Early baseball was a game played without gloves. During the slow transition to gloves, a player who continued to play without one was called a barehanded catcher. This did not refer to the position of Catcher, but rather to the practice of catching with bare hands. The earliest glove was not webbed and not particularly well suited for catching, but was used more to bat a ball to the ground so that it could be picked up.

One of the first players believed to use a baseball glove was Doug Allison, a catcher for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, in 1870, due to an injured left hand. The first confirmed glove use was by Charles Waitt, a St. Louis outfielder/first baseman who in 1875 donned a pair of flesh-colored gloves. Glove use slowly caught on as more and more players began using different forms of gloves.

Many early baseball gloves were simple leather gloves with the fingertips cut off, supposedly to allow for the same control of a bare hand, but with extra padding. First baseman Albert Spalding, originally skeptical of glove use, influenced more infielders to begin using gloves. Spalding later founded the sporting goods company Spalding, which still manufactures baseball gloves along with other sports equipment.By the mid 1890s, it was the norm for players to wear gloves in the field.