Tumultuous Times in America's Game: From Jackie Robinson's Breakthrough to the War Over Free Agency by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Tumultuous Times in America's Game: From Jackie Robinson's Breakthrough to the War Over Free Agency by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte George Skornickel Bryan Soderholm-Difatte. Tumultuous Times in America's Game: From Jackie Robinson's Breakthrough to the War Over Free Agency. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 493 pp. Cloth, $40. In Tumultuous Times in America's Game: From Jackie Robinson's Breakthrough to the War Over Free Agency, Bryan Soderholm-Difatte provides a comprehensive examination of major developments and key figures in Major League Baseball from the integration of Jackie Robinson in 1947 to the owner-instigated catastrophic players' strike of 1994–95. In his chronological account of the game's progress, no stones are left unturned. Tumultuous Times in America's Game includes histories of each of the major league franchises, presented alongside Soderholm-Difatte's detailed examination of the controversies, development, and innovations from these significant decades in professional baseball. Recaps of several of baseball's most exciting pennant races round out the narrative, making this book a valuable read for fans and historians of the national pastime. The book's five sections break down topics that could be difficult to handle into parts that can easily stand alone. Part I covers the beginnings of integration, with Jackie Robinson, through the beginnings of the road to expansion. The relocation of the Braves, Browns and Athletics are covered in detail as well as an interesting section on the first wave of Latin players. Also included in the first section is a discussion of the Dodgers exceptional decade of baseball and the Yankees return to dynasty status. Written as it is in sections allows readers to select which period they wish to pursue according to their interests. The book continues with "Part II: The Last of the Old-Fashioned Pennant Races." Topics include the west [End Page 147] coast Giants-Dodgers rivalry, the 1964 Phillies epic collapse, the end of the Yankees so-called Forever Dynasty, and the Amazin' Mets of 1969. "Part III: Shifting Balances in the Game and the Business of Baseball" focuses on the implementation of the designated hitter rule, the domination of the Baltimore Orioles and the Oakland Athletics, the Big Red Machine, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Soderholm-Difatte also covers the introduction of Marvin Miller to the baseball scene. As with other parts, this section covers all of the material in a complete but concise manner. Continuing in "Section IV: Baseball's (Almost) 'All In It To Win' Decade" we get a discussion of the divisional battles in both the American League and National League. Concluding with "Part V: Baseball at the Brink" with the Pete Rose affair, the A's "Roid Rage," the shift in the role of the relief ace, and collusion, Soderholm-Difatte gives a complete but manageable look at the period addressed. He chronicles a time of substantial challenges that upended more than half a century of the tradition that was major league baseball, including histories of each of the franchises alongside detailed examination of the innovations and developments from these significant times in the game's history. All of this succeeds in making Tumultuous Times in America's Game a valuable read for historians and fans alike. It is a wonderful companion to Soderholm-Difatte's America's Game: A History of Major League Baseball Through World War II. Both books give a concise yet complete picture of the time periods in professional baseball they cover. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press
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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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.016 |
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".