The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915 (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915 Christopher Keshock Robert Peyton Wiggins . The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. 362 pp. Cloth, $49.95 When the newly proposed United Football League was presented for public scrutiny in 2009, its innovative features (e.g., Thursday and Friday night games) and propensity to go head-to-head with the firmly established National Football League raised many eyebrows. And yet, almost one hundred years earlier the upstart Federal League of Base Ball Clubs set many precedents for the outlaw leagues in professional sports that followed. Wiggins's detailed account of the Federal League (1914-15) chronicles the history of this ill-fated venture for baseball fans of today. Effectively combining colorful descriptions of club owners, front office personnel, coaches, and players, along with selected game summaries, Wiggins presents an eminently readable history of a failed enterprise. In his account of the creation and eventual demise of an organization that brought both immediate and long-term changes to Organized Baseball—changes still being felt almost one hundred years later—Wiggins has provided a working model for those who would take on an established major league. These portraits of wealthy men and their desire to become baseball magnates foreshadow current owners of sports franchises driven by the profit motive and psychological needs to be recognized and even admired by sports fans. Wiggins examines how other iconic baseball figures, such as Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, were biased against the upstart Federal League. One of the interesting features of this book is the nostalgic, descriptive language used in the deadball era. For example, Otto Knabe, new Federal League signee, was appraised as a player who was "out to get all the money in this one and one can hardly blame him. . . . He is a manly little fellow, a good ball player and a credit to the profession" (35). Charlie Weegham, backer of the Chicago club, was described as "an illustration for a collar ad—you know—the sleek fellow with goose-grease in his hair" (32). Benjamin Kauff, known [End Page 167] as the "Ty Cobb of the Feds," was "On deck with his usual electrifying performances, making a clean theft of home once, besides running wild in the outfield and bagging balls originally labeled 'hits'" (139). Wiggins's The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs won the 2010 Larry Ritter Award, presented by the Deadball Era Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research for the best book on the deadball era published in the previous calendar year. While Wiggins's book is more descriptive than analytical, it is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the history of early twentieth-century baseball. Copyright © 2011 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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".