Gabby Hartnett: The Life and Times of the Cubs' Greatest Catcher (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Gabby Hartnett: The Life and Times of the Cubs’ Greatest Catcher David A. Goss William F. McNeil. Gabby Hartnett: The Life and Times of the Cubs’ Greatest Catcher. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 334 pp. Paper, $29.95. Charles Leo "Gabby" Hartnett was a catcher in the National League from 1922 to 1941, all but the last of those years with the Chicago Cubs. Hartnett grew up in a large family of baseball players, brothers and sisters alike, in Millville, Massachusetts. (One of his hometown battery mates, Tim McNamara, had a five-year Major League career as a pitcher.) Hartnett's first year in professional baseball was 1921 with Worcester in the Eastern League. The next year he broke in with the Cubs and remained with them through the 1940 season. The bulk of the book is devoted to Hartnett's years with the Cubs, and extensive, almost [End Page 150] day-to-day, coverage is given to Hartnett's and the Cubs' fortunes during those years. Highpoints of Hartnett's Hall of Fame career include team pennants in 1929, 1932, 1935, and 1938, an MVP season in 1935, and the "Homer in the Gloamin" in 1938, along with 236 career home runs and a career .297 batting average. Low points were his sore arm in 1929, which limited him to appearances in only 25 games, almost exclusively as a pinch hitter, and his firing as the Cubs' manager at the end of the 1940 season. The book also covers Hartnett's year with the New York Giants in 1941, his five-year Minor League managing career, and his life after baseball. William McNeil emphasizes throughout the book how Hartnett was known for his powerful throwing arm. He presents data to show that Hartnett routinely threw out a higher percentage of potential base stealers than the contemporary greats with whom he is most often compared, Bill Dickey and Mickey Cochrane. The author uses that information, along with Hartnett's frequent league leadership in putouts, assists, and fielding percentage to advance Hartnett's superiority over Dickey and Cochrane as an all-round player. McNeil is a cheerleader for Hartnett, but he presents a good case that Hartnett was essential to the Cubs' successes of that era and that Hartnett was perhaps the greatest catcher of his time. Sabermetric analysis in the eighth edition of Total Baseball appears to support McNeil's contention. While Hartnett's career .859 OPS trails Dickey's .868 and Cochrane's .897, Hartnett far exceeds them in fielding runs and leads them both in win shares and total player wins. The book contains sixty-five black-and-white photographs of Hartnett, his family, hometown scenes and teams, and Major League players of the era. At the back of the book are references, a three-page bibliography, and an index. In gathering information for the book, McNeil interviewed several of Hartnett's family members and acquaintances. He also cites a number of newspapers and other sources. In the first few chapters McNeil includes several references to an unpublished manuscript by James M. Murphy. Surprisingly, there is no mention of Murphy's seventy-seven-page book, The Gabby Hartnett Story: From a Mill Town to Cooperstown, published by Exposition Press in 1983. Overall, the book makes for enjoyable reading. There are a few instances of stories based on players' recollections, which one may wish the author had checked for veracity. That minor criticism aside, the book is well researched with much detail about games and pennant races during Hartnett's playing career. It is highly recommended to anyone wishing to learn more about Gabby Hartnett or the Chicago Cubs of the 1920s and 1930s. Copyright © 2008 the University of Nebraska Press
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.013 |
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".