ABSTRACT
This chapter presents different representative examples of the rules regarding gloves from over a century of baseball. From the standpoint of a specific cultural object, what is especially noteworthy about these rules is how intimate they are with the materiality of the glove in its three primary forms: catcher's mitt, first basemen's mitt, and fielder's glove. The material life of a glove, its making and remaking, its shaping and reshaping speak to issues of design and ingenuity, ritual and belief, scientific principles, industrial practices, and conventional wisdom, but it also speaks to the evolving set of social negotiations regarding proper "sporting" practice of the game ultimately embodied in the rules. These patents are an important part of the biography of the glove. A patent is a revealing object of material culture history. It is a legal document typically consists of two parts, a diagram of the invention and a rationale for what makes the invention significantly innovative.
