Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Castle. Million-to-One Team: Why the Chicago Cubs Haven't Won Pennant Since 1945. South Bend IN: Diamond Communications, 2000. 337 pp. Cloth, $29.95. David Claerbaut. Durocher's Cubs: Greatest Team That Didn't Win. Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 2000. 226 pp. Cloth, $22.95. Carrie Muskat. Banks to Sandberg to Grace: Five Decades of Love and Frustration with the Chicago Cubs. Lincolnwood IL: Compiled by Contemporary Books, 2001. 292 pp. Cloth, $21.95. John C. Skipper. Take Me Out to the Cubs Game: 35 Former Ballplayers Speak of Losing at Wrigley. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2000. 248 pp. Paper, $29.95. Warren Brown. Chicago Cubs. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 256 pp. Paper, $15.95. Bill Hageman. Baseball Between the Wars: A Pictorial Tribute to the Men Who Made the Game in Chicago from 1909 to 1947. Lincolnwood IL: Contemporary Books, 2001. 292 pp. Cloth, $29.95. One of the democratic qualities of baseball is that every team starts out even at spring training. winter is thawing, and fans all over the world look forward to season full of possibilities. Everyone has chance, at least theoretically, to win the pennant. Everyone, it seems, but the Chicago Cubs. At least for the past fifty or so years. Perhaps it's that name, which denotes cute and cuddly. Compare this to the Windy City's football team, the Bears, Monsters of the Midway. Which sounds more intimidating? In the first half of the twentieth century, the Cubs could be expected to win the pennant on fairly regular basis. 1906 team, featuring such stalwarts as Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Frank Chance, Harry Steinfeldt, and Johnny Kling as well as topnotch pitching from Three Finger Brown, Jack Fiester, and Ed Reulbach, compiled 116-36 record, which is still the standard of excellence nearly 100 years later. They did lose the World Series that year, but they won back-to-back Fall Classics the following two years. They also won in 1910 and 1918 and then every third year from 1929 to 1938. That was then... This is now: when it comes to championship futility, the two teams we read about most are the Boston Red Sox and the Cubs. As well known as the Curse of the Bambino is, it's nothing compared to the inability of the Cubbies to keep playing into October, let alone win the whole shooting match. BoSox, at least, have made it to the Series as recently as 1986. last Cubs appearance? Back in 1945. And even that one, according to George Castle, author of Million-to-One Team, was almost default, due in large part to the wartime absence of Stan Musial and some of his Cardinal teammates. To put it in some perspective, the Cubs have not won the World Series since Ford invented the Model T. Maybe it's all for the best. In The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, W.P.Kinsella postulates how the end of the world will come when the Cubs next play in the World Series. In fact, they are lauded in fiction as the poster team for dreams unfulfilled. One area in which the Cubs are among the league leaders is the amount of bookshelf space devoted to the team. Within the past two years, seemingly disproportionate number of titles on the team from the Northside of the Windy City have appeared, several of which are included here. Million-to-One Team is the most analytic in its criticism of the foibles, almost all of which Castle blames on the Cubs ownership. Phil Wrigley was the antithesis of the crosstown White Sox owner Bill Veeck. P. W. played everything close to the vest, not wanting to take too many chances, fiscally conservative to the point of penuriousness, racially conservative to the point of passing on black players who could have improved the team. One apt photograph in the book shows then-general manager Wid Matthews showing off an organizational depth chart to farm director Harrison Wickel, with the caption a farm system filled with many names and little talent. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.093 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".