Time for a MITT post.
Mitt, the kind we'd heard of before we'd heard of Romney, is shortened from mitten. What is a mitten? If you know German, you know that Mitte means "middle" or "center." In this case, the sense is something that has been divided down the middle, specifically a glove that has been divided down the middle. A mitten (Old French "mitaine" was a half of a glove, i.e. a fingerless glove). Later it became the mitten we know today, with one section for the fingers and another for the thumb.
The baseball sense of "mitt" is from 1892. But is it called a mitt or a glove? I think technically a glove, and I refer you a very cleverly titled book called Glove Affairs in which players fondly remember their first gloves. Baseball people can confirm, but my understanding is that glove is the general term, but the handwear of first basemen and catchers are called mitts because they lack individual fingers.
Let's not forget the mitten crab, an olive-green Asian crab with hairy pincers.
The real question is why a person named Willard gets nick named Mitt. Or why any person is nick named Mitt. Jon Stewart suggested Mitt was named for the shape of his home state.
The name Mitt was apparently taken from the nickname of Romney's father's cousin, football player Milton "Mitt" Romney (1899-1975) who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears from 1925-1928.
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