Tylar Sutton
Best Daily Home Run: Yurko Stitch
We’re all missing baseball. Brad Yurkovich has a way you can keep the game close to you. The owner of leather goods company Yurko Stitch converts baseball gloves into wallets.
“We use wallets every day,” says the North Canton resident. “It’s a way to revisit a memory of a loved one or when the kids were simpler playing little league.”
Since he crafted his first one in 2015, Yurko wallets have scored a spot in minor league baseball team shops and a partnership with the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Yurkovich deconstructs game-used gloves from thrift shops and flea markets and cuts them into slide-in, snap, money clip and fold over wallets and stitches them with red lace, showcasing autographs and leaving imperfections.
“The scuffs, scars — everything,” he says, “I want you to smell baseball, dirt, sunflower seeds, sweat.”
The heaviest hitters are custom wallets crafted from gloves with stories. Yurkovich made himself one out of a Zett glove used and signed by himself, his cousin and his brother as a reminder of all the summer days he spent playing the game he loves with family.
“Every time I take it out,” he says, “you think of all the good things surrounding baseball.” yurkostitch.com
