First Gloves: Del Rice

Del Rice was sort of the Forrest Gump of baseball. He always seemed to turn up in the right place at the right time, sometimes for no apparent reason.

That trend has continued to the present day, despite the fact that Rice passed away in 1983. As my wife and I were browsing throw an antique store about a week ago, I turned a corner and had a a Del Rice model catcher’s mitt sitting directly in front of me, right at eye level. I couldn’t miss it.

As you can tell from the photo, the glove was in a section of the store with bigger items, like furniture and rugs. Why was a baseball glove in that section? No clue, but there it was anyway, complete with Del Rice’s faux signature, faded by still clear as a bell. So I started looking into Delbert W. Rice, Jr., or just Del for short, and found that his career was a bit of an odyssey that brought him into contact with all sorts of famous people from all walks of life, despite a pretty bland skill set for a big league ballplayer.