When the St. Louis Brown Stockings, of the National Association, began their 1875 season, the roster was studded with current and future stars. Their venerable player-manager, Dickey Pearce, had been one of the first two men to be openly paid for playing baseball, way back in 1856. He also invented bunting and the modern position of shortstop. The left fielder, Ned Cuthbert, was equally innovative: In 1865, noticing that there was nothing in the rules to prohibit it, he became the first recorded player to steal a base. The centerfielder, Lip Pike, was the first Jewish professional baseball player of note, and the right fielder, Jack Chapman, was so skilled at chasing down batted balls that he acquired the cumbersome nickname Death to Flying Things.

The pitchers were a pair of rookies: George Bradley, who in 1876 would pitch the first major-league no-hitter, and Pud Galvin, a future Hall of Famer. Little noticed among these luminaries was another rookie, a twenty-one-year-old reserve named Charles Waitt. With Baltimore in 1882, he would make history of a negative kind by batting .156, the lowest ever by an everyday outfielder. That performance earned him the nickname Charlie (“Can’t Hit His”) Waitt—or should have, anyway. Clearly, if Waitt was going to make a living at baseball, it would be as a glove man, and sometime during the 1875 season he took a crucial step in this direction by inventing the baseball glove.

Ever since its birth in the 1840s, baseball, like boxing, had been a manly art pursued by stout-hearted sportsmen using their bare hands. In this respect, it also resembled its ancestor, cricket, which many baseball players still played on their days off. In 1918, Cap Anson, another future Hall of Famer, recalled baseball’s bare-knuckle days: “We had a trick of making a spring-box of the fingers, the ball seldom hitting against the palm, and we could haul down even the hottest liners that way, though broken fingers happened now and then. The hands of the infielders and the catchers were awful sights, as a rule, but they stuck to their work even when bleeding fingers were useless at the broken joints.” Professional clubs averaged eight or nine errors per game, which explains why in the nineteenth century fielding was just as prized as hitting.

Waitt mostly played the outfield, but occasionally, he spelled the Browns’ regular first baseman, Harmon Dehlman. One day, daunted by the infield’s fast-flying balls, Waitt took an ordinary flesh-colored glove, cut off the fingers, and slipped it on over his palm. The rookie was somewhat sheepish about his less than macho act, especially when questioned by Albert Spalding, the Boston Red Stockings’ pitching star and future sporting-goods entrepreneur. As Spalding later recalled, Waitt “confessed that he was a bit ashamed to wear it, but had it on to save his hand. He also admitted that he had chosen a color as inconspicuous as possible, because he didn’t care