Mitt Doctor: Gordon King lives the life of a baseball glove forensic pathologist
Published: April 23, 2016 Kent Record-Courier
By Jonah Rosenblum | Staff Writer
You have a sleep disorder. A run-of-the-mill doctor writes a quick prescription for Ambien. A specialist figures out what the root cause of that sleep disorder is. Is it anxiety? Is it restless leg syndrome?
Gordon King is that specialist -- for baseball gloves. How do you fix a broken baseball glove? Some will just patch it up or restring it. The problem is, King says, that doesn't fix the original problem, so King does far more. Take a glove in which King shifted the horizontal bar on the webbing downward. What are you doing, his wife asked quite reasonably? It's crooked now. He was providing a long-term solution. By inspecting the markings on the glove, King had deciphered where the kid was catching the ball in the mitt -- and maneuvered the horizontal bar to avoid the worst of the beating and thus last longer.
But what if his friends made fun of him for his now weird-looking glove? "You tell him it was strung by a professional," King said he told the kid's father.
Gordon King knows two things better than just about anyone. He knows bull riding, particularly the famed bull Bodacious. He knows baseball.
What connects those two seemingly opposite spheres -- the rough-and-tumble world of bull riding, chock full of Texas prairies littered with bulls and steers, and the sharply manicured baseball fields that play host to America's pastime? Leather is the connection. It's what makes up baseball gloves -- and it's what makes up Gordon King's life.
Gordon King is a mastermind of the baseball glove. From his apartment in the midst of an enormous apartment complex in Parma, with its stylistic brick siding and endless wings and parking lots, King repairs gloves for people from 41 states and three countries to the tune of 200-plus gloves a year. Why do people send their gloves all the way to Parma? How do people decide to trust someone they've never even met with such a prized possession?
King takes a phone call from a client during a visit from the Record-Courier. He constantly moves both legs as he talks about the finer points of a baseball glove. He has the voice of a baseball announcer, finely textured, deep and booming with a euphonic mixture of expertise and knowledge.
That commanding voice, his mastery of parlance, might be one draw. Then, there are the friends he made from decades spent playing baseball & slow pitch softball. Increasingly, there are the glowing testimonials that dot his website. More than anything, there's King's love for the game.
He said that a lot of times when a kid and his or her parents come in, the kid will tell him things about his or her glove that even the parents didn't realize.
He speculates the connection might be due to the many decades he spent playing the game. He might never have played the game at a high level, he always had to scrap for his success in the game, but he built a true understanding of the game that way. "I level with them like a ballplayer to a ballplayer," King said.
Andrew Syx, who played baseball for Woodridge until he graduated last year, remembers his visit to King well. Snow was still on the ground as he made his way to Parma to get his glove restrung. The job was a tad more challenging than it sounds, given Syx's trapeze-style mitt. "When the strings broke on the inside of my glove,
I really had no idea what to do with it because it's a very complex webbing my mitt had," Syx said.
King impressed Syx by bringing a glove out, tearing it open and demonstrating step-by-step how he fixes gloves. When it came to his glove, Syx said King didn't hesitate, taking out all the factory string and replacing it with authentic leather string he made himself. "This guy knows his stuff, it is ridiculous," Syx said. "He literally has become the expert when it comes to both leather and baseball mitts."
King picks a baseball glove off his apartment floor and asks what kind of glove it is. It's a third baseman's glove. How did he know? The size of the fingers combined with the marks on the fingers, made by infielders scraping their mitts against the dirt. He said that sometimes he will tell a parent you've got quite the middle infielder. How did you know he was a middle infielder, the parent will ask him? The glove doesn't lie. That's how. "I'm like a forensic pathologist for baseball gloves," King said.
It's 10 at night and Gordon King cannot stop talking about baseball. Doesn't he ever get tired of looking at baseball gloves every day? Isn't there a day when he wants to do something else, anything else? That's an easy one.
He doesn't blink. "No, not really." This is a man who lives and breaths baseball. He listens to it in the car on SiriusXM or watches it on the MLB Network.
He recalled that in first grade he came home with an atrocious reading score. His first-grade teacher tried to figure out some way to get young King into reading. Isn't there something he's passionate about? Well, his father thought, other than pretending to be a bull rider, there's baseball. He's always reading the box scores in the newspaper. His teacher suggested his parents subscribe to baseball magazines since he had an interest in it. King never struggled to read again.
