Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tim Wendel. Summer of '68: The Season that Changed Baseball--and America--Forever. Boston: Da Capo, 2012. 257 pp. Cloth, $25.00. I came to Tim Wendel's Summer of '68 expecting a nostalgia trip, and I was not disappointed. I had been disappointed by Wendel's previous book High Heat, a desultory search for the fastest of fastballs. But I like his novel Castro's Curveball, an entertaining semi-fantasy set, like Summer of '68, in more innocent times. I was certainly innocent in 1968. I was nine years old. It was the first baseball season I followed with conscious clarity from start to finish, complete with baseball cards, box scores, and Who's Who in Baseball. Could Wendel recreate that magic summer? It was a highly unusual summer, both for baseball and for America. I have had to remind myself ever since that pitchers don't win thirty games every year (Denny McLain) or record ERA of 1.12 (Bob Gibson), and that the fabric of American life isn't annually threatened by war, assassination, riots, and bizarre Presidential elections. Wendel conveys the improbable qualities of 1968, and its importance as a cultural watershed. In some ways, Summer of '68 is as desultory as High Heat. Transitions among the different strands of the baseball narrative are loose. Politics and other sports make random appearances. The story of the '68 season was told more analytically by William Mead in Two Spectacular Seasons (1990), with an emphasis on the Year of the Pitcher. Wendel addresses the dominance of pitching in 1968, but it's a secondary theme. His main interest is in the two clubs that drove toward a World Series showdown, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. In particular, he examines what the Tigers meant to their strife-beleaguered city. Wendel weaves together original interviews, quotations from secondary sources, and press reports into a seamless narrative. This is a difficult literary task, and the technical quality of his execution is high. Summer of '68 is not a book that reveals its author at work very much (High Heat is quite the opposite). Wendel makes only a rare appearance or two in his own voice, talking about his direct experience of people and places. For the most part, you are transported back to 1968 by the voices of the men who took part. The heroes are predictable ones: Gibson, McLain, Mickey Lolich, Lou Brock. Wendel does find one unlikely angle in the perspective of Jon Warden. A rookie relief pitcher for the '68 Tigers, Warden had just turned twenty-two when the World Series started, and had posted an ERA of 3.62 during the regular season, when anything over 3.00 was worse than average. He became the only player on either roster to sit on the bench for the entire Series. …
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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) | 0.023 | 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".