The right baseball glove not only will enhance your performance but also give you optimal comfort. As a result, the equipment stands out as one of the most critical items for any serious baseball player.
But finding the perfect gloves for yourself is far from being the final step in this regard. Once you have purchased gloves that fulfill your requirements, you also need to ensure their long-term durability. Apart from saving your investment, it also gives you significant peace of mind.
With the right advice, achieving this goal isn’t difficult at all. From following optimal cleaning practices to getting a baseball glove oil, here’s how you can prolong the life of your glove.
Clean After Every Session
Whether you use your glove in a practice session or an actual game, make sure to clean it off properly after each play. This ensures that the glove doesn’t get a buildup of dirt or grime with overtime usage.
This cleaning regime doesn’t require much from your end. Instead of purchasing special devices, you can just wipe your glove off with a soft cloth. It’s as simple as it sounds.
This basic yet effective practice makes sure that your glove remains clean of surface contaminants even with repeated use. There might be times where your glove gathers mud or tougher stains. You can still wipe them clean with a cloth and move forward with the next step.
Use Baseball Glove Oil After Cleaning
Nearly every baseball glove is made out of leather. Some of them are built from usual cowhide for economical options, while others use premium materials such as full-grain leather or steer hide.
Leather adds more quality, durability, and performance to your glove. But the material also renders it unwashable. This means that even after you clean your glove with a soft cloth, it can leave a lot to be desired in terms of projecting a fresh-off-the-shelf look.
That’s where you can use a special glove oil. When your premium leather gloves imbibe this oil, they can retain their signature gloss and texture even with extensive usage. This makes these oils one of the essential accessories for prolonging the life of your gloves.
Store in a Cool and Dry Place
In contrast to using a baseball glove oil, this advice seems like it comes straight from a medicine cabinet. In all seriousness, it deems quite effective in protecting your gloves for the long term.
Due to most baseball gloves’ base material, you need to keep them safe from warm and damp environments. It’s because prolonged exposure to sunlight and heat can discolor and crack the leather. On the other hand, water draws out leather’s natural oils and evaporates them, making the material lose its natural shine.
Due to these reasons, you need to make sure that you keep your glove safe from these natural elements that can be harmful to it. Since doing so doesn’t ask you to move mountains, it remains quite an easy tip to follow with significant benefits to boot.
By keeping these tips in mind, you can easily prolong the life of your favorite gloves. Practicing them regularly might be tricky at first. But once you start doing them daily, they become an effortless part of your routine.
