The following description of the meaning of a baseball glove was used in advertising by the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company in 1965:
A baseball glove is a beginning and and ending: a boy’s first sure step towards manhood: a man’s final, lingering hold on youth: it is a promise… and a memory.
A baseball glove is the dusty badge of belonging, the tanned and oiled mortar of team and camaraderie: in its creases and scuffs lodge sunburned afternoons freckled with thrills, the excited hum of competition, cheers that burst like skyrockets.
A baseball glove is a thousand-and-one names and moments strung like white and crimson banners in the vast stadium of memory.
A baseball glove is the leather of adventure, worthy successor to the cowboy’s holster, the trooper’s saddle and the buckskin laces of the frontier scout; it is combat, heroics, and victory… a place to smack a fist or snuff a rally.
Above all, a baseball glove is the union of father and son, boy and friends, man and men; it is union beyond language, creed or color.
© The Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, 1965