Cottonwood man creates new business for custom made baseball gear

REDDING, Calif. — Baseball gloves, batting gloves, wood bats... A local entrepreneur crafts them all at his facility in Cottonwood.

A lot goes into a baseball glove, and Matthew Alleva knows them literally inside and out.

He's been in baseball his whole life and has turned hand stitching custom gloves into a business: Patriot Glove Company.

“I started out collecting gloves, actually, and infatuated with how they were madethe different types of leather, and this and that,” Alleva told KRCR. “When I was a kid, we were kind of left out in the dark. You either had brown [leather], black, or, if you were lucky, a mixture of both. I’ve always kind of been into art and creating new things and I kind of went from there.”

Alleva expanded to bat-making, creating custom bats primarily from maple wood.

“We’ve broken a lot of wooden bats," Alleva explained. "You go into a sporting goods store anywhere in the country and...you’re going to pay $200 to $220 for an epoxy-covered, all-black bat...we sell completely custom, fully-engraved, any color option you can think of for $139—our most expensive pro-maple bat.”

Patriot Glove Company also specializes in batting gloves, using cabretta leather, light, comfortable and supple, made from sheep that grow hair rather than wool.

You can see hw makes gloves and bates to your specifications. There's more information on the company's website: patriotgloveco.com.

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