Bibliographic record
Abstract
David J. Vaught. The Farmer's Game: Baseball in Rural America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 214 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Joel S. Franks Serious baseball historians have to wage a constant battle with two popular narratives of the sport's past. One narrative lovingly displays images of existent or demolished baseball urban cathedrals--Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium, and Ebbets Field. It has been over sixty year since anyone saw the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. But we can still see, in glorious black and white, the baseball history that was made there--Bobby Thomson's home run to send the Dodgers packing in 1951 and Willie Mays chasing down Vic Wertz's deep drive to center in 1954. The other narrative, perhaps in recent years best advanced by movies such as Field of Dreams and The Natural, articulates a pastoral vision of baseball--that the game is purer when played down on the farm, away from city bankers bent on dispossessing hard-working farmers and city gangsters intent on corrupting honest sons of the soil. David Vaught, a historian at Texas A&M University and a former undergraduate student of Jules Tygiel at San Francisco State, has developed a reputation as an expert in American agricultural history. Merging his background in the often harsh reality of agricultural history with a love of baseball, Vaught has given us The Farmer's Game, a critical, well-researched, and well-written analysis of the relationship between agrarian America and baseball. In the process, Vaught underscores what Larry Gerlach told readers of the Journal of Sport History in 1994: Much of what passes for baseball history concerns only major league baseball and is presented without qualification as through 'baseball and 'major league were synonymous. By Vaught's admission, The Farmer's Game is not the definitive account of American rural baseball. It consists of seven essays, including the introduction, on rural baseball at various times and in various parts of the United States. The introduction focuses on the Abner Doubleday myth and sets the scene for the other essays. Debunkers of the Doubleday myth stress baseball's urban origins. While Vaught hardly supports the notion that Doubleday invented baseball in the largely agrarian antebellum Cooperstown, he does remind us that rural people in villages like Cooperstown hit balls thrown at them and ran around bases years before the Civil War, and young Doubleday may, indeed, have been one of these early ballists. The six chapters then venture into the rural baseball played far away from Yankee Stadium's shadow, while moving from the antebellum era to contemporary times. The first chapter returns to a rural Cooperstown taking up early baseball while struggling with the early stages of capitalism's domination over agrarian life. The second chapter escorts us across the continent to post-Gold Rush California. …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.114 | 0.036 |
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".