Best baseball glove conditioners

Does the glove actually need conditioner?

Often not, and this is the part nobody tells parents. A new youth glove arrives soft on purpose, and adding oil to a soft glove makes it heavy and floppy rather than better. Conditioner is for leather that has dried out, and you can tell by looking: dry leather goes pale at the creases, feels papery rather than smooth, and starts to show hairline cracks along the fold where the glove closes.

Cream, gel, oil or spray

These are four delivery systems for roughly the same job, and the difference that matters is how easy each one is to overdo.

• Cream (Gold Glove Butter): stays where you put it, penetrates slowly, near impossible to over-apply. Best for a kid doing it themselves.
• Gel (Glove Gel Conditioner): Rawlings calls it a petrolatum blend. Softens quickly and cheaply, and darkens light-tan leather.
• Conditioner (Rawlings' break-in aid): the classic. Fast-penetrating and the cheapest per glove, and the form most often used in far too great a quantity.
• Oil with lanolin (Glovolium with Lanolin): the same oil with a softener added, for leather that has dried hard rather than leather that is merely stiff. Treat it as a rescue product, not a weekly one.

How to use it, and how much

The routine is short and the quantity is smaller than you think.

1. Clean the dirt off first. A damp cloth, or saddle soap if it is genuinely filthy, then let it dry completely. Conditioner over grit grinds the grit into the leather.
2. Apply a thin coat with your fingers. A coin-sized amount of cream for a whole youth glove. Work it into the palm, the pocket and the laces, not the web stitching.
3. Leave it overnight at room temperature. Not on a radiator, not in a car, not in the sun.
4. Wipe off whatever has not soaked in and then play catch with it. The glove shapes to the hand that uses it; nothing in a bottle does that part.
5. Repeat two or three times a season at most, and only when the leather looks dry.

The full break-in routine, including where to put the ball and how to tie the glove, is on how to break in a baseball glove, and the in-season cleaning routine is on how to clean and care for a glove.

What never to put on a glove

The internet is full of shortcuts that destroy leather. Four to avoid outright:

• The oven or the microwave. Heat drives the natural oils out of leather and cooks the lacing. It feels soft for a week and then cracks.
• Petroleum jelly or motor oil. Too heavy. They add weight, never fully absorb, and turn the pocket greasy.
• Cooking oils. Olive oil and similar go rancid inside leather. The smell does not leave.
• Shaving cream as a conditioner. The old dugout trick relies on the lanolin in some formulations, and most modern shaving foams contain none. Use a product made for the job; it costs four dollars.

One more: do not run a glove through a washing machine or leave it in a hot car. Both are versions of the same mistake, which is treating leather as fabric.

Before you buy

• One small container lasts years. A 4 oz jar of cream will condition a youth glove ten times over, and so will a 4 oz bottle of oil. Buy the small size.
• Match the form to who applies it. If your 9-year-old is doing it, buy cream. If you are doing it, oil or gel is fine.
• Buy a mallet before you buy a second conditioner. Shaping the pocket does more for a stiff glove than any additional oil. It is an inexpensive tool and kids enjoy using it.
• Do not condition a synthetic glove. Entry-level gloves with PVC or synthetic shells gain nothing from it.
• Prices here come live from Amazon, stamped with the date they were read; retail pricing moves.