Suds Series: Baseball, Beer Wars, and the Summer of ’82 by J. Daniel (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Suds Series: Baseball, Beer Wars, and the Summer of '82 by J. Daniel Steve Gietschier J. Daniel. Suds Series: Baseball, Beer Wars, and the Summer of '82. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2023. 273 pp. Cloth, $29.95. In the summer of 1982, baseball hoped that fans would forget the summer of 1981. Instead of a season rent asunder by a strike that lasted fifty days, lopped 712 games off the schedule, and cost the players around $28 million in lost wages and the owners about $116 million in lost revenues, the major leagues the following year produced a quartet of tense pennant races all decided by no more than three games, two stirring league championship series, and a World Series featuring one club returning to the Fall Classic for the first time since 1968 and another in it for the first time. Suds Series is J. Daniel's attempt to recount the excitement of this season in all its wonderous complexity. The title of the book does the author, a veteran sports producer, no favor. It suggests that his work focuses only on the seven games that pitted the National League champion St. Louis Cardinals against the American League champs, the Milwaukee Brewers. Not so. Like Daniel's earlier book on 1980, the year before the strike, this one is a complete study of the whole season laid out in ten neat chapters, each of which sparkles because of the author's intense and comprehensive research and his ability to keep the story moving. Daniel's structure is straightforward: one chapter on the off-season, one on spring training, one on each month of the regular season, and one each on the playoffs and the World Series. Each chapter is a carefully organized essay, mixing game stories, player profiles, and odd happenings while not losing sight of the pennant races that saw the Cardinals and the Atlanta Braves win the National League's division titles and the Brewers and the California Angels emerge triumphant in the American League. Take the chapter on June as an example. It includes a dozen topics: Texas Rangers owner Eddie Chiles's decision to fire general manager Eddie Robinson; Steve Garvey of the Los Angeles Dodgers playing in his one-thousandth consecutive game; the Philadelphia Phillies recovering from a tough May thanks to the pitching of Steve Carlton and the hitting of Pete Rose; the Montreal Expos' problems with players using drugs; Reggie Jackson's effect on the California Angels' team personality; the Boston Red Sox building a lead in the AL East; the New York Yankees' poor play; the Brewers' rebounding after Harvey Kuenn replaced Buck Rodgers as manager; the ups and down of the Braves; the realization in Cincinnati that the days of the Big Red Machine were over; the Cardinals' offensive struggles as they depended on the inconsistent [End Page 127] George Hendrick; and the San Diego Padres' improving play under the guidance of manager Dick Williams. That's a lot of material for one chapter, but every other one is similarly packed. In addition, each section of each chapter is chock full of detailed information gleaned from what must have been a careful and exhaustive reading of memoirs, biographies, and other books and a deep dive into several newspapers and The Sporting News. The stories and bits of ephemera Daniel gleaned from this work keep the prose alive and allow the book to rise above a simple game-by-game account that would have proved tedious. Do you know, for example, that on the day Garvey was supposed to play in his thousandth game, his teammates humorously scratched his name off manager Tommy Lasorda's lineup card in favor of Rick Monday? Writing chapters like this requires great skill, and Daniel can be forgiven for sometimes forcing transitions from one section of a chapter to the next. "While the Expos were a young team who had their first taste of winning the year before, the Angels were loaded with veterans for whom winning was routine" (102) is smooth enough, but others have a "meanwhile back at the ranch" feel that, while abrupt, are understandable. Beyond the pennant races...
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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) | 0.027 | 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".