A Salute to Tito Francona, his dad and an old mitt

The Cleveland Guardians gave a wonderful tribute last night to Terry “Tito” Francona on his last home game managing the team before his retirement. It was a well-deserved sendoff, as illustrated by this video the team produced in his honor.

That tribute video prominently mentioned that he spent a lot of his early childhood with the erstwhile Cleveland Indians, for whom his father — also named Tito Francona — played from 1959 through 1964.

Those video references to father and son stirred up memories. I’m a couple of years older than Terry, old enough to remember his father playing for my hometown team. I can’t recall specifically seeing Tito play at old Municipal Stadium, but I surely knew who he was and saw him on TV.

Topping this post is a photo of my first leather (“full grain Wil-O-Tan cowhide”) baseball mitt, made by Franklin. It wasn’t a signature model, but in my little-boy brain I pretended it was a Tito Francona model. Franklin … Francona. Get it?

I can even remember that my flight of fancy wasn’t completely kosher. I was a righty with a righty mitt, and I knew Tito was a lefty. But no matter. My bond with Tito was firm.

I probably got that mitt from my parents when I was four or five years old. Prior to that, I remember that I had flimsy plastic “toy” mitts, suitable for light-duty catch with a plastic ball. The Franklin was the real deal, with leather ties on the webbing that remain on the mitt to this day. It hangs in honor on the “baseball wall” in one of our bedrooms with other baseball items and photos.

After the Franklin, I moved up to a flat Wilson model with the signature of Woodie Held, an Indian from 1958 to 1964, teaming with Tito for all of those years but 1958.

Once I got the Wilson, the Franklin was put into periodic duty as one of the bases in the imaginary ballpark in our back yard on Erieview Road in Cleveland Heights. The mitt has served me well, and it continues to remind me of the strong bond I’ve had with baseball my whole life long.