About Pro Style Sports

The Original Baseball Wallet

ProStyle Sports is based in a Portland, OR, and was founded by life-long baseball fan Michael Austin. A Houston native, Michael grew up playing Little League ball and watching the Astros in the late 80s and early 90s. After earning a Bachelor's degree at Rice University, he moved to Tennessee to pursue a graduate degree in Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt. While still in school, he started working on designs for a baseball wallet. To save time, the initial designs were made from paper cutouts in the figure eight shapes of baseballs. For the first leather prototype, Michael walked by the local baseball stadium every evening to search for lost foul balls. Unstitching these balls by hand, one stitch at a time, he resewed them into a wallet more suitable for an 8th grade art project than a major league park. And he spent over forty hours in the process.

After making four more variations off the original wallet to improve the design, Michael was ready to have professionals manufacture the wallet. With the help of three Vanderbilt M.B.A. students taking an entrepreneurship class, Pro Style Sports found suppliers and manufacturers to assemble the final product. Although Michael has turned the sewing over to the experts, he still inspects every wallet to make sure they are up to his standards for quality.

Pro Style Sports gained national attention in December of 2006 when Sports Illustrated featured the baseball wallet in its list of Sports Christmas gifts. In 2009 Pro Style Sports received a patent for their baseball wallet design. Click here to view the patent and images.

Michael is now a player/manager in the Northwest Independent Baseball Leage (NWIBL) for the Portland Flyers Baseball Team.