The strangest inventions in baseball history. Part 3

We continue to talk about strange innovations series.

“Base-ball catcher” (James Bennett, 1904)

Catchers initially wore no real equipment at all. But as the game evolved and more and more and in 1904 James Bennett thought he had the solution for all of the catcher’s problems:

He’d devised a wire cage, worn on the chest in lieu of a glove, which would catch each pitch and protect the catcher’s hands until he had to throw the ball back to the pitcher.

As you can see from the diagram above, it was quite the contraption: The cage was reinforced on all sides with wood, and springs at the back protected the catcher’s chest from the blow of each pitch. Once the ball passed through the open front end, it closed automatically, and an opening at the bottom of the cage would drop the ball into the catcher’s hands