Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game by Dan Taylor (review)
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Reviewed by: Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game by Dan Taylor David Bohmer Dan Taylor. Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. 203 pp. Cloth, $36.00. This is an interesting and well-written book, often paced like a novel. Its primary focus is the alleged gambling scandal in 1919 that emerged after the 1926 season involving Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb, "Smoky Joe" Wood, and Dutch Leonard. At the same time it is equally a story about Babe Ruth and his publicist [End Page 136] Christy Walsh dealing in part with the Babe's offseason exploits as well as his stellar performance during the 1927 season. The key segment of the story, suggested by the title, is the surfacing of a gambling scandal between the four players mentioned above to throw a couple of games between the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers near the end of the 1919 season. The allegations were serious enough that the American League president, Ban Johnson, prohibited Cobb and Speaker from playing in 1927. He was overruled by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who allowed them to play, but only if they changed teams. Once again Major League Baseball seemed to be rocked by a gambling scandal similar to when the White Sox fixing the 1919 World Series was exposed near the end of the 1920 season. Once again just as Babe Ruth helped to bring baseball fans back to the game with his home runs in 1921, so he did again by breaking his own home run record in 1927. In telling that story Taylor also presents some interesting asides, including Ruth acting in the lead role of a Hollywood movie during the off season and the slugger's commitment to a fitness regimen to control his weight and ensure his readiness for the coming season. Both are fascinating sidelines to the ultimate thesis—that Ruth, with an assist from Walsh, would once again save baseball from scandal. All of that creates an entertaining story made more so by the author's writing skills. The major problem is with the title—suggesting baseball was at an abyss, a black hole. It implies that the future of the game was threatened. The American League did suffer a decrease in attendance in 1927, though less of a decline than in the season following the exposure of the White Sox scandal. While Cleveland had a large drop in attendance after losing Speaker, Detroit's ticket sales actually increased without Cobb. Since the National League had an increase in attendance of more than 350,000 fans in 1927, it seems likely that the AL decline had more to do with the Yankees dominating the league from the very beginning of the season. That hardly suggests an "abyss." In fact both the Great Depression and World War II would prove to be far greater threats to baseball. The other problem is the book's sources. It is rich with excellent primary materials, but there is no mention of any secondary references. Yet there are excellent biographies of Landis, Cobb, Speaker, and Wood, all of which discuss the alleged gambling scandal. There are also numerous biographies of Babe Ruth and one of the most recent goes into great detail about the Ruth-Walsh relationship. The lack of reference to these important books certainly seems to be an omission. [End Page 137] This is an interesting and entertaining book for anyone wishing to learn more about the supposed scandal that came to light in 1926 involving some of baseball's greats, as well as Ruth's endeavors in 1926 and 1927. However, suggesting in the title that baseball was seriously threatened by it seems to be overkill. So, too, is the failure to cite biographies of all the major participants in the scandal and its resolution. The reader should keep that in mind while reading this book. [End Page 138] Copyright © 2024 University of Nebraska Press
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,001 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,011 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».