Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vernona Gomez and Lawrence Goldstone. Lefty: An American Odyssey. New York: Ballantine Books, 2012. 375 pp. Paper, $28.00. Lefty Gomez was one of the five dominant pitchers of the 1930s--Dizzy Dean, Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell, and Red Ruffing were the others. Gomez pitched for seven New York Yankees pennant winners and is a member of baseball's Hall of Fame. In addition, he was one of the game's most colorful and quotable characters, the first pitcher to make the cover of Time magazine, and a man who was adored by the press and the fans. Yet until the publication of Lefty: An American Odyssey, by Lefty's daughter Vernona and author Lawrence Goldstone, there had been no biography written of Gomez. Lefty Gomez lived a long and productive life and the authors cover it all, from his boyhood in rural Rodeo, California, through his minor-league days with the San Francisco Seals, to his glory years with the Yankees, his career as the most successful salesman ever for the Wilson Sporting Goods company, his long involvement with Babe Ruth League baseball, and his recovery from alcoholism and a nervous breakdown. Lefty's youth in Rodeo reads like something from a John Steinbeck novel of that time and place, for while not too far from San Francisco geographically, Rodeo was a cultural wasteland. Lefty did all the things young boys did in such places, go to school, help with the chores on the farm, and play baseball. Being a big-league ballplayer was all he ever wanted, and though he had to fight his father all the way, he made it to the Seals and then to New York. Gomez pitched for the Yankees from 1930 until he was unceremoniously released by team president Ed Barrow following the 1942 season. He was a four-time twenty-game winner who led the American League in wins, winning percentage, and earned run average twice, and in strikeouts and shutouts three times. By leading the league in wins, earned run average, and strikeouts in both 1934 and 1937, he earned the pitcher's Triple Crown in both those seasons. Lefty was a member of the American League team for the first seven All-Star Games and the starting and winning pitcher of the first game in 1933. Though a notoriously weak batter, he also had the All-Star Game's first run batted in. Gomez was a money pitcher, the one who delivered when a pennant or World Series was on the line. His World Series record was a perfect 6-o. After pitching (and losing) one game for the 1943 Washington Senators, Gomez retired with a 189-102 record and a .649 winning percentage. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1972, a choice that did not meet with unanimous approval by sportswriters. The six-feet-two, 150-pound country boy who came to New York with a cardboard suitcase and ill-fitting clothes soon transformed himself into a well-dressed, well-traveled celebrity. …
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.181 | 0.064 |
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".