There’s been a movement in recent years towards youth baseball players wearing batting gloves. The practice began back in the 1980s in major league baseball, when most players preferred wearing gloves over pine tar to get a better grip on the bat.
But batting gloves do more than help with grip, especially for younger players. They also protect the hands against stinging from the vibration of the bat in colder weather, and absorbing sweat in the summer. Hand protection has become important, and rightly so, and for me and my players, I’ve recommended to parents the Easton Z3 Youth Batting Gloves.
What I like about these gloves is how snugly they fit over the hands of my younger players. Kids just starting out hitting need all the confidence they can get and should develop good habits early on and improve on them as they grow into the game. The sheepskin sued in the Easton gloves help players grip the bat better, and there’s a lot of flexibility at the joint areas of the fingers.
Everyone wants to avoid hand blisters, but kids especially because it can impact their playing more significantly than adults. What’s more, most kids use aluminum bats. This kind of bat vibrates a lot more than a BBCOR or wood bat, and good batting gloves effectively absorb the vibrations, making it easier to hit the ball with power, instead of pulling back for fear of the vibration feeling they’ll experience without the gloves.
What is Hyperskin and How Does it Improve on Earlier Batting Gloves?
Hyperskin is a new technology that uses a composite of different leathers, including sheepskin, to help players grip the bat better than before. This is good for coaches, too, because kids’ hands will tire less quickly, and they’ll avoid calluses and even fractured fingers in some cases. We like it because we can keep kids practicing longer, put them through more drills with batting tees and batting nets. The more drills we can do, the tickler their confidence goes up and the faster they improve.
What is especially nice on the Easton Hyperskin Youth Glove is the wristband. Made with neoprene, the band secures the hand inside the glove better than I’ve seen with other gloves. It’s also narrow at only 30 mm in width, so it’s unobtrusive while it secures the glove over the hand.
Youth baseball gloves get a lot of positive feedback from parents at online marketplaces. Many have their child enrolled in baseball clinics in the off-season in winter, and love the fact that a batting glove keeps the hands healthy and prevents them from injury with year round playing.
Hands are used more in baseball than any other part of the body. We wear baseball gloves over them, take batting practice off batting tees, and have two practices a week at least, in addition to the actual ballgame. The better shape hands are in, the better we swing and field. Because of stiff competition, youth gloves are priced very reasonably for what they do and how well they’re made nowadays. Here’s the link for the Easton Z3 Hyperskin Youth Batting Gloves: https://amzn.to/2FLJWi3
