Phillies’ Matt Strahm Creates Glove in Nod to Nicolas Cage Doppelgänger Memes – ryan

Phillies pitcher Matt Strahm has been told he looks like Nicolas Cage — a fact he’s now fully embraced through a custom glove.

After the National League Division Series in 2023, Strahm went viral not for his performance on the mound, but for memes that showed he was Cage’s doppelgänger.

Two years later, he’s had a glove created featuring the Declaration of Independence, a nod to the 61-year-old actor’s character, Benjamin Franklin Gates, in the 2004 action-adventure film National Treasure.

“I stole it, then made a glove out of it,” the 33-year-old athlete told The Athletic’s Matt Gelb, who posted an image of the stylized glove on X on Wednesday, April 16. A day later, on his Instagram Storieshe reiterated the joke by posting a photo of him working with others to design the glove with the caption, “BTS: Plotting to steal the Declaration of Independence.”

Almost 200,000 fans have viewed Gelb’s fun post, which references the famous line from the movie when Gates declares that he’s going to steal the Declaration of Independence. The historian is on a desperate search for the legendary Templar Treasure before others can take it for themselves. He plans to steal the foundational document in order to protect it.

Last fall, Strahm addressed the viral comparison to Cage. While no one has ever mistaken the pitcher for the iconic actor, he’s often asked about their similar looks.

“They come up to me and they’ll be like, ‘Hey, has anyone ever told you you look (like)…’ ” Strahm recalled during a clip of an interview posted on the MLB’s X account in September 2024. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, every day on Twitter.’ ”

Even the MLB had to tease him about it in the same post. “Has anyone ever seen Matt Strahm and Nicolas Cage in the same room before…?” the MLB account wrote, poking fun at the pitcher by juxtaposing a photo of Strahm next to the actor.

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While many people love Strahm’s new glove, which features cursive lettering over a white background in homage of the historic document, Sports Illustrated reported that he may not be able to use it in a game.

According to section “a” of Major League Baseball Rule 1.15, a pitcher’s glove “may not, exclusive of piping, be white, gray, nor, in the judgment of an umpire, distracting in any manner,” as listed by MLB.com.

Either way, Strahm’s fans are loving the custom glove. “Being the Declaration was written in Philly,” wrote one person on Facebook in response to the news, “makes it even better.”