection with him on trips and to shows.

“Every year, the Federalsburg Historical Society holds a hobby fair. I like to exhibit my collection each year. It gives me a chance to get my collection out and show them off,” said Tony. “That way, I get to bring them down at least once a season to look at them.”

Collecting gloves brings back baseball’s best memories for Gianninoto and those lucky enough for him to share them with.
“I find that people enjoy seeing the collection and sharing them brings additional enjoyment to me,” he said.

The four gloves are shown with the leather creme he uses to condition the mitts. Plus, there is a vintage baseball he uses. The four gloves are: back row, Tony’s father’s catcher’s mitt from the 1940s; a George A. Reach glove made in Greensboro. a Brooks Robinson glove from the mid-1960s. In the front row is a Eddie Leonard Sporting Goods glove from the 1930s, which were manufactured in Annapolis.