So, on this late evening, knowledge pours out. Did you know Babe Ruth used to purchase beef bones, at West Side Market in the 1920’s, on trips to Cleveland to bone up his bat? Did you know Tony Conigliaro getting smashed in the face by a pitch in 1967 was the impetus behind earflaps on batting helmets? But, that one was easy -- that one was about King's beloved Boston Red Sox. "I just have loved the game my whole life," King said. He has a wall in the bedroom of his apartment with pictures of Carl Yastrzemski, the famed Red Sox Hall of Fame Outfielder. That was his favorite player of all time.
What does Babe Ruth's beef bone have to do, however, with Gordon King's glove repair business? Quite a lot, actually. His extensive knowledge serves to win the trust of customers. Sometimes, quite literally.
One potential customer had Joel Youngblood's former glove. The story goes that he had season tickets to the New York Mets and became recognized to the point that when a string snapped on Youngblood's glove, the player tossed his glove to the fan. So, how did he decide King was fit to repair his prized Youngblood glove?
He asked King who was the only player in Major League Baseball history to play for two teams in one day, getting a hit for both teams. King said that he didn't hesitate: Joel Youngblood. Alas, a new customer was born.
The connection between a player and his or her glove is intense -- Syx said he and his teammates called their gloves "their ladies" -- and you wouldn't leave your lady with just anyone. "Your glove is one thing that pretty much stays with you for an extended number of years," Syx said. "Your cleats come and go, you get new baseball bats, you get new jerseys, the one thing that stays the same would be your glove. You fall in love with your glove. You love the way your glove fits. No one else's glove feels the same." In King, players like Syx find someone who loves their glove just as much as they do.
He seemingly knows what everyone in the game is wearing. While most Americans look out for fastball versus changeup, King evidently looks out for Rawlings versus Wilson. He's always chasing knowledge. One day, he noticed that Chris Tillman of the Orioles was wearing a new Spalding glove. (Spalding had not produced a new glove for pros in decades King thought.) How unusual, he thought to himself. Next thing you know, King was on the phone with the Baltimore Orioles public relations department to find out more about this Spalding glove. It turns out that Spalding was purchased by Russell Athletic and was once again producing top of the line gloves for consumers and the pros. "I study," King says simply. "If I don't know, I ask."
The gloves lay scattered across King's living room floor, stacked all the way to the television stand. They lay in one plastic bin after another, or one cardboard box after another ready to ship. Each bin or box has a glove. Stacked against the wall leading up to the kitchen counter are tens of gloves that King will send to the military.
(The military doesn't allow soldiers to bring baseball gloves with them, presumably due to fears of smuggling, but gloves can be sent so long as they go through the Department of Defense -- so that's what King does.)
Does his wife, Joyce, mind the mess? She laughs. She's learned to deal with it. "I'm getting used to it, I guess you could say," she said. "As long as he's enjoying it, there are not a lot of people out there that enjoy what they do."
The problem for Joyce, decked out in a Madison Bumgarner shirt, is she has only herself to blame. It was Joyce who, seeing her husband out of work and noticing the way he fixed his friends' baseball gloves, suggested that he turn it into a business.
King is fanatic about finding new ways to work with baseball gloves. There is his way of freezing gloves and then baking them in 10-minute increments to best simulate the way a steer actually lives.
Then, he learned a commonly sold oil, used to condition baseball gloves, contained an allergen. A customer alerted him to that fact -- so he got to work creating his own lotion. After rubbing it on an old glove, the old faded brown suddenly turns into a gleaming, sharp shade. The secret formula consists of 11 natural elements available at any drug store or grocery store. It looks like a thick hand lotion.
With a catcher's glove, he'll use a thicker hide (the hide gets thicker as the cattle/bovines age, King explains) for the string lining the top of the glove because that's the part that absorbs the most impact.
Sometimes, King won't immediately know what to do. Each glove has its own story -- and some are quite perplexing -- like the recent glove he got where the family dog bit the index finger off. King might lay that glove to the side -- just for a little bit. "A lot of times, I'll go to sleep thinking about a glove and wake up with a solution," King said.
Recently, he had a 6-foot-8, 285-pound boy struggling to fit into his top-notch Italian Rawlings glove. King said that he drew an outline of the boy's hand on a piece of cardboard, took the $600 glove completely apart and reassembled it. He said he has never heard back, which he presumes to be a good thing.
Buying different kinds of hide, creating his own lotion, baking gloves in the oven, King has come a long way from restringing a buddy's glove.
"I've gone way beyond cutting strings and putting them in gloves for folks," King said. "It amazes me," his wife adds. "It really does, it amazes me. You'd think it would end or slow down at one time, especially during November, December, but no, it doesn't stop."
