Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leonard was born in Moscow, Russia, not Idaho, in 1923 and came to the United States to New York City with his family in 1928. New York, as you know, was then, much more than now, a center of America's sport and culture, and Leonard was certainly drawn to it. In 1948, two years after receiving a B.A. from Columbia University, he joined the sports staff at the New York Herald Tribune. In 1954 he moved to the New York Post, and in 1963, to the New York Times. In 1979 he heeded Horace Greeley's advice, moving to Palo Alto, California, as a sports editor and columnist for the Peninsula Times Tribune. He assumed emeritus status in 1984 but continued to write for the Times Tribune and, since 1993, for the Oakland Tribune. Leonard Koppett has long been my favorite sports journalist for the very reasons that he enjoys preeminence in his profession. From 1964 to 1984 I devoured his weekly columns in Sporting News. In a profession dominated by personal opinion and anecdotal evidence, he approaches his craft as a teacher and an educator. I have read most of his twelve books, four of which have been revised and reissued, and they share the same characteristics. Many people know a lot about sports; Leonard Koppett understands sports. He has an uncanny knack for offering in new ways commonsense insights that prompt readers to say, Of course, that's obvious. Why didn't I think of that? For example, A Thinking Man's Guide to Baseball, which came out in 1967, remains, I think, the best explanation of the game on the field and behind the scenes. If you haven't read that book and you think you understand baseball, pick it up and you will learn a lot. Essence of the Game Is Deception explores the essentials of a fundamentally flawed sport, basketball, and Man in the Dugout offers a revealing examination of the personalities and styles of baseball's most famous skippers by tracing their lineage to the managerial Stengel, Mack, McGraw, and Rickey. For anyone desiring to comprehend America's obsession with sports and journalism's role in stating it, Sport's Illusion, Sport's Reality, recently issued by the University of Illinois Press, remains one of those rare must-reads. And, of course, his Concise History of Major League Baseball I think is the most comprehensive and serviceable history of the subject. I'm not the only one impressed with Leonard Koppett. His peers elected him chairman of the New York Chapter of the Baseball's Writers' Association of America, of the New York Football Writers' Association, and of the Metropolitan New York Basketball Writers' Association. He received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award in 1992 and the Hank Gowdy Award in 1994, thereby becoming the only journalist to become enshrined in both the baseball and the basketball Halls of Fame. I am delighted that Leonard agreed to speak to us tonight, and so will you be, so please welcome the thinking fan's sports journalist and baseball historian, Leonard Koppett. JOURNALIST I am a journalist, not an academic, so as a journalist I have certain degrees of freedom that academics do not. I found out very early in the game that the way you make a logical argument is to ignore everything that doesn't fit, and the same goes for research. I wanted to take a little different tack with you tonight and discuss what all of us have been reading and hearing and talking ourselves about baseball for the last ten or twelve years--what terrible things have gone wrong and what are we going to do to fix it. My take is the opposite of that. I think baseball has never been as good as it is, has never had as good a time as it is having, right now. That's why I made this little title that we have: The Golden Age That We Have: Who's Knocking It and Why. That's the tack I want to take. Now, again, I have done no research. I'm not going to give you any factual backing for what I'm going to say. These are conclusions, not the laying out, as you have been hearing in these papers today, the evidence for the conclusions. …
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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) | 0.003 | 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".