Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball by Dan Taylor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball by Dan Taylor Jon C. Stott Dan Taylor. Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Cloth, $38.00. The story of the Hollywood Stars, one of the most successful mid-twentieth century Pacific Coast League teams, is told in Dan Taylor's Lights, Camera, [End Page 284] Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball. The team had been playing in the movie capital for a season when, in late 1938, it was purchased by a group led by Bob Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby Restaurant, an establishment frequented by movie stars. Cobb enlisted such motion picture celebrities as director Cecil B. DeMille and actors Bing Crosby, George Burns, and Gene Autry as investors. During the first ten seasons of the Cobb group's ownership, the baseball team earned the nickname "Terrible Twinks," finishing in the second division eight times and making the playoffs only twice. However, beginning in 1945, they became one of the city's most popular entertainment options, drawing over three hundred thousand spectators for nine consecutive seasons, including over half a million fans three times. Taylor chronicles each of these dismal seasons. If the on-field performances of the home team were frequently less than stellar, the venue, the newly built Gilmore Field and the fans who filled the box seats were not. The stadium was state-of-the art for the time. There were special box seat areas for the celebrities, two ladies' lounges, excellent field lights, and an electric scoreboard. Fans could enjoy non-baseball promotions, a variety of concessions, and star gazing, not at players but at such luminaries as Joe E. Brown, Ronald Reagan, and Humphrey Bogart. Beginning in 1949, the course of the Stars on the field and in the business office changed. That year, former major league player and manager and later the team's radio announcer, Fred Haney, was named manager of the Stars. He engineered an affiliation agreement with Branch Rickey, then with the Brooklyn Dodgers and later with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Over the next five seasons, they would win three pennants. Irv Noren (1949), Johnny Lindell (1952), and Dale Long (1953) were named MVPs. By 1956, Rickey, who had become part of the Stars' ownership group, basically controlled the team, whose focus had become the development of talent for the Pirates. One of the young stars was future Hall of Famer Bill Mazeroski, who played eighty games for Hollywood before being called up midway through the 1956 season. While the Hollywood Stars were piling up successes on the field and grooming future major leaguers, Cobb and other Pacific Coast League owners were on a quest to transform their circuit into a major league. In 1952, the league achieved the status of Open Classification, one step above Triple A, but not quite major league. It was agreed among the owners that no team would enter into an affiliation with a major league club and that major league teams could not draft players owned by Pacific Coast League teams. The Stars didn't observe the first part of the agreement, being affiliated with Pittsburgh during each of the Open Classification years. [End Page 285] However, these actions took place as attendance in all the minor leagues was rapidly declining. Hollywood went from a season's total of just over 500,000 in 1949 to 166,000 in 1956. At the same time, three struggling major league teams relocated to Triple A cities. It began to seem as though acquiring an existing major league team would be the way Los Angeles and San Francisco would make it to the majors. In 1958, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to California. The Pacific Coast League reverted to Triple A status, and the Hollywood Stars were sold and moved to Salt Lake City. Taylor's history of the Hollywood Stars is thoroughly researched. Not only did he pour through reels of microfilm of the Los Angeles Times and the archives of The Sporting News but he also conducted several dozen interviews, many with former members of the Hollywood team. The book moves...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".