How things are made, used, and valued (economically, morally, aesthetically, and culturally) and what they signify concern material culturists. According to Jules D. Prown, material culturists tend to fall into one of two categories – hard or soft – depending on how they read or interpret objects: the “hard material culturist focuses on the reality of the object itself, its material, configuration, [and] articulation.” By contrast, “soft material culturist[s] [read] the artifact as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind.” That is, the “quest is not to gather information about the object itself and the activities and practices of the society that produced it, but rather to discover underlying cultural beliefs.” One might say that historians gravitate to the “hard,” and anthropologists to the “soft,” but both form part of a continuum.

This chapter, which is more “hard” than “soft,” and, given the scope of the subject, suggestive rather than definitive, enumerates the extraordinary range and diversity of baseball artifacts, as well as inventions and technologies that have influenced the game. Then, it briefly examines, in order to provide insight into the development of baseball and its relation to the surrounding culture, a number of baseball's most significant objects.