While visiting my parents last weekend, I stumbled upon something I hadn't seen in quite some time: my first baseball glove, which my father had bought for me when I started playing baseball in second grade and I continued using until my freshman year of high school, when the coach decided it was too small and made me buy a new one.  It was just sitting there on the floor in one of my parent's spare rooms (we call this particular room the "new kitchen" because, in a perfect world, it will one day replace their current, old kitchen.  Because the world is imperfect, however, it has been referred to as the "new kitchen" for as long as I can remember), gathering dust, so I picked it up and gave it a look for old-times sake.

I was surprised by something I had forgotten: this glove, my first, was a Don Mattingly autographed model, which is a little bizarre considering I was born and raised in southern New Hampshire and my entire family consists of Red Sox fans.

It was unclear at first how this could have been allowed to happen, but the answer soon became painfully obvious: I'm left-handed.  Not sure how many of you out there share this fate, but it is not an easy road, especially when it came to buying baseball gloves in the late 1980s.  There's nothing quite so depressing as seeing all those cool gloves laid out on the racks (especially the solid black ones, which always looked exceptionally bad ass), then looking closer and realizing that there is only one left-handed model in the bunch, it's at the bottom of the bin, and it's got Don Mattingly's name across the palm.

Say what you will about my Don Mattingly glove, however: it served me better than the Pedro Guerrero model I got for Christmas a couple of years later.  I found that one this weekend as well, and it still looks brand new.  If I'm lucky, at least one of my kids will turn out to be left-handed; all I have to do then is make up a couple of exciting Pedro Guerrero stories (to make the glove more appealing, of course) and I'll save $40.