If you live anywhere near Minneapolis and have an old baseball glove you want refurbished, it looks like D&J Glove Repair is the place you want to go. I say this based on their Twitter feed, but also based on some of their customers just randomly tagging them in posts after they let big leaguers use their newly-repaired gloves.
Take “BobbySTL1936,” who asked Steven Matz of the Cardinals if he wanted to try out his old glove after it had been tuned up by D&J.
In case you can’t read it, the glove was endorsed by Cardinal legend Red Schoendienst. Here’s what it looked like before the D&J folks fixed it up.
Pretty cool. There are other versions of Schoendienst gloves that have his signature in the palm instead of on the pinkie, but all of them are from MacGregor. That’s not a brand you see much anymore, but Schoendienst appears to have been pretty loyal to them, just as he was to the Cardinals even after they traded him away in one of the most unpopular deals in franchise history.
The fans had reason to be upset at the deal, because Red Schoendienst apparently loved the Cardinals just as much as Cardinals fans loved him.
He grew up in Germantown, Illinois, which is now about a 45-minute drive from the heart of St. Louis. His dad was a coal miner, and the family didn’t have running water or electricity. After dropping out of school in the heart of the Great Depression to help his family, Schoendienst suffered an injury on the job that nearly cost him his left eye. After much discussion of removing it, the eye was finally saved, but he had trouble tracking some pitches from right-handers after that and decided to become a switch-hitter to solve the problem.
When the Cardinals held an open tryout in early 1942, the 19-year old Schoendienst impressed the club enough that they eventually offered him a contract in the Class-D Georgia-Florida League. He did well there, and moved up to the Double-A Rochester Red Wings the next season as their starting shortstop. World War II interrupted his career for a couple of years at that point, but he was back in time for Spring Training in 1945. The Cardinals liked him and wanted him on the club to start the season, but they already had Marty Marion at shortstop. Schoendienst was asked to switch to left field, a position he’d never played professionally, but he agreed to it.
He never spent another day in the minor leagues. Moved to second base for the 1946 season, Schoendienst settled in there for the next decade, and began his trend of doing pretty much anything the Cardinals organization needed him to do. Switch-hit? Sure. Move to the outfield? Fine. Move back to second base? No problem.
Even though the wasn’t a speed merchant at all, St. Louis wanted Schoendienst to run more when he was a rookie. He proceeded to lead the league in steals. At a time when the team was regularly in the bottom half of the league in scoring and needed more pop in the lineup, Schoendienst was dropped to the middle of the order and set a new career high in homers. Another year he led the league in sacrifices. His willingness to do whatever they needed was one of the constants of his game, along with durability and sound defense.
That glove was always there. In his only year in left field he had +6 fielding runs despite never having played the position. Then, in the next decade at second base, he averaged another +6 fielding runs every year, and didn’t have a single season when his total was below average. He led all second basemen in putouts and assists three times each, and led in fielding runs and double plays twice. Five times he had the best range in the league, and six times he led in fielding percentage. He never won a Gold Glove because he was 34 and slipping a bit by the time the award was invented, but it’s fair to say he’d have collected a few in his prime years.
Throughout his early years he could also be counted on to fill in capably pretty much anywhere on the field, and was also a .304 hitter when called upon to pinch-hit. There weren’t many things Schoendienst was excellent at on a baseball field, but he wasn’t bad at anything.
In the middle of the 1956 season, as the team floundered around the .500 mark, the Cardinals shipped Schoendienst to the Giants. It was reported that newspaper switchboards were swamped with calls from unhappy fans, and Stan Musial, Schoendiesnt’s best friend on the team, refused to comment for one of the rare times in his career. The deal was supposedly made because younger players were blocked by him, but it didn’t do much good. A year later the GM who traded him, Frank Lane, resigned under pressure, and the Cardinals didn’t win another pennant until 1964.
By then Schoendienst was back with the club as a coach, having won another World Series with the Braves in 1957. He’d re-signed with the Cardinals in 1961, and with the exception of two years with the A’s in the 1970s, he never again worked for anyone else, serving as a coach and manager in both the majors and minor leagues until his death in 2018. He had three different stints as the team’s manager, winning over 1,000 games and a World Series.
So, if that rejuvenated glove is anything like the man whose signature it bears, it’s got a long, long baseball life ahead of it.
Frank Lane was the most unqualified person who ever was the GM anywhere. His years of destruction in Cleveland, which included the infamous Rocky Colavito trade, were beautifully documented by Terry Pluto, IIRC. A great essay. Thank you.
Thanks, Paul, I always enjoy these. They always remind me of a story my friend told when he went to buy a new baseball glove years ago. When he told the guy at the store he wanted a new mitt the guy said “Softball?” He thought he said “Southpaw” so he answered “ No, I’m right handed” and they went back and forth with this a few more times :)