Of Baseball Gloves and Marketing

Real men don’t wear gloves.

At least that was the conventional wisdom in the early days of baseball. To even think about wearing a baseball glove would make you “un-manly.” One of my favorite books is Glove Affairs by Noah Liberman…a sociological look at the history and culture of baseball gloves.

Catchers were the first to wear gloves (for obvious reasons) in the 1870s. Some players took to wearing flesh colored gloves so they would protect their hands while avoiding ridicule. Albert Spalding (player, and later founder of the Spalding sporting goods company) was among those who championed the use of gloves.

Over the years, gloves have changed drastically, with players at each position using mitts tailored for their specific tasks.

But despite the adaptation and evolution of the baseball glove over the past 130+ years – and despite other changes to the rules – the game has remained basically the same. The basic structure and object of baseball remain untouched.

In other words, the game has remained virtually unchanged, but the tools are different.

The same goes for marketing with the advent of what we refer to as Social Media. The basics of marketing remain the same: we want to create products and services, tell people about them, and encourage them to buy those products or services. In the 20th century, the advent and growth changed the way we do business. Now in the 21st century, the Internet and Social Media are changing it again. We still want to sell products and make money, but we are using different tools.

But on the other hand, those tools DO impact how we play the game. In baseball, the earliest gloves were not so much for catching, as they were for knocking down those screaming line drives so a player could be thrown out while running the bases. Eventually better gloves led to more pop-outs and line-outs. Getting on base became more difficult.

If a player were to take the field today wearing either no glove, or a poorly padded glove from the late 19th century, he would not only be laughed off the field, but he wouldn’t be able to do the job well. We need to use the proper tools.

In this way, as Paul Chaney says in Digital Handshake: Social Media is both a tool set AND a mind set.

Are you using the proper tools for the job at hand? Are you using the most current tools to help keep you in the game? Has the Social Media “tool set” changed the way you play the game?

If the answer to these questions is “no”, then there’s a good chance you won’t be able to ever make it out of the backyard and onto the real diamond.

For a little more on this topic, check out my friend Myka’s blog post Wearing the Black Gloves, that helped to spark the idea for my post.

Tagged as: baseball, Marketing, Social Media