Frequently Asked Questions

The delivery time on all custom gloves range from 4 to 6 weeks.

Customizing a glove is easy. Our Glove Builder is a multi-step wizard that guides you through the design process.

Yes. We make youth size gloves using a combination of pro steer leather in the palm and premium cowhide for the glove shell.

The wrist leather is adjustable to make the opening smaller or larger, if needed.

Our gloves are made from the best leathers for baseball gloves. We use US Steer leather and European Kip leather professionally tanned in Japanese tanneries.

Baseball glove prices are expensive for different reasons. The quality of the material used to make a glove will affect the price. The leathers used for the expensive gloves are premium steer-hide and European leather.

Another factor that drives price is the expertise of the glovemaker’s factory. Gloves manufactured in these factories will cost more.

Retail store baseball gloves are lower quality mass produced product, using leather from the leftover parts of the hide that cannot serve in high level baseball or in professional play.

Corporate sporting goods companies have a huge presence in the retail market and are making huge profits selling inferior gloves at huge prices.

9Positions custom gloves are handcrafted by the glove makers who have over 30 years of experience selecting, cutting and molding the best leathers for gloves for all positions.

Wood bat orders that included “full” painted bats will ship within 3-4 weeks.

Eligible models with a natural or half painted finishes may ship sooner.

We make our youth wood bat models from birch billets. Birch is perfect for youth bats. Birch provides the flexibility of white ash and the hardness of maple. Sizes are available between 27″ – 31″.

Yes, barrel size matters, but there are conditions.

The wood bat model that you choose should be based on your swing and your hitting style.

It’s natural and fun to try all the different models that have been made. To use the models used by your favorite professional players.

Wood bat barrel diameters range from 2.5″ to 2.625″ inches for adult models. If you are an aspiring player using wood bats for the first time, using the largest barrel bat is not advisable.

The choose of a wood bat model should not be based on the unusual shape of today’s metal bats.

We recommend one of three models for players of all levels.

The 271 wood turning is a popular model used by Ken Griffey Jr and Alex Rodriguez. The model was designed by Jose Cardenal, he was seeking a model with perfect balance.
The 271 accomplishes this goal with a slight flared knob and a barrel size just under 2-1/2 inches in diameter.

The #2 model is the 141 wood bat model. It sports a longer barrel with a 2-1/2 inch, skinny handle and a flareless knob.

The third recommended model is 110 wood bat turning. This bat was made for the great Mickey Mantle. It has a thicker 1″ handle with a 2-1/2″ barrel

Improve your hitting yearly without sacrificing your statistics, hitting with one of these 3 models.

In the 2008 major league season, over 2,200 wood bats broke. This number of broken bats occurred during the recent introduction of maple wood bats.

In 2001 season, the year Barry Bonds hit 73 homeruns using a maple wood bat made by Sam Holman, owner of the famous Sam-Bat bat company.

As a result of Bonds success, players shifted on mass to maple wood bats. The newer smaller wood bat companies scrambled to source maple billets from any sawmill to make bats for their professional customers.

There was a flaw. Not alot was known about maple early on until MLB commissioned a study after the large number of broken bats, which caused injuries to player and fans.

It is common knowledge that when turning bats, it is important that the wood grain be straight and evenly spaced throughout the entire length of the bat. This has been the standard for ash bats, which was the primary wood used for bats for over 70 years.

Based on this standard, wood bat makers turned the maple bats. The results of the study commissioned by major league baseball gave us more information on how to make maple bats that are less likely to brake into many pieces.

Scientist found that the direction of the the smaller, almost invisible, grains was the key to set the guidelines for bat makers. The ink dot is nothing more than a stain made by a sharpie, placed 12 inches from end of the knob on the face grain.

This gives officials the ability to see the direction the smaller grains slope. The bats that are more likely to remain intact vs break into pieces have grain patterns between 0-2% slope, represented by ‘||||’ to a max slope of ‘////’ identified under the ink dot.

A few of the regulations that came from the findings are the following:
1. Bat handles can not be smaller than .92″ inches.
2. Only Hard Maple lumber can be used to make pro wood bats. (Soft Maple cannot be used).
3. The grain on the bat must be straight for at least 24″ of the bat length.
4. The ink dot or marker stain must be placed at the 12″ mark on the face grain and not along the grain.
5. Billets produced by by split logging.

It starts with one question.
 
How successful are you with what you have right now?
 
Let’s say you’re an aluminum bat player, you’ve been converted, and you’re looking for the right wood bat. Where do you start?
 
The formula we use tells us we should take half an inch to one inch off the length of the bat. Aluminum bats, for the most part, have fairly standard sizes, so it’s not an apples to apples comparison. It’s not a good idea to simply copy over the dimensions from your metal bat to your wood bat. It just doesn’t work.
 
Feel free to upgrade to something heavier, once you’re used to and feel comfortable swinging a wood bat.
 
If you’re making the transition from aluminum to wood, you’re probably wondering how heavy your bat needs to be. Thanks to aluminum bat usages, we’ve been programmed to feel bats are supposed to “feel” a certain way. In technical terms, that usually translates to a -3 bat weighing 33 oz.
 
That’s perfect… if you’re 12.
 
 When it comes to weight, there are several schools of thought, but they’re not particularly clear.
 
We keep it simple.

It’s simple physics. Choose heaviest/ bat you can swing comfortably. Do that, and you’ll hit the ball further.
 
Obvious right?
 
Our whole goal with 9Positions is to create a better baseball player. If you want to smash the ball, hit hard line drives, and move the ball across the field with power and authority, you need a dense, heavy bat. Hitting isn’t just about your brawn. Your wood bat needs to do some of the work.
 
A bat with just the right amount of weight makes all the difference.
 
Watch the pros, when they hit the ball, the flight is extreme. The ball travels further, faster, and more accurately because they’re using a dense, heavy bat. Their bats are usually in the -2 to -2.5 range.