Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Pull up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story Pete Cava Curt Smith. Pull up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2009. 264 pp. Cloth, $29.95 From the East Coast to West Coast, Vin Scully is as much a part of the American landscape as the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge. His celebrity [End Page 128] knows no boundaries. One of the lead characters in TV’s The X-Files (Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson) was named for him. Pull Up a Chair, Curt Smith’s latest book on broadcasting and the national pastime, provides a reverential portrait of Vincent Edward Scully, a native New Yorker who grew to legend in Southern California. Scully’s six decades as “voice of the Dodgers”—he’s their last link to Brooklyn—rank near the summit of baseball longevity, up there with Connie Mack’s reign as manager of the Athletics and Bob Sheppard’s years as Yankee public address announcer. Scully grew up in Washington Heights, the same northern Manhattan neighborhood that later produced Manny Ramirez. In 1949, Scully graduated from Fordham University in the Bronx and, not long after, CBS radio network head Red Barber recruited him as a college football announcer. Recognizing raw talent in the younger redhead, Barber subsequently hired him for the Dodgers radio booth. In the ensuing years, baseball has trekked westward, taken on new teams, weathered challenges from professional leagues in other sports, adopted a draft, made adjustments for television, survived free agency and double-knits, added a playoff system, and gone global. And Scully went from green on-air talent (he once declared that Pittsburgh had tied the Pirates) to baseball’s man of letters. “I grew up on Barber,” noted NBC’s Al Michaels. “Scully succeeds him. Best two Voices, and I get ‘em both” (156). Uprooting the Dodgers, Walter O’Malley broke a borough’s heart. “L.A. deserved a franchise,” Smith observes. “It did not deserve Brooklyn’s” (61). O’Malley avoided greater sin by eschewing advice to ditch Scully in favor of an established West Coast voice. Los Angeles fans soon began to carry transistor radios to the Coliseum in hope of seeing games through Scully’s poetic viewpoint. The Dodgers brought the World Series to California in their second year on the West Coast, and Scully’s reputation blossomed. “Vin entered 1959 as a phenom,” writes Smith. “He left it as a phenomenon” (80). For three-plus pages, Smith lingers over Scully’s on-air description of the last inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game against the Giants—the best radio broadcast in baseball history, according to the Scribner Encyclopedia (100). The transcript, presented in full, makes a convincing argument, even without the benefit of Scully’s melodic tenor: “And Koufax, with a new ball, takes a hitch at his belt, and walks behind the mound,” intoned Scully with one out in the ninth, adding, after a caesura, “I would think that the mound at Dodgers Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world” (100). By the late 1960s, Scully supplanted Mel Allen as the gold standard of baseball broadcasters. “If you want to see the game, listen to Scully,” urged a Los Angeles beat writer (123). Pirates announcer Bob Prince once turned down [End Page 129] an offer to work for the San Diego Padres, claiming, “You’ve got desert to the east, ocean to the west, Mexico to the south, and Scully to the north” (69). The Gunner raised a valid point: luring Scully’s listeners would be tantamount to weaning sweet-feeding ants off sugar. Even at Anaheim Stadium, Angels fans toted portable radios to catch his crisp, crystal-clear calls of Dodgers games. Smith recounts forays into tennis, golf and football (Scully called NFL contests for CBS from 1975 to 1982), as well as a gimmicky network game show called It Takes Two, where the courtly Scully was an easy mark for practical jokers. During one live episode, he was supposed to retrieve the answer to a question from the back of a classic sedan. When he opened the trunk, there lay...
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 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.069 | 0.000 |
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.
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".