Bibliographic record
Abstract
Charles Fountain. Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training. New York: Oxford, 2009. 311 pp. Paper, $24.95. Charles Fountain brings the history of baseball's annual rites of spring to life in the pages of his book, Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training. With this book, the history of spring training has been chronicled and the highlights and lowlights exposed. This is not a history book in the sense of a straight chronological recitation of events, although Fountain does follow a fairly chronological timeline; instead, he deals with major issues and events covering the period starting in the 188os and completes the story in 2009. Fountain begins by exploring the early traditions of spring training and refutes the persistent story that spring training began in the nineteenth century with Cap Anson taking his Chicago White Stockings to Hot Springs, Arkansas. He notes that the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Stockings started their 1870 season in New Orleans and played several games in the south before heading north. Fountain gives Ned Hanlon credit for creating the modern concept of spring training due to his decision in the 189os to take his Baltimore Orioles south to work on fundamentals and get in shape for the season. Several themes are interwoven though the text: the reputation of early baseball players and how that changed during the 1920s due to the presence of Babe Ruth and other baseball greats; the role of racism in the South, particularly Florida, and how major-league teams reacted to racism after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947; the ongoing struggles of Florida towns and cities to attract and keep major-league teams for spring training; and finally, the rise of other spring training locales, particularly Arizona and to a lesser extent the threat posed by Las Vegas. By the 1920s, Florida had become a favored destination for major-league teams. There were still teams that went elsewhere in the south (Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and California). Fountain notes that teams were rather peripatetic during this time until Al Lang in St. Petersburg, Florida, realized that it would be a great benefit for St. Petersburg to have a major-league team conduct their spring training in the city. In 1925, Lang convinced the New York Yankees to come to St. Petersburg, and a longstanding relationship was established. After the Yankees' decision to stay in St. Petersburg, other cities and towns in Florida began courting major-league teams. The story of spring training would not be complete without a thorough discussion of the racism inflicted on black baseball players in the south during spring training. Fountain writes at length about the difficulties faced by players and teams in Florida following the integration of the major leagues in 1947. Noting that most major-league clubs were in the north and Midwest (St. …
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
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".