By Carlos Castillo, Co-Founder, Kachi Gloves.
There's a clean version of the Kachi Gloves origin story — two former MLB pitchers, one Miami academy, premium Japanese leather, a shared vision. That version is true. It's also tidy in a way that the actual story wasn't.
The actual story is five specific conversations between 2021 and 2026, and most of them were about pitching mechanics, not glove construction.
Pitch One — November 2021
Julio Teherán came to the academy to work on his arm slot. He'd finished a rough 2021 with the Tigers — shoulder injury, limited innings — and was looking for whatever was left in the tank at age 30.
I told him his arm angle was too high. It was a three-quarters delivery being over-rotated by a body that had thrown more than 1,300 Major League innings. The shoulder was telling him something. I suggested we drop the angle two or three degrees, reduce the deceleration load, and put that stress somewhere other than the back of his shoulder capsule.
He was skeptical. 2× All-Stars get skeptical when journeyman former-relievers tell them to change anything. We threw long toss for a week. By day four he was throwing three-quarter comfortably, and the elbow-down finish was letting his two-seam bite late instead of cutting flat.
That's when I showed him a different glove.
Pitch Two — The First Glove Conversation
Julio had been using the same retail pitcher's glove pattern for most of his career. It was a good glove — game-legal, standard Japanese-manufacturer construction, two-piece web. Perfectly adequate.
But I'd spent four years in Japan and Taiwan before my 2011 retirement — Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in the NPB, Macoto Cobras and Brother Elephants in the CPBL — and I'd learned that Japanese Kip leather is cut and treated differently when it's destined for the NPB market versus when it's destined for US retail. The same stamp doesn't always mean the same glove. Higher-grade Kip goes to the professional tier in Japan. The retail export tier is a different cut.
I pulled out a glove I'd built for one of my academy pitchers — same leather tier as my NPB gear — and asked him to try it. He flexed it, opened and closed the web, and made the face you make when your wrist tells your brain the thing is 20% lighter than it should be.
He asked where I got it. I told him I made it.
Pitch Three — The Changeup Grip
By the time Julio came back the next offseason, we'd started calling the Miami visits "training camps." He'd thrown most of 2022 in the Atlantic League with the Staten Island FerryHawks, keeping himself sharp for a Mexican League run. The arm was holding up. The cutter was working. The changeup was the next project.
His changeup had always been a two-seam orientation with the horseshoe pointed away from his release. Standard deception grip. I told him to move it a quarter-inch deeper into his palm and angle the middle finger pressure toward the inside seam. He asked why. I said because his slower heartbeat at 31 was going to slow the arm action just enough to telegraph the grip, and hiding the ball deeper in the hand would buy him two-tenths of a second of deception.
He tried it. Threw it in a bullpen in front of three academy coaches and a couple of kids who'd stuck around to watch. The pitch dropped six inches off the glove-side break it used to have. He made us do it three more times because he didn't believe it the first time.
The next year, he made the 2023 Brewers rotation.
Pitch Four — The Cutter
I'd been pushing the cutter for two offseasons. Julio resisted because his two-seam was still working, and because every retired pitcher who tells a 2× All-Star to add a pitch is essentially asking him to bet his career on an intuition.
But by 2023, he was working harder for every out. Hitters had three years of film on his two-seam-changeup mix. The cutter was going to be either a third pitch or a bridge pitch between the two-seamer and the slider.
I showed him the grip my old catching coach in Japan had taught me — more of a two-seam cutter than a traditional one, with the ball canted slightly off-axis at release. First week, he couldn't find the plate. Second week, it was 87 mph with late armside run. By the third bullpen, he was commanding it to both sides.
He used it in the 2025 WBC qualifier against Brazil — 6 scoreless innings, a no-hitter through five. The cutter was the pitch he got the bunt-single guy out on.
Pitch Five — March 2026
Julio was supposed to start against Canada in the first round of the 2026 World Baseball Classic. He warmed up and his shoulder locked up. He'd been carrying the impingement since December. He'd been using a new glove pattern I'd built for him specifically for the WBC — slightly deeper pocket, a tighter closed web for grip concealment, Japanese Kip in a heavier weight for the colder San Juan evenings. He never got to throw a pitch in it.
Five days later, after Colombia's win over Panama, he recorded a retirement video in Spanish and closed out fourteen years of professional baseball. I watched it from Miami. An hour after it went live, he texted me:
"Tenemos mucho que hacer en el academia."
("We have a lot of work to do at the academy.")
That's the actual origin story. Not five years of glove-company planning. Five offseasons of mechanics work, one retirement, one text message.
What Kachi Gloves Is Now
We're a glove company because two former pitchers — one who pitched in four pro leagues on three continents, one who was a 2× All-Star and tied Warren Spahn with six consecutive Atlanta Opening Day starts — decided that the pro-grade glove market had forgotten who it was supposed to serve.
That's the product. The story that got us here is just the background for it.
About the authors: Carlos Castillo is a former MLB pitcher and co-founder of Kachi Gloves and the Kachi Baseball academy in Miami. Julio Teherán is a 2× NL All-Star and co-founder of Kachi Gloves. Career records via Baseball-Reference (Castillo) and Baseball-Reference (Teherán).