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Record W1548482319

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings

2000· article· en· W1548482319 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Darryl Brock

Bibliographic record

VenueNine · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican Sports and Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryWrightStyle (visual arts)NewspaperArt historyArtMedia studiesArchaeologySociology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Keynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999 In the summer of 1985 I set out on a two-month, 12,000-mile odyssey around the U.S. following the tour routes of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. My intention was to visit the twenty-six cities and towns where they played. I managed to get to all but Fort Wayne, which still remains on my to-do list. was I doing this in the first place? Well, it began with my reading Douglas Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History. Wallop, you may remember, wrote The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the Broadway hit Damn Yankees. I was intrigued by Wallop's charming descriptions of the first ballplayers to come out in the open and say they were playing a boy's game for money. Their salaries were guaranteed by contracts, and the amounts were even published in newspapers. (By the way, the day after tomorrow, Monday, is the 130th anniversary of the start of those contracts: March 15th, 1869; they ran eight months, expiring on November 15th.) Wallop recounted how opponents called player-manager Harry Wright a bearded boy in bloomers and captain of the bloody calves because of the team's new knickerbocker-style uniform. Wallop also told of them riding across plains and prairies to play in San Francisco--which meant they had ridden the new transcontinental railroad in the very first months of its existence. Who were those guys? I wondered. What was it like to be a twenty-two-year-old playing baseball only four years after the end of the Civil War and seven years before the Custer massacre, when the West was still wild? What was society like? What was baseball like? This was hardly a new pattern. As a boy I would read, say, Robin Hood and then probe its reality by delving into a general history or perhaps a biography of Richard the Lion-Hearted. In college I was a double major--literature and history--and taught those subjects later along with psychology--the very elements of novel making. By spring of 1985 I had done enough research on post-Civil War matters to become fascinated by them and also to realize that little in the way of commercial entertainment had employed that era as a setting. Most of it had been focused in the South, such as KKK-related stories during Reconstruction. Nothing had been set in the North except the old TV program Wild West, which I think took place during Grant's second administration. The year 1869 seemed a fabulous backdrop for some kind of story. Consequently, on Sunday, May 5th, 1985, I prepared to set out from Seattle, where my wife, Lura, was then employed as an actress. We loaded gear into my truck - Lura had purchased a camper shell as a setting-out gift. Is she a great wife, or what? - and in jumped our beagle-mix, Missy. The scouting report on Missy read: Best position shortstop. Great natural instincts, speed, and range; can get her teeth around almost anything ever turned out at the Louisville bat factory. She would be my traveling companion i n the weeks to come. We left Seattle at 6 A.M. and set out across the Cascades, passing through Ritzville and St. Regis and Saltese; through Spokane and Couer d'Alene and Missoula. By nightfall we'd gone 704 miles and found a KOA campground to our liking outside of Bozeman Hot Springs, Montana. Next morning I breakfasted at the Cowboy Cafe in downtown Bozeman, where I caught snippets of dialogue (more accurately, intersecting monologues) that went: Hey, Craig... [long silence] Ah sold thet roll a bob wahr... . and the uninflected response: ... Huh.. . On the TV in the corner was coverage of historians combing the Little Bighorn site with metal detectors, attempting to track the 1876 battlefield movements by means of ballistic tests on shell casings. The commentary in the Cowboy Cafe went: Why the hell they wanna spend money finding out what happened to Custer? He got kilt-that's what happened! By then I knew, if I hadn't already suspected, that I'd left my usual haunts and was somewhere adrift in America. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.219
Threshold uncertainty score0.905

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0950.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.227
Teacher spread0.209 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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