Bibliographic record
Abstract
Doug Wilson. Bird: Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013. 306 pp. Cloth, $29.99. Those who observed Mark Fidrych's amazing year of 1976 will never see its like again. Those who did not can be forgiven if they believe the rest of us exaggerate. At the beginning of the movie Gandhi, the narrator says something like, In the future, people will have difficulty believing that such as man existed. Thanks to Doug Wilson, they will believe in The Bird. This kid pitcher from rural Massachusetts barely made an impact on scouts, yet improved steadily until he reached the starting rotation of the woebegone Detroit Tigers. He became not only the best pitcher in baseball, but among the most famous and most beloved men in America. That's the story any baseball fan who observed it knows and remembers. It's all here, including insightful reasons why the times were right for The Bird to fly from local hero to national phenomenon. Wilson doesn't just tell the story that everyone saw. He also tells the inside baseball story of this once marvelous pitcher's rise and fall. Unlike many baseball writers, Wilson has a working knowledge of how the game is played. He researches like a scholar and writes like a journalist. He charts, with compassion and acuity, the sad path from Fidrych's wonder year to his professional demise at age twenty-eight. After 1976, The Bird won exactly ten major-league games. Fortunately, Wilson was able to interview Ralph Houk, the Tigers' manager in 1976, months before he died at age 90 in 2010. With vivid memory and profound understanding, Houk shares why he believes Fidrych was so successful and also speculates on why he got hurt. Many fans and historians blame Houk for over-working a twenty-one-year-old arm that threw dozens of elbow-bending sliders to the tune of 250 innings and twenty-four complete games. Houk himself believed the answer was more complex and finally, probably, unknowable. Wilson pinpoints the exact pitch after which Fidyrich's arm went dead, never to return. Yes, it followed all those complete games, but it also followed a knee injury sustained the following year. Pitching a baseball is stressful and complex. Why successful pitchers fail is equally so. No matter how much or how little one knows about pitching, one will learn something from the way this book unpacks the mystery of Fidrych's arm. Yet the book's value is not merely that it captures The Bird, either the media sensation, the national craze, or the All-Star pitcher. …
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.010 |
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".