Going Back to Kansas City: An Interview with Ira McKnight
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Going Back to Kansas CityAn Interview with Ira McKnight Emily R. Rutter (bio) and Ira McKnight Ira McKnight was born August 5, 1935, in Trenton, Tennessee. He spent the majority of his childhood in South Bend, Indiana, where he later began his career playing for the South Bend Globetrotters. By the time McKnight became a professional player, Jackie Robinson had already made his momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers (April 15, 1947), but opportunities for black players were delimited by quota systems and racial biases more generally. McKnight also suffered an injury to his finger, which hindered his chances of playing on a big-league stage. With the exception of brief stints with Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees minor-league teams, McKnight spent his prime playing in the Negro Leagues, mainly for the Kansas City Monarchs (1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960). After the Negro Leagues folded, he barnstormed with the Satchel Paige All-Stars and spent many rewarding years gracing Canadian fields with his skills as both a catcher and a formidable hitter. Like many talented players, McKnight has never received the fanfare he deserves, but he nonetheless stands as a living testament to the sacrifices that African American men in particular made to play the game they loved. The following interview took place on two separate occasions in September 2016, at Mr. McKnight's temporary home, a rehabilitation center on the north side of Indianapolis. ER: When did you start playing baseball? IM: I first played pick-up on a field in my neighborhood in South Bend, Indiana. I was the only black boy on the team. I started catching. When I went [End Page 150] to Oliver Junior High, I started playing other sports too. In 1949, we won the championship in all of the sports I played: baseball, basketball, football, and track. When I was in high school, I let my grades slip. My mother wanted to make sure I finished high school, so she sent me to live with my grandma in Trenton, Tennessee, which was a different experience. All I did down there was play basketball; I was a good shooter, but I knew because of my height I wasn't going nowhere. I just played to stay in shape. Meanwhile, I was staying with my grandparents, picking cotton, using an outdoor toilet. I finished high school in 1953 and went back to South Bend. I started catching for the South Bend Globetrotters. ER: Were the Globetrotters an independent team? IM: Yeah, they were a local team. We had two black teams in South Bend. We had a pretty good team but we couldn't really beat anybody except for teams around Indiana. We'd go down to Argos, Plymouth, and Lapel and beat up on them. We couldn't beat Rochester or some team like that. I quit the Globetrotters in 1955 and went over to the South Bend White Sox, and I was the only black on the team. We played in a different league and had a good team. In 1955, William Sheridan—they called him Pop—signed me to a contract with the Chicago White Sox. I went down to Hollywood, Florida, but all I did was warm the pitchers up. Then, they sent me to Evansville, Indiana, where they had a farm team. Johnny Romano was the catcher, so I didn't really get a chance to play. I was still just warming up the pitchers. ER: So, when did you begin playing in the Negro Leagues? IM: In 1956, I saw an ad in the Chicago Defender that they were looking for players for the Kansas City Monarchs. I tried out in Chicago, and then headed to Birmingham to train. Walter Bond was my roommate. I got this [points to his broken finger] in 1956. A batter swung and hit my finger. I missed a month of the season that year and went home to South Bend. It don't bother me; it's just crooked. In 1957, that was my best year in the Negro Leagues. ER: When we talk about the Negro Leagues, the conversation is usually focused on the time before integration. So...
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".