He Golfed All Day, Then Homered Twice in a Golf Glove

Ken Harrelson loved golf the way other men love breathing. On September 4, 1964, he played it all day, then reported to Municipal Stadium in Kansas City to face the New York Yankees with a hand he could barely close.

A Hand He Could Not Close

Harrelson played 27 holes of golf that day, according to the account in Ernie Harwell's Stories from My Life in Baseball, with a night game waiting for him.

The blisters came up on his hand. Every practice swing in the cage moved the bat against raw skin.

So he went back to his bag, pulled out the red leather golf glove he had worn on the course a few hours earlier, and took it to the plate with him.

His own teammates scoffed. Nobody in the American League walked into a batter's box dressed for the ninth fairway.

Two Swings Off the Yankees

In the third inning, with two out and a runner on, Harrelson homered to left off Whitey Ford, a future Hall of Famer who had walked him in the first inning.

In the ninth he did it again, this time off reliever Pete Mikkelsen, a solo shot that tied the game at five.

Kansas City lost anyway. The Yankees put up four runs in the tenth and won 9-7 in front of 9,900 people.

Harrelson's own retellings have placed the round a year earlier; the box score for September 4, 1964 matches the story detail for detail.

The date carried one more thing Harrelson never had to look up. He turned 23 that day - September 4 was his birthday.

Mantle Bought Twenty Pairs

The Yankees noticed. According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Mickey Mantle bought 20 pairs of red golf gloves the next day.

The whole team took the field for pregame warm-ups wearing them, aimed squarely at the man in the other dugout, calling him "sweetheart" and "Mrs. Harrelson."

It did not land. Harrelson had already felt the difference at the plate.

"The bat felt better in my hands than it did with the gloves off," he told the New York Times in 2007.

The resistance lasted for years. Even in the 1980s, George Brett explained why he batted bare-handed with a flat "I ain't no sissy."

He Was Not the First, and the Hall Says So

Harrelson is credited with bringing the batting glove into regular-season play, not with inventing it.

Lefty O'Doul and Johnny Frederick of the Brooklyn Dodgers both wore some form of glove at the plate in 1932, nursing injuries. Bobby Thomson was handed a pair of golf gloves by a club pro in 1949, though he seems to have kept them for batting practice and spring training.

Historian Peter Morris, in A Game of Inches, credits Harrelson and Rusty Staub with the part that actually mattered: making the glove normal.

Now It Is Part of the At-Bat

By 1969, advertisements for children's batting gloves were running in baseball publications. The following year the Baltimore Orioles put batting glove day on their promotions calendar.

The glove then did something no one predicted. It became a ritual.

Mike Hargrove fussed with his so exactly that he was christened "The Human Rain Delay," and Nomar Garciaparra later turned the same routine into appointment television. "I step out sometimes and go to work on my gloves," Jeff Bagwell said in 1995, "but it's mainly a way to clear my head."

The Hall of Fame's collection now holds the gloves Lou Brock wore for his 3,000th hit, the pair David Ortiz wore for his 400th home run, and the pair Ichiro Suzuki wore for the two hits that broke his own single-season record in 2004.

Almost every hitter who steps in tonight will be wearing a pair. It started with a man who had played too much golf.