First Gloves: Joe Gordon

Joe Gordon was an excellent player, but he was sort of forgotten by the team he had his best years with, and it took way too long for him to get the recognition he deserved.

Maybe that’s why I came across a Gordon model baseball glove recently at a local estate sale, unwanted by the previous owner’s family and being sold off for whatever they could get for it, decades after it was first purchased. This isn’t the exact glove (the folks running the sale were oddly picky about taking photos), but it looked just like it.

For a while during the 1940s Gordon was part of a great debate over whether he or Boston’s Bobby Doerr was the best second baseman in baseball. Even viewing it years later as a Red Sox fan whose mother thought Bobby Doerr was “dreamy” when she was a little girl, I understand why Gordon was part of the debate. Once Charlie Gehringer started slowing down in the late 1930s, Gordon and Doerr really had no peers at the position. (Cubs fans will argue for Billy Herman, and they will be wrong. He was past his prime in these years.) From 1937 until 1951, here are the top WAR totals among second basemen.