Additional Notes from Umpire Committee

[BretMan]

I have the Reebok plate shoes and love them. But the big white "REEBOK" across the back and the white Major League Baseball emblem had to go...

The "REEBOK" on the back is pretty easy to get rid of. A little nail polish remover and a little elbow grease and it's gone. After I wiped out the logo, I flushed the area pretty good with water. I didn't want any residual acetone to possibly damage the vinyl material of the shoe.

The MLB logo on front was a little tougher. It's not a screen printed logo, like the one on the back- it's more of a sewn-in vinyl insert. I started going over it with Sharpie and it looked pretty crappy- kind of streaky, not as dark as the surrounding black shoe material and you could still see it was there. So I went over the logo with black leather dye. A couple of coats and the logo is now fairly invisible.

While I'm on the subject of these shoes, several umpires have mentioned to me that they don't like the way the top plate "bows up" where it attaches near the front of the shoe (if you've tried these shoes, you probably know what I'm talking about). I didn't like that either, so I played around with tying them different ways. If you lace up the shoe like you would a normal shoe, then run the laces through the holes in the top plate last, after going through the last eyelets in the shoe, when you pull the lace tight it pulls the top plate back and it lays flat against the shoe.

These shoes are very comfortable and have proven durable through two seasons. As much as I like them, I like them even more now that they really are "all black" and that ugly bump in the front is gone!