The Rise of the Latin American Baseball Leagues, 1947-1961: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lou Hernandez. The Rise of the Latin American Baseball Leagues, 1947-1961: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 402 pp. Paper, $49.95. It's a rather huge undertaking to chronicle the history of seven baseball leagues in Latin American countries over a span of nearly fifteen years, but Lou Hernandez takes a heroic stab at conquering this mountain of research. When you think of baseball leagues in Latin America's history, the average fan who follows such topics usually turns to Peter Bjarkman and Milton Jamail for their excellent work in Cuban baseball, while others look to John Virtue's recent work on Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican Leagues, as well as Thomas Van Hyning's Puerto Rico's Winter League. Still others might consider George Gedda's work on Dominican baseball, and one should not overlook noted Latino baseball historians Sam Regalado and Adrian Burgos Jr. In The Rise of the Latin American Baseball Leagues, 1947-1961: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, Hernandez's task is obviously daunting. Relying heavily on local newspapers and a couple dozen books as reference, Hernandez jumps in with both feet to cover seven chapters detailing each nation's baseball leagues. The author presents a fan's guide to each country's season-by-season action. Beginning in 1947, Hernandez covers the span of the Cuban assent into the Latin American baseball confederation and their ultimate withdrawal in 1961. In masterfully weaving his story, Hernandez does a tremendous job with local newspaper accounts that illustrate a colorful history filled with extraordinary personalities and situations. Certainly none are more extraordinary or bold as Pasquel in Mexico and his mission to recruit the best talent the United States had to offer for his Mexican league. In this work, we witness the eternal rivalry of Alemandares and Habana in the Cuban Leagues, as well as the battle for Latin American baseball supremacy in the Caribbean World Series. Going beyond the usual suspects of countries and their glorious baseball histories, Hernandez does a fine job in bringing Panama, Nicaragua, and Venezuela into the baseball discussion. While historians tend to dote on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, it is refreshing to learn more about the other three countries. What's equally familiar in the book are the players from North American baseball whose careers we have followed for years, making their bones in Latin America's Winter Leagues. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.005 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".