NOCONA, Texas -- With his business in flames and the future of his small Texas hometown suddenly uncertain, fourth-generation factory owner Rob Storey met with his employees and made some promises.

AP photo

Nokona is the only company that still mass produces baseball mitts in the United States.

He would keep alive the only company that still mass produces baseball mitts in the United States. And nobody would be laid off— or even miss a paycheck.

“We had a group prayer and then a group meeting,” said the 48-year-old Storey, whose original Nocona Athletic Goods factory was destroyed in a fire just over two years ago. “We never considered laying anybody off. That’s not the way we do business.”

Baseball is called America’s pastime, but the production of its mitts mostly takes place overseas. The largest American glove makers—Wilson and Rawlings—produce some custom mitts domestically, but most gloves, whether sold by American or Japanese companies, are made in Asia.

The stubborn holdout remains Nocona, headquartered in its namesake Texas town of about 3,200 residents nearly 90 miles northwest of Dallas. For 80 years, the company has been an integral part of the town, where a local Dairy Queen is a center of social activity and the mayor owns a popular barbecue joint.

Nocona Athletic Goods is the town’s third-largest employer, with 85 workers. Only a hospital and a boot factory provide more jobs, said Mayor Robert Fenoglio.

The town’s baseball field is named for a former company president, and “old man Bob Storey was the type of person who would ... watch kids playing baseball somewhere and he would drive by and throw them out a new glove,” Fenoglio said.

The town lost about 200 jobs in the mid-90s when Justin Boots bought out the Nocona boot factory and closed it. “A slap in the face,” the mayor said. The town might not have been able to survive the closing of the glove factory, he said.

“We’re very proud,” Fenoglio said. “To have anything like that in a small community anymore is near impossible.”

The factory will make about 75,000 handmade gloves in 2008, Storey said. That’s a small percentage of the nearly 5.1 million baseball and softball gloves sold in 2007, accounting for nearly $184 million in sales, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.

Nokona gloves—the brand name is spelled with a ‘k’ because, according to company lore, trademarking the name of a town was not permitted—can be a tough find at big-box sporting good chains.  High-end Nokona gloves, some made from pliable kangaroo or buffalo hide, have found an appreciative audience at specialty baseball stores, where they retail for several hundred dollars alongside other top-of-the-line gloves.

The company’s traditional strength was in making adult softball gloves and it has a strong following in girls fast-pitch softball gloves, Storey said, aided in the latter by Title IX regulations mandating schools provide equal sports opportunities for boys and girls.