Here's the Catch: A Memoir of the Miracle Mets and More by Ron Swoboda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Here's the Catch: A Memoir of the Miracle Mets and More by Ron Swoboda George Skornickel Ron Swoboda. Here's the Catch: A Memoir of the Miracle Mets and More. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019. 240 pp. Cloth, $27.99. There are currently several books on the market commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the York Mets victory over the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series. One excellent volume is Ron Swoboda's Here's the Catch: A Memoir of the Miracle Mets and More. Swoboda, a former Met, was the perpetrator of the iconic catch for the Miracle Mets in the 1969 World Series, a moment which is illustrated on the book's cover. A beloved player of Met fans, Swoboda has written, as the title suggests, "a memoir and more." He writes both of his baseball career and a personal view into his life outside of baseball. Swoboda has written an engaging account of his life and his time with the Mets in a wonderful conversational manner. He is a tough guy who can really write, peppering his writing with quotes from the likes of Langston Hughes. He can be sentimental as well as funny. Nothing is held back, not for his teammates, his competitors, or himself. The book begins with a look back to Game Four of the 1969 World Series. Swoboda takes readers into his mind as to what he was thinking at the top of the ninth with the tying Baltimore run on third base. He compares Shea Stadium to the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare and the constant motion of the fans to a Jackson Pollock painting. He skillfully describes, "the Catch," with which he recorded the third out of the Mets' win. Regarding his personal life, Swoboda relates stories of his Chinese Grandad, who was a cook. At the stove, Grandad always sipped from a small glass which supposedly held tea. The tea actually turned out to be VO. The wild card on [End Page 273] his mother's side was Grandpa Wong; his uncles played this role on his father's side of the family. His uncle George worked at the morgue, providing Ron with several more entertaining escapades. In college he says he technically majored in physical education, but actually majored in baseball and minored in Phys. Ed. In college, at the University of Maryland, he met a girl with flaming red hair that he said Stevie Wonder would have noticed (29). The captivating redhead was his future wife, Cecilia. He then enters his professional years, highlighting his at bats against St. Louis Cardinals great Bob Gibson and Los Angeles Dodger legend Sandy Koufax. Swoboda relates a humorous anecdote about Casey Stengel. He knew that Casey could spell his name correctly. He wrote it on his lineup card a few times, but when Casey spoke to him he called him "Saboda." However, when Casey signed a photo for Ron's mother he wrote, "To Mrs. Swoboda, but you can see where he first left off the 'w' and then wrote over it" (45). Swoboda also discusses his time in Puerto Rico playing for the Cagues Creoles and the harrowing rides on the narrow mountain roads on the team bus. Then there was his trip with Bowie Kuhn, Joe DiMaggio and Larry Jackson on a USO trip to Vietnam, which included a harrowing mission with the Green Berets. Swoboda progresses to the New York Mets' magical 1969 season. Through his eyes, readers follow the Mets from Opening Day, April 18, 1969, through the team's early struggles, their winning streaks, and the trade for Donn Clendennon. Swoboda discusses the immediate impact Clendennon had on the team as he platooned with Ed Kranepool at first base. Fighting for first place, they faced important series with the Dodgers, Giants and Padres on a west coast sweep. The Mets finally reached the playoffs against the Atlanta Braves on September 24. After a victorious series against the Braves, it was on to Baltimore to face the Orioles in the World Series. Swoboda's recounting of the games is very detailed and entertaining. The remainder of Here's the Catch deals with Swoboda's...
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.013 |
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".