Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Aiello. The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011. 264 pp. Cloth, $39.95. In July 1932, the struggling Monroe Monarchs limped into Chicago. The showdown with the Chicago American Giants was the most-anticipated series of the season. Controversy had surrounded the close of the first half of black baseball's pennant race: though the Monarchs had the better record at 31-7, prestigious national black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender had deemed the American Giants the winner. Of course, southern press coverage thought differently and did everything to court public opinion and make a case for Monroe's champion black team. In Chicago, the pressure on the small-town southern club would be immense and the Monarchs were, at least on this occasion, unable to rise to the challenge. Thomas Aiello's The Kings of Casino Park is the story of Fred Stovall's Monarchs, who would become the only World Series team Louisiana would ever generate and the first from the American South (1). Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1882, Stovall emerged as a black entrepreneur at a critical time in US history: the Great Depression. He benefited from the Texas-Louisiana oil and natural gas boom. While struggling to support his family and save money in Monroe, Louisiana, he built upon his experiences and knowledge base to establish the Stovall Drilling Company. By 1927, Stovall invested profits in the J.M. Supply Company, the first of several substantial business deals. However, baseball was his passion. By 1930, he had bought Casino Park--at a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars--for the benefit of Monroe's black community. Casino Park had an adjacent pool, a dance pavilion, and casino for fans attending games at the baseball field. Stovall organized his team from the most athletic of his black employees. On May 11, 1930, the Monarchs played their first recorded game with the Newton Braves. While his business records no longer survive, it seems likely that the owner administered the Monarchs through the Stovall Drilling Company. Given the outcome of this social drama, the Monarchs' national and statewide notoriety, Thomas Aiello's The Kings of Casino Park adds another chapter to the history of baseball in Louisiana. The postbellum history of organized black ball in Louisiana dates as early as 1868, when the New Orleans Aromatics captured the national imagination with their quaint moniker. In 1875, thirteen teams around the state held a baseball convention and formed the Colored Leagues, Monroe boasted African American clubs as well. In 1879, Monroe and Gum Swamp (Morehouse parish) crossed bats, the former winning by a score of 54-18. Gum Swamp returned the favor, bulldozing Monroe on its home ground. Stovall's Monarchs recall Walter L. Cohen's New Orleans Pinchbacks. Between 1888 and 1889, the Pinchbacks put Louisiana in the national spotlight. …
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.097 | 0.016 |
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".