Juneau man turns vintage baseball mitts into wallets

KC Mack grew up with America’s pastime, playing baseball from a young age. Like any young player, he dedicated a huge amount of time to the most important item in his bag — his mitt.

“As a kid, having your baseball mitt is your baby,” Mack said. “You’re always conditioning it, you’re always taking care of it.”

Now, baseball mitts have gone from being his babies to being his business.

In 2014, Mack needed a new wallet and couldn’t find one that he liked. He had been collecting vintage baseball mitts since the time he was 14, mostly from between 1940 and 1960. Many of them were unusable for baseball purposes, with stitching coming apart or lacing missing.

Mack, who has always had a knack for crafts, got an idea. He took one of the old mitts and started experimenting, tearing it apart and trying to figure out a way to take the leather and turn it into a wallet. He wanted to take a glove that had sat unused and unusable for decades and give it a new life.

“You can re-lace it and have it sit on a shelf, which is not as cool, I think,” Mack, 27, said. “I think repurposing it into something usable like a wallet is fun.”

He’s perfected the process since that initial wallet in 2014, and has started his own online shop, Mack Provisions. The Juneau resident offers multiple styles, from a “minimalist” model that’s made to hold a few cards and maybe some cash, to full-sized bi-fold wallets. A recent Kickstarter campaign raised more than $3,000 to help him expand the business.

Every wallet is a little bit different, and each one is customizable. Many mitts carry a player’s name on them, from Mickey Mantle to Gil Hodges to Stan Musial, and people can order a wallet based on what name is on the glove. When someone places an order on his website, www.mackprovisions.com, they can choose either to request their wallet be made from a random mitt or from a mitt of their choosing. If they select the custom option, Mack sends them a list of the gloves he has.

Since Mack’s been building his business, more and more friends have sent him old gloves that they have or that their family has. Multiple times, people have reached out to him saying their parent or grandparent has passed away and left their collection of old gloves behind.

“They consider it junk,” Mack said, “and for me, I consider it good pickin’.”

He makes all the gloves out of a small room in his house in the Mendenhall Valley, where he and his wife live. The room has two wooden work desks and a closet where bins of old mitts are piled high. Most of the bins are full of mitts he’s found on eBay or that people have donated to him that will be used for wallets soon, but one bin is full of mitts he won’t tear apart.

Among these untouchables is a mitt that was issued to soldiers in World War I to be used if the soldiers had down time. Another item is a vintage catcher’s mask that Mack, who played catcher at Green River College and Whitworth University, holds dear. The mitts in this bin will stay put this holiday season, but Mack expects to be busy the next few weeks as orders come streaming in for the holidays.

Mack takes pride in the fact that his products are American-made, and that he does all the stitching and leather treatment of the products himself. He hopes to share his knowledge with others eventually.

“It’d be cool to pass it on,” Mack said, “because it is a dying art. A lot of this stuff is being moved overseas. Leather work’s being moved overseas, sewing’s being moved overseas and some sort of resurgence back would be kind of cool.”

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• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or alex.mccarthy@juneauempire.com

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