God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen by Mitchell Nathanson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen by Mitchell Nathanson Michael Haupert Mitchell Nathanson. God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 393 pp. Cloth, $36.50. Mitchell Nathanson does the seemingly impossible: he gets inside the head of one of baseball's most famous head cases, Dick/Richie/Rick/Sleepy Allen. Or at least he attempts to. Whether he succeeds or not may never be known, since Allen himself never seems to be sure what exactly is going on in his head. Nathanson, without benefit of an interview with his subject, digs deeply into what made Dick Allen tick. He traces Allen's childhood, Minor League Baseball struggles with racism in Little Rock in the early 1960s, and rocky Major League Baseball career, during which he battled with the fans, teammates, and most often management, to varying degrees and levels of success. In some ways Allen was a maverick, in others, a victim of his circumstances, and still others, a sullen, discontented, but extremely talented ballplayer, who succeeded in burning bridges that quite possibly led to an early exit from the game and hindered his chances at election to the Hall of Fame. [End Page 252] That lack of an interview is the weak link in the book. All of the attempts by Nathanson to explain Dick Allen's behavior and thought process, to understand his actions and what motivated him, are only conjecture, because they rely on secondary sources, not on any first-person testimonials. To be sure, he does have quotes from Allen in the form of various interviews and his autobiography, but we never get concrete answers to the questions raised by Nathanson. The first and foremost of which is the overarching theme of the book: "Was Dick the cause of his problems or merely misunderstood? … Who was responsible for the tragedy that was Dick Allen?" (4). And yet, in the end that may not even matter. As Nathanson documents so well, Allen often contradicted himself. Sometimes he admitted to changing his answers intentionally. Sometimes they changed over time, and often they were never proffered at all. If you are interested in Dick Allen the ballplayer, and covet stories of his on-field exploits, complete with details of his heroics and a season-by-season overview of his career, you will need to look elsewhere. Little actual baseball action takes place in this book. Instead, each season is a backdrop providing another glimpse into the mind of Dick Allen. Each year gives us another example of how a baseball executive or fan base reacted to Allen, tried to tame him, explain him, and even love him, and how, one after the other, they failed, tired of him, and sent him packing. From Philadelphia to St. Louis, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, back to Philadelphia, and finally to a sad and relatively quiet end in Oakland. The lack of baseball action in a baseball biography is not an indictment of the quality of Nathanson's offering. Quite to the contrary, this is an excellent biography. And probably because it does not merely recite seasonal accomplishments and repeat box scores. Instead, Nathanson tries to understand the man who was the ballplayer. One criticism I will make is that an appendix with Allen's career statistics would have been nice. It would have saved me several trips to Baseball Reference.com. But the approach works. Baseball was Allen's vehicle, but the focus here is on the driver—Allen himself, who was much more than just a powerful and feared right-handed bat, a Rookie of the Year, a seven-time All-Star, and an MVP. And much more interesting. I must admit that early on I wondered what I was in for. Nathanson wonders, "why wasn't a black superstar such as Dick, as difficult as he could be at times, accorded the same deference by the working press and fan base as were the white superstars of his era" (4)? Really? This was 1960s America. That question will even seem ludicrous to some people if it were asked about the racial environment today, much...
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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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.011 |
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".