The Arrival of the American League: Ban Johnson and the 1901 Challenge to National League Monopoly (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Arrival of the American League: Ban Johnson and the 1901 Challenge to National League Monopoly Harry Jebsen Jr Warren N. Wilbert. The Arrival of the American League: Ban Johnson and the 1901 Challenge to National League Monopoly. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 240 pp. Paper, $29.95. In the heady entrepreneurial days of 1900, when the extremes of business competition and the vastness of trust activity seemed rampant, Ban Johnson and his confederates—most notably, Charles Comiskey—dove into the stormy waters to challenge the supremacy of the National League. Other challengers had tried in the 1880s and early 1890s to break the strangle-hold that the Spalding-controlled league had on baseball—the American Association, the Union Association, and the Players League attempted to join the upper echelons in the baseball business but had not been successful in their challenges. The American League, according to Wilbert, was successful in their efforts of 1900, 1901, and 1902 due to divisions within the National League, league president Nicholas Young’s poor leadership, and the brash, self-confident, and well-orchestrated efforts of Johnson, as well as Comiskey, Connie Mack, and Charles Somers—all of whom recognized the opportunity to profit by aligning the American League with the older league and placing it in a position to be a business success. Wilbert helps readers to better understand the dynamics of this move: the critical importance of relocating Western League franchises in National League cities in 1900 and the transformation of the Western League into the American League with major-league status. While much of this transformation was symbolic, by 1901 it included raiding the National League of much of its strong talent and some of its leadership. Clark Griffith’s move from the west to the south side of Chicago and Napoleon Lajoie’s leap in Philadelphia [End Page 146] from the National League to the American League and then on to Cleveland provided pillars for an emerging institution. Wilbert also handles the tempestuous relationship between Johnson and the difficult John McGraw, whose Baltimore franchise gave the conservative Johnson more headaches than all the other franchises combined. The reader gets a good picture of Johnson and his goals, a decent understanding of New York’s central role in stabilizing the new venture, and less successful portraits of the parts played by Comiskey, Somers, and Griffith in making this venture permanent. Simply structured in a chronological fashion, each chapter is divided into two parts: the first outlines the most important events on the field, as the American League staged good races in each of its first three years, while the second part follows a chronological picture of games, play movements, and critical events in the founding of the American League and in its eventual acceptance as a partner by the National League. 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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.005 |
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".