I read an article in SI a number of years ago where a guy took his British friend to a baseball game. The British guy wasn’t especially impressed by the pitching, and wasn’t impressed by the hitting. Seen it all before. But he was blown away by the fielding.
Cricket is a batsman’s game. Batsmen dominate the sport. Baseball, if you think about it, is dominated by fielding at the professional level. Half of all plate appearances end in a ball being hit into play and fielders getting someone out. At the major league level errors are less common than double plays; they’re infrequent to the point of having almost no overall significance.
When gloves came into use in the 1800s, it was common for catchers and first basemen to wear two gloves, often with fingers protruding beyond the first knuckle. Though the wording of current rules seems to imply only one glove may be used, no rule was ever made to restrict a fielder to one glove. I think the reason for that is that it has never been thought necessary to make such a rule.
There was a directive – though not an actual playing rule, and it may have been just the National League – issued in the 1960s regarding a second glove. That occurred after Chicago Cubs catcher Randy Hundley took the field with his normal catcher’s mitt along with a fielder’s glove either in his back pocket or stuffed into his back waistband. The plate umpire asked him about the extra glove, and Hundley explained that if it looked like there would be a play at the plate, he planned to toss away his mitt and use the fielder’s glove to be able to handle the throw more easily. The umpire asked him not to use the other glove until he could check on it, and Hundley complied. A check with the league office resulted in a directive that a second glove was not allowed. This was a second glove not worn on the hand, though, and not a case of a fielder wearing a glove on each hand.