A history of baseball in 100 objects: a tour through the bats, balls, uniforms, awards, documents, and other artifacts that tell the story of the national pastime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organized chronologically, beginning with a rare illustration depicting an early predecessor to the modern game of baseball on a 14th-century Flemish Book of Hours manuscript, The History of Baseball in 100 Objects is a visual and historical record of the game as told through essential documents, letters, and photographs, equipment, memorabilia, food and drink, merchandise and media items, and relics of popular culture, each of which has had a major impact on the history and evolution of the game. Objects include the original ordinance banning baseball in Pittsfield, MA, in 1791 (the earliest known reference to the game in America); the By-laws and Rules of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, 1845 (first codified rules of the game); Fred Thayer's catcher's mask from the 1870s (the first use of this equipment in the game); a scorecard from the 1903 Series (the first world series); Grantland Rice's typewriter (the role of sportswriters in making baseball the National Pastime); Babe Ruth's bat, circa 1927 (the emergence of the long ball); Pittsburgh Crawford's team bus, 1935 (the Negro Leagues); Jackie Robinson's Montreal Royals uniform, 1946 (the breaking of the color barrier); ticket stub from the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game and Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round The World (one of baseball's iconic moments); Sandy Koufax's Cy Young Award, 1963 (the era of dominant pitchers); Reggie! candy bar, 1978 (the modern player as media star); Rickey Henderson's shoes, 1982 (baseball's all-time greatest base-stealer); original architect's drawing for Oriole Park at Camden Yards (the ballpark renaissance of the 1990s); and Barry Bond's record-breaking bat (the age of PEDs). Each full-page photograph of the object is accompanied by lively text that describes the object itself (always fascinating in its own right), the historical significance of the object and its connection to the moment in baseball's history it represents, and additional stories and information about that particular period in the history of the game.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".