Can a baseball company make a good golf glove? | I Tried It

You may have heard of or seen Bruce Bolt in the baseball space before, with big leaguers like Ian Happ (of my hometown Chicago Cubs) rocking their gear.

Last year, Bruce Bolt stepped into the golf world, taking all of their expertise in developing premium gloves for baseball and applying it to golf. What many consider an afterthought or even an inconvenient purchase is the heart and soul of the company, focusing on re-establishing the benefits of playing proper gear, even with ancillary equipment like your glove. Bruce Bolt aims to provide an athlete-first approach that brings high-end materials to the golf glove category, while ensuring peak performance with a thoughtfully constructed, expressively designed luxury golf glove.

The question then is, is it worth the luxury cost?

From the moment you receive your order, you get the luxury experience.

First off, when you order your gloves, you are ordering a pair. The inside of the (reusable and very convenient for the bag) packaging has a great explanation for why they provide you with two gloves (it’s a little bit of a nod to a “Front 9, Back 9” approach). The truth for golf gloves, and you’ll hear this from any manufacturer, is that they need to be properly cared for if you want them to last the longest. Having a glove on constantly through a round, particularly in humid environments, is going to put a ton of stress on the glove, no matter the materials the manufactureruses.

By getting the customer into a pair of gloves right off the jump, they increase the lifespan of both gloves. Based on my experience so far, I would say these two gloves will last about the same as 3-4 standard golf gloves worn consecutively.

The gloves have been great on the course. We actually got a chance to use them on our last two stops of the Fully Fit trip — which you’ll see in the coming weeks at Callaway and Srixon — and it wasn’t just me who liked the gloves. The whole group did. You can see the glove featured in my Callaway fit on our YouTube channel, as well as the TaylorMade driver fit that Johnny Wunder did with Adrian from TaylorMade.

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They last a good amount of time and have some color pop, which is also nice. I rotate between a white, black and a baby-blue glove. The first signs of wear on the colored ones are that the top finish layer of color will start to fade away in high-impact areas. But the actual material of the glove stays strong for quite a while. I went about 1,000 swings in my white glove (worn for practice and testing sessions) before I got a genuine hole in the palm where I make pretty heavy contact with the grip.

But the most important aspect of the glove, which is hard to really articulate without trying it on, is its comfort. It’s really soft on the inside, without getting flimsy or thin. Typically, there is a trade-off. Durable gloves are heavier and sort of stiff, and the more comfortable gloves wear out really quickly. But Bruce Bolt has found a material here that is comfortable on the skin, flexible enough to blend into the hand and durable enough that I don’t feel bad at all about the luxury price tag.

Bruce Bolt’s design team has pointed out a couple of things that make the glove really stand out in terms of comfort. Rather than holes in the pattern, they’ve gone with a moisture-wicking backing material. They’ve used conical finger shaping with an inverse stitching pattern that naturally conforms to the fingers with ease while hiding the stitching and preventing friction points on the inside of the glove against the skin. The gloves are full AAA Cabretta Leather with no elastic additions, and they’ve used a StaySoft Finishing Spray to prevent unwanted pilling and peeling of the material. All of this comes together in a glove that will feel a bit snug at first, but all it takes to get it to mold comfortably to your hand is a quick warm-up session before your round. As you step up to the first tee, you’ll feel the comfort on your first swing.

The last and most fun part of this exploration with Bruce Bolt is the brand’s expressive nature. They did it first with baseball, taking wild color options and putting them up to bat on the largest stage. While they’ve brought some color to their stock lineup, they also have the Signature Series gloves designed with YouTube stars The Bryan Bros and 2017 Masters champion Sergio Garcia. I love any chance a brand gives a player to show off their personality and bring something different to the game without it getting too over-the-top. Sergio has designed his glove around his LIV Fireballs team. The Bryan Bros have stuck with their icons series pattern for their Bruce Bolt identity.

You can search the entire Bruce Bolt Golf catalog on their website with seven different colors to choose from in plenty of sizes, both left- and right-handed. For just a couple of bucks more, you can get the signature series from The Bryan Bros or Sergio Garcia as well.

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