Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World's Finest Private Collections

Among the national treasures you'll find:

• The only known photographic image of baseball's first organized team, the New York Knickerbockers, circa 1846.
• Original copy of the first written rules of modern baseball.
• One of the earliest known color advertising posters promoting the very first set of baseball cards, released in 1887.
• Scorecard from the inaugural World Series in 1903.
• Shoeless Joe Jackson's rookie-era game-used bat.
• Game-worn jerseys of Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Grove, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams.

Stephen Wong, a lifelong collector of rare and historically significant artifacts, spent two and a half years researching his top-selling adult book smithsonian baseball: Inside the World's Finest Private Collections. Wong has advised a number of the world's top collectors and is currently lending his expertise to an upcoming exhibition at the Chicago Historical Society celebrating the glory days of Chicago Cubs and White Sox baseball in the early twentieth century. He is also an advisory director for the Museum of the City of New York's summer 2007 exhibit "The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957" and an honorary committee member for the city of Pittsfield and the Berkshire Museum's "1791—Art of the Game—Pittsfield," a two-year celebration of Pittsfield's unique place in baseball history. A graduate of Stanford Law School, Wong is currently an executive director at Goldman Sachs. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in Hong Kong.