Yankee-hating is seeing a resurgence, thanks to the sudden ability of Alex Rodriguez to get hits in October and their building the most homer-friendly ballpark in the majors. The Handbook, that religious document, is now out of print (due, no doubt, to the nefarious machinations of Clan Steinbrenner), so those seeking to bone up on the various historic reasons the Phillies are worth rooting for have to turn to our old friend, the Web.

The beautiful thing about baseball is how astonishingly rich its history is. (Consider this: in its entire history, the NFL has played fewer games than have been played in baseball’s past five years – in the Majors alone.) People have been playing professional baseball for over a century, all the while documenting the games and the players in every new media format available. Much of that documentation is a quick link-click away.

Let’s start at the most jaw-dropping website in professional sports: Baseball-Reference.com. I’ll explain what’s available there with a quick anecdote (as, it seems, is my wont). Shortly after my Dad laid the Handbook on me, we took a trip to Detroit to see my childhood favorites, the Tigers play, and beat, the Yanks. Our family made much of the fact that, while regular players had photos that appeared on the scoreboard when they batted, Rob Richie, newly drafted, had only the Tigers’ logo where his photo should be – implying that Mr. Richie bore more resemblance to Shere Khan than Genghis. In a family of corny jokes, this one became long-running. So, with only this information in hand (Rob Richie’s early appearance, the Tigers winning), I was earlier this year able to scrabble through the pages at Baseball-Reference and find the boxscore for the game itself – August 19, 1989. (Mr. Richie went 1-for-4, with 2 RBI.)

Photo from the New York Public Library on Flickr.

Baseball-Reference has box scores, standings, player data for nearly every game in the history of professional baseball. Want to know what the standings were on the day you were born? No sweat. They’ve got it.

Statistics are one thing. Photos are another. Yesterday, the New York Public Library posted on its blog a series of photos from classic New York and Philadelphia teams (all pulled, notably, from the Flickr Commons). The photos are fantastic – crucial, valuable bits of American history. (I’m particularly taken with this staged photo of someone sliding into second – you can get a sense for how long they held this action-packed pose by noting the blurred man in the background.)

The historical import of such images is reinforced by the Library of Congress’ baseball card collection. Fatima Cigarettes gave us the 1913 Phils and 1913 Yankees. That year, per Baseball-Reference, the Phillies came in 2nd in the NL; the Yanks, pre-Ruth, 7th in the AL. (The Philadelphia A’s, meanwhile, won the AL pennant, and the World Series.) Baseball cards still exist, of course, but target the collector market rather than kids, a transition made clear when, in the mid ’90s, Topps stopped including gum with the cards since the gum left stains. (Little known fact: Topps started as a candy company, using the cards to build gum sales.)

A few decades into the professionalized sport, radio became mainstream. The image is universal: pre-teen boys huddled around a console radio, pounding a fist into a glove, growing agitated over the travails of their favorite team. Sadly, much of this is lost to time, though some of the more memorable calls – like Bobby Thompson’s shot-heard-round-the-world – live on. Major League Baseball (MLB, which tightly controls its own history) has a collection it calls ”Baseball’s Best.”

Then came motion pictures and television. Some of the best footage comes from movie news clips – the first time video of games was presented in the now-familiar highlight-reel format. This video details the last time the Yankees and Phillies met in the World Series: a 1950 Yankees sweep. A dark time. There are any number of similar segments on YouTube – but much of the more modern footage is still only available through the MLB, leaving some fans to resort to other ways of getting their game footage fix.

The Web is dripping with baseball history, including fan sites, like Historic Baseball.com, and professional organizations like SABR, the Society of American Baseball Researchers. It reinforces the web history truism – the more interesting a subject is to a broad range of people, the more complete its history will become.

Of course, the history of the game of baseball continues to be written. Last night, for example, was the first World Series game ever played at the new Yankee Stadium. And like all of the best stories in history, it had a happy ending.

Acquired by the Library of Congress in 1948 from the Bain News Service the above image sat, for much of the intervening sixty years, in sheltered seclusion in Washington, D.C., rarely seen or noticed. Then along came the Web.

Last January, Flickr created a process to collect public-domain images from institutions dedicated to preserving cultural heritage. Starting with images from the Library of Congress, The Commons, as Flickr refers to it, now includes images from a broad range of international groups, with a heavy emphasis on photographic history, including the National Media Museum, the Smithsonian, the George Eastman House, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Archive of the Netherlands, and the Brooklyn Museum. The contributions of each group tend to be thematic, if a bit random, creating an overall collection with no unifying theme save one: chronicling human and photographic history.

The Commons doesn’t suffer for its diversity. It’s a constant revelation — fascinating moments you wouldn’t have expected to be interesting, such as turn-of-the-century children learning to dance, or incredible things you never knew existed (case in point: an image from when Japanese terrorists (!) held the French embassy at The Hague hostage).

I discovered The Commons last year when I stumbled across a photo of a group of schoolchildren standing on a boulevard. The image, from the Eastman collection, was taken about 100 years ago in my hometown of Rochester, New York. I found myself puzzling for hours over which intersection was represented in the photo; ultimately, with my sister’s help, determining the answer.

Which is where the true beauty of The Commons emerges. Built on top of a socially-networked photo sharing site, details about photos emerge from the collective wisdom of site visitors. In a photo titled “Burying Binghamton Dead”, a group of coffins is assembled in a graveyard, a silent crowd looking on. Site visitors quickly deduced the reference point: a 1913 fire in a clothing factory that killed 31 people. Another photo showing five urchins cooling their heels in a puddle beneath an elevated track was undated – until a Flickr user noticed the reversed date that had been written on the negative. In a bird’s eye look at New York’s East Village, users have spotted signs, landmarks, train stations — even people hanging laundry on apartment rooftops.

This is why The Commons exists: to present but, more importantly, to flesh out our photographic history. On a website which, earlier this month, saw the iPhone became its most popularly used camera, century-old photos are presented for consideration by fresh eyes — and are rewarded with a richer sense of why and when they were created.

Philip Bump is a technology and communications consultant in New York City who will be writing an occassional column for Mediaite about the intersection of history and the Internet called “The Wayback Machine.” Follow him on Twitter here.