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Record W236429999

Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend

2011· article· en· W236429999 on OpenAlex
Ron Briley

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueNine · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican Sports and Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiographyLegendWitnessRacismWhite (mutation)AuntSpanish Civil WarArt historyHistorySociologyArtLawGender studiesPolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

James G. Hirsch. Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend. New York: Scribner, 2010. 628 pp. Cloth, $30.00. In this authorized biography, James G. Hirsch, the author of a fine history of the 1924 Tulsa race riot and a biography of Rubin Hurricane Carter, provides an opportunity for the enigmatic Willie Mays to present his story. Often perceived by his critics as a gifted athlete who failed to use his privileged position to address civil rights issues, Mays asserts that in his own quiet, unassuming manner he did advance the race, letting his play on the field do the talking. Relying upon both print and interview sources to describe ballgames which he never had the opportunity to witness, Hirsch does an excellent job of chronicling Mays's exploits on the field. Nevertheless, it is the voice of Mays as a man explaining his approach to integrating a white world, a topic upon which the ballplayer has usually remained silent, that makes this biography a unique contribution to the literature on baseball and race. Hirsch argues that Mays embodied the assimilation philosophy and approach of Booker T. Washington. Born on May 6,1931, Willie Howard Mays Jr. grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, near notoriously racist Birmingham. His parents, Cat Mays and Annie Satterwhite, never married. Young Willie was essentially raised by his aunt Sarah May, while Cat provided for the extended family from his wages in the steel mills and playing baseball. In addition to teaching his son the game of baseball, Cat instructed Willie to avoid conflict with Southern whites. Hirsch concludes, Long after the civil rights movement had reached the South, Willie Mays continued to embrace those lessons of hard work and self-improvement as well as compliance and accommodation (21). Willie also internalized his father's warnings about the dangers that tobacco and alcohol posed for an athlete, and he neither smoked nor drank in his adult life. As a high school student, Mays focused upon athletics, but in 1947 he joined the professional Birmingham Black Barons, bringing his amateur career to a halt. With the Barons, Mays grew under the tutelage of Lorenzo Davis, who heeded the advice of Cat Mays that his son responded to praise and encouragement rather than criticism. With the Black Barons, young Mays learned to play the game of baseball with an intensity and flair; a good ballplayer was also an entertainer with obligations to the paying customers. In addition, Mays told Hirsch that his experience with the Barons taught him that defiance was self-defeating. The players did suffer racial indignities from whites, but they enjoyed a privileged position within the black community. At nineteen, Mays was signed by the New York Giants, and in 1950 he was the only black player with the Trenton Giants of the Class B Interstate League. Although he was subject to racial taunts by opposing players and fans, his work ethic and outstanding play earned the respect of his teammates. Mays asserts that the solidarity of a baseball team was able to trump racial considerations, and he enjoyed an outstanding season with the Trenton franchise, hitting.353. Mays opened the 1951 season with the Class AAA Minneapolis Millers, but on May 24 the young outfielder was summoned to join the struggling New York Giants. He was welcomed as a savior by Giants owner Horace Stoneham, with whom he established a friendly but paternalistic relationship. Mays was also embraced by legendary manager Leo Durocher, who understood that the ballplayer responded best to encouragement and assumed the role of a father figure to his young protege. Although some perceived the relationship to resemble that of a slave owner who enjoyed showing off his most treasured property, Mays adored Durocher. Mays needed the steady leadership of Durocher during a rookie season in which he sometimes stumbled at the plate. Hitting .274 with twenty home runs, Mays was spectacular in the field, leading the Giants to the 1951 National League pennant and earning the Rookie of the Year Award. …

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.582
Threshold uncertainty score0.894

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1070.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.043
GPT teacher head0.188
Teacher spread0.145 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it