The Nokona Ballglove Factory, located about ten miles south of the Red River in Montague County, has been manufacturing baseball gloves for ninety years. The small facility is the last domestic producer of baseball gloves in the United States, with an average output of about one hundred gloves per day and 42 workers on the factory floor. Nokona can’t match the sales or major league endorsements of glove makers like Rawlings or Wilson. But those industry giants might not be able to boast of employees as devoted to their jobs as Nokona’s Malinda Reynolds.
Reynolds cites her first day working at the plant without hesitation: “June twenty-fourth, 1977.” That was soon after she graduated from nearby Gold-Burg High School. Reynolds began back then as a glove lacer, and she’s never worked anywhere else. She’s now the lead production floor supervisor.
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Reynolds’s love for Nokona is on par with her love for Texas Rangers baseball. She’s traveled the country for years, watching her favorite ball club play on the road. Those two passions intersected in June 2023, when Cody Bradford, a pitcher in the Rangers’ minor league system who endorses Nokona gloves, was hastily called up to the big leagues to start a game in Arlington the following night.
Bradford had just finished playing a series with the triple-A Round Rock Express in Salt Lake City when he got the news. Although there were no problems booking a flight back to Dallas, Bradford’s equipment was already on a truck bound for Round Rock and wouldn’t arrive before his scheduled start.
Nokona stocks gloves for its pro ballplayers at the factory. When workers heard of Bradford’s dilemma, Reynolds approached Rob Storey, a fourth-generation Nokona executive and co-owner of the company, and said, “I’ll drive Cody’s glove to Arlington.” She was prepared to gas up her twelve-year-old Chevy Malibu to make the two-hundred-mile round trip to ensure Bradford had the right glove.
Storey thanked her but said that shipping a glove overnight would suffice. Recalling the episode in his office inside Nokona’s 20,000-square-foot facility, he said, “We’ve never been as big as the Rawlings and Wilsons of the world. Never will be. But the company isn’t the factory. The company is the employees.”
Nokona has been the only company manufacturing baseball gloves in the United States for decades, ever since Rawlings, Wilson, and other glove makers began shifting their production overseas in the sixties and seventies to save on labor costs. Rob Storey’s grandfather “Big Bob” Storey was running the company in those days, and he refused to follow the competition overseas. “If I have to import gloves and send my employees home,” Rob said, quoting his grandfather, “I’d rather grab a bucket of worms and go fishing.”
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“I kind of get chills knowing my granddad made a decision sixty years ago that you’re still saying, ‘Well, we had to be doing something right,’ ” Rob Storey said. Now 64, Storey said he’s been involved in the business since he was 10.
The ride has often been a rough one for Nokona, which is named after Nocona, Texas, the town of 3,027 residents where the company is based. (The U.S. patent office refused to allow the business to trademark the municipality’s name, so the spelling was altered.). Nokona has lost two factories to fire over the years, the latest one in 2006. Around that time, the Storeys feared going out of business due to lagging sales, so they sold half the company to investors from Massachusetts. The partnership was not successful, and the company was pushed into involuntary bankruptcy in 2010.
That year, sporting-goods company Cutters, which sells football gloves, bought a majority stake in Nokona at Storey’s invitation, with Cutters founder Jeff Beraznik stepping in as president of the baseball-glove business. Beraznik helped stabilize the operation by increasing Nokona’s direct marketing efforts, rather than relying on sporting-goods dealers to push sales. He also oversaw the company’s entry into online sales. He eliminated some of Nokona’s peripheral goods, like football protective gear, while introducing the production of “ShowBelts,” personalized leather belts for baseball players, which have proved popular.
“We don’t pay them [to wear the belts],” Storey said, describing how the company’s ShowBelts have become trendy among pro players. “They can bling ’em up pretty much the way they want to, with certain restrictions based on Major League Baseball.” Beraznik estimates 400 active MLB players (out 945 pros in the league) have bought ShowBelts.
Nokona’s roster of big league endorsements rivaled those of other glove manufacturers in the forties and fifties. But when competitors began offering players payments and other perks in addition to free gloves, “Big Bob” Storey got out of the endorsement game. A half century later, Nokona resumed working with endorsers, and these days the company targets younger players, like the Rangers’ Bradford, most of them in the minors. Around fifty current major leaguers represent Nokona, Beraznik said. That’s a fraction of the number aligned with Rawlings or Wilson, which tend to sign the star names, like the Houston Astros’ Jose Altuve or the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge. “We’re not going to pay you a ton of money,” Storey said. “But if you want a good glove, if you want somebody to be loyal to you, we’re going to do that.”
Astros relief pitcher Ryan Pressly is probably the best-known Nokona ballplayer. “The guys that I work with at Nokona, they understand what I want, and they get it done,” Pressly said. “It’s a great relationship. I love it.”
Taylor Ward of the Los Angeles Angels was sent a sample Nokona glove after visiting with the company’s representatives during spring training “and fell in love with it,” Ward said. “It’s sturdy,” he added. “It’s going to last for years. Every ball that hits the glove sticks in the pocket.”
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Most Nokona gloves sell for considerably higher prices than their competition, and the company’s business plan doesn’t emphasize availability at big-box stores. “We’re going to make the very best product we can regardless of price,” Storey said. “If people don’t want it, whatever.” He said 2023 was the company’s best year ever financially, declining to provide details. “There’s a lot of pride in the market for American-made, and we benefit from that,” Beraznik said. “It’s something we hope to be doing in another ninety years.”
There’s no bigger fan of Nokona gloves than the state’s most famous ballplayer ever, as Nolan Ryan explained in a 2012 video. “When I was seven years old, my dad took me to the hardware store in Alvin, Texas,” Ryan says in the promotional clip. “It’s a day I’ll never forget. It was the day I got my first baseball glove. Four years later, I made the Alvin Little League All Stars using that glove. It was a Nokona. . . . I still have mine.” Similar praise from Ryan is posted in the factory’s front showroom.
Ryan’s passion for Nokona gloves extends well beyond nostalgia. One year during his tenure as CEO of the Rangers, Ryan bought a personalized Nokona glove for every club employee (besides the players) for Christmas. “I felt like that was a gift that they could put on their desk if they wanted,” Ryan told Texas Monthly. “They could use it if they wanted. Or they could pass it on to their children or grandchildren. They really seemed to enjoy it.”
Ryan not only ordered 320 gloves, but he also toured the plant multiple times. Elvis was in the building. “He signed baseballs and took pictures,” Storey said. “Gracious as he was, he met everybody.”
And the total retail value for those personalized gloves? Storey smiled, paused, and finally said, “A lot.”
Nokona is returning the Ryan love. Storey is producing a limited number of custom gloves that feature color images of “the Ryan Express” at various stages of his Hall of Fame career, to be auctioned off by Ryan’s foundation this fall.
Cody Bradford and his wife, Madi, accepted an invitation to tour the Nokona plant last offseason. They were given a personal tour by Storey, who introduced them to Malinda Reynolds. “It was just a really cool experience,” said Bradford, who has been with the Rangers throughout this season. “It was really intimate. I had no idea that the factory is probably a collection of about forty or fifty people—and that’s the entire company. And they’re hand-making gloves in there. It was unbelievable.”
On Friday, Nokona employees will pile onto a chartered bus for the company’s annual outing to attend a Rangers game. The defending World Series champions will host the San Francisco Giants. And for Reynolds, the Rangers superfan who has already traveled to Atlanta this season to watch them play, it’ll be her shortest Rangers trip so far this year. “Wouldn’t miss it,” she said.
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