They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen—The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers by Jason Turbow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen—The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers by Jason Turbow Frank G. Houdek Jason Turbow. They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen—The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 384 pp. Cloth, $28.00. In his newest book, They Bled Blue, Jason Turbow, co-author with Michael Duca of The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench- Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime (2010), tells the story of a 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers team that is largely overshadowed by the dramatic ninth-inning home run which a gimpy-legged Kirk Gibson hit off Oakland reliever Dennis Eckersley seven years later to inspire a surprising Dodger victory in the 1988 World Series. Although a self-described diehard San Francisco Giants fan, Turbow seeks to rescue the memory of the earlier team, also an underdog World Series champion, by recounting its improbable season. He begins with the emergence of a pitching phenom who sparked a baseball phenomenon: Fernando Valenzuela's 8-0 start, including seven complete games and five shutouts, led to "Fernandomania" and Rookie of the [End Page 260] Year and Cy Young awards for the twenty-year-old from Mexico. He moves to the story of the storied Dodger infield—Steve Garvey, Davy Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey set a record for longevity by playing together for eight-plus years, 1973–81—finally experiencing baseball's ultimate, a World Series title, after losing in three earlier attempts. But the centerpiece of Turbow's story is the team's rah-rah manager, Tommy Lasorda, whose office walls "were covered to capacity with photos of celebrities, athletes, and the pope" (16), including one devoted solely to Frank Sinatra. On a team with strong leaders (Reggie Smith and Dusty Baker stand out) and playful personalities (topped by Jay Johnstone and Jerry Reuss), Lasorda was still the dominant Dodger, "the one figure [who] managed to tower over all of it. … The sport's most boisterous, overt, and downright infectious manager was the perfect guy for the job he ended up with, providing an enviable blend of acumen, enthusiasm, and unvarnished loyalty" (327). The book is littered with Lasorda anecdotes and stories; even in someone else's profile, he is often the punchline (e.g., describing the longstanding grudge which Yankee slugger Bob Watson held against the Dodger scout who ignored him after his Los Angeles high school won the city championship, Turbow tells us in a slow reveal that the erring scout was none other than … Tommy Lasorda). Turbow describes the up and down Dodger regular season, split in two by a player strike: winning the National League (NL) West division in the first half with a league leading record of 36-21, but posting only a middling 27-26 in the second half. (Readers interested in more than just the Dodger version of the 1981 season, particularly the issues behind the labor strife, should consult a fine book by Jeff Katz, Split Season: 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball [2015]). But he spends considerably more time, rightfully so, on the Dodger post-season, beginning with the first-ever postseason divisional playoff round against the Houston Astros. The team came from two games down in the five-game series to defeat the Astros, an especially gratifying victory since the same Astros had kept them from the 1980 postseason by winning a tiebreakers game after the Dodgers had swept them in a season-ending three-game series to secure an improbable tie for the best record in the NL West. In another thrilling series well described by Turbow, the Dodgers came back from another deficit in the subsequent NLCS, forever breaking the hearts of Expo fans (see Danny Gallagher, Blue Monday: The Expos, the Dodgers, and the Home Run That Changed Everything (2018)), by winning the final two games in Montreal. Batting against Expos ace Steve Rogers with two outs in the ninth inning of the deciding fifth game, Rick Monday, the first player chosen [End Page 261] in baseball...
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".