Ask Lexi North, and the fire-throwing Otsego softball pitcher is the first to tell you: She did not open the season by throwing four straight no-hitters without a little help.
By her side, too, were her teammates and ... her white Rawlings glove.
Yep, her glove, the now-dusty-brown one the senior has worn every game of her high school career — the leather talisman that looks like it got run over at a monster truck rally and is so perfectly broken in that it fits North like, well ...
“A glove to me can be like clothes or shoes to somebody else,” she said. “It just fits you the right way. Your glove just makes you comfortable.”
So, naturally, when her mitt seemed to meet its maker (Mr. Rawlings?) during a game the other day — with the laces exploding as if “somebody had put a grenade in there,” said Lexi’s dad, Mark — it was no small emergency.
And no small relief when she knew just who to call.
The big-box sporting goods store? No, the local cobbler.
Mark dialed up brothers Dino and Mario DiTerlizzi, who own Pasquale & Sons Shoe Repair, the trip-back-in-time shop on Upton Avenue that their father, Pasquale, opened 75 years ago.
“I called them them at 9 a.m. and explained Lexi had a game that afternoon against Lake,” Mark said. “’Is there any way you can fix the glove in time?’ And I’ll never forget it, [Dino] said, ‘No matter what else we’ve got going on, we’ll have it ready.’”
Day saved.
Lexi called herself “super thankful,” and, turns out, she’s hardly alone.
When Mark told us there were two Toledo craftsmen who have become something of the unsung heroes of the spring high school sports season, he wasn’t kidding.
More than saving soles — and mending purses, belts, gun holsters, and any leatherware you can imagine — the DiTerlizzi brothers have earned a reputation as the best glovesmiths this side of Ozzie Smith and Omar Vizquel, the word traveling down from one class of local ballplayers to the next.
I visited them in their small, wood-paneled shop just down the street from the old DeVilbiss High School, where they’ve worked since before they could see over the counter.
Armed with a needle, cutters, pliers, rawhide laces, a little know-how, and a lot of care, Mario, 65, and Dino, 61, relace, patch, and fix about 500 gloves per season. The average ticket runs about $12, but for the brothers, this glove story truly is a labor of love, just as it was for their dad.
Pasquale, a Libbey graduate who was a welder in World War II, opened the shop in 1947 and kept lending a hand every day until his passing in December, 2020. He was 97.
To the end, little brought Pasquale more joy than helping young athletes.
(A quick aside: In the storefront, the walls are adorned with old mitts and bats and hockey gloves and ... a signed photo of Rush Limbaugh. Pasquale was a daily listener and many years ago had gotten in an argument with the radio personality about Title IX, calling in, as Dino remembered, to tell Limbaugh, “the girls are entitled to as much as the boys.” After Limbaugh cut him off, Pasquale wrote the host a letter — “You didn’t let me finish!” — and Limbaugh replied with a kind note.)
“I want to be like my dad and keep this place going as long as we possibly can,” Dino said. “We’re not saying, ‘Oh my God, I can’t wait to retire.’ We enjoy the work.”
As for all the mitt repairs, they might seem like a relic from another time, same as the cobbler trade itself. There were about 100,000 shoe repair shops in the U.S. in the 1930s, according to the industry’s trade organization. Today, there are some 5,000.
“We live in a throw-away world,” Dino said.
A heel breaks or a sole comes loose, you buy a new pair of shoes, right? An old ball glove comes apart, you toss it, no?
Well, no, not always.
To walk into Pasquale’s — where the haul of goods awaiting repair one day earlier this week included 16 gloves — is to see their enduring place in our community.
And, for that matter, as all of us who once had a favorite mitt can attest (my Tony Gwynn Rawlings was all but attached to my left hand as a kid), to appreciate the timeless connection between a ballplayer and their glove.
Also on the walls are any number of old Blade articles chronicling the feats of area athletes, all with a note attached. See the glove in this photo or that one? Pasquale’s repaired it.
“Thanks for fixing my favorite mitt! It works great!!” an Anthony Wayne baseball player penned.
“I can always count on you guys,” a Southview softball player wrote.
“Dino, above is a picture of the glove that you miraculously repaired 1 hour before that game,” a dad noted in 2010, when his daughter was a star pitcher for the Clay softball team. “I must tell you that I took the glove to a competitor, who said, ‘Throw the glove away.’ That glove means the world to my daughter, and I will be forever grateful. You will always have my business.”
North, who visited the shop Saturday to thank the brothers in person, is but the latest satisfied customer.
When I asked her what would happen if she didn’t have her glove, she laughed and said, “It definitely would have thrown me off.” Instead, her season — North is a cool 18-1 with a 0.67 ERA — has just kept getting better.
So has this 75-year-old Toledo glove tale.
First Published May 7, 2022, 12:00 p.m.