Northsiders: Essays on the History and Culture of the Chicago Cubs (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Northsiders: Essays on the History and Culture of the Chicago Cubs Dave Ogden Gerald C. Wood and Andrew Hazucha, eds. Northsiders: Essays on the History and Culture of the Chicago Cubs. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 229 pp. Paper, $39.95. This eclectic collection of essays looks at the history, culture and characters that have branded the Chicago Cubs as the epitome of the ever-struggling franchise that reminds us that to be a baseball fan is to know humility and disappointment. The nineteen essays are divided into five sections. The first section, titled "The Cubs, Wrigley Field and P. K. Wrigley," entails a history of the franchise, the stadium, the hapless management of Philip K. Wrigley, who inherited the Cubs from his father William in 1932. Wrigley's ill-fated experiment with the "College of Coaches" and his resistance to putting lights at Wrigley Field are two of his decisions (among others) cited by essayists that kept the Cubs among the "also-rans." The second section, "Race, Ethnicity and the Cubs," deals with the Cubs' reluctance to integrate, with Gene Baker and Ernie Banks breaking the club's color line in the early 1950s. One of the essays discusses how Chicago's African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, devoted much of its baseball coverage to the White Sox, which had integrated years before the Cubs with the signing of Minnie Minoso. The Defender all but ignored the Cubs. The book's third section, "The Sociology of Cubdom," discusses the Cubs' influence on fiction and the theater. Curt Smith provides a brief history of Cubs broadcasters, and other essayists discuss the ambiance of attending a game at Wrigley Field. The fourth section, "Players as Icons," pays tribute to such Cubs legends as Hack Wilson, Gabby Hartnett and Ron Santo. The last section, the "Epilogue," consists of a single essay by Rick Moser, who makes a convincing argument why Cubs fans should find joy in their team's hundred-year absence from the World Series. [End Page 170] Most of the essays are historically grounded, but some of the most thought-provoking passages in the book are by essayists who have trouble keeping their personal trials and tribulations as Cubs fans out of their writing. Terry Barr completely surrenders to that temptation as he relates his personal odyssey to find former Cubs pitcher Ken Holtzman. Barr does not find Holtzman, but he uses his quest to reflect on his (and Holtzman's) Jewish heritage and how that heritage has prepared him to be a Cubs fan. Barr says, "I can't help but feel that if the Jewish people can wait over 2,000 years to attain their most cherished dream, then the Cubs can endure a few more 'next years'" (116). The book constantly reminds the reader of the "spirituality" of the franchise, beginning with the ground on which Wrigley Field was erected. The stadium was built in 1914 on the site of a former Lutheran seminary, as explained in the first segment of the book. A common theme among many essays is the sanctity by which the Cubs faithful follow their team. Those essays focus as much on Cubs fans as they do on the team and its personnel. The "Bleacher Bums" get special attention. In his essay, James Davis discusses how the ideology of that particular set of fans was transformed into a popular theatrical production that faithfully portrayed some of the nuances and expectations of those who regularly sit in Wrigley's bleachers. On the other hand, Ron Kates laments the corporatization of the Cubs and how the owner, the Tribune Company, has attempted to make Wrigley Field a tourist destination, neglecting the core of Cubs fans who made the Bleacher Bums (and long-suffering Wrigley Field spectators in general) a community all its own. Holly Swyers picks up on Kates's theme when she describes the demography and the scorekeeping habits of the Bleacher Bums. The "regulars" among the Bums, she writes, form subgroups based on where they usually sit in the bleachers (i.e., a left-field group, a center-field group, and a right-field group). Regulars generally became regulars by one of...
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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) | 0.011 | 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".