Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jackie Robinson Would Have Hated Jackie Robinson Day Ron Rapoport (bio) I couldn't care less if someone is out there wearing 42 —Jackie Robinson, June, 1972, four months before he died1 Jackie Robinson is standing on the field at Dodger Stadium, near the stands on the third-base side of home plate. It is a soft June afternoon, and though he moves slowly and needs someone to guide him, he is chatting with a few people and seems to be enjoying himself. As I make my way over to him, the buzz of ballplayers gathered around the batting cage melds amiably with the activity of the organist up on the mezzanine playing show tunes and workers setting up microphones for the ceremonies at which his number will be retired. I have almost reached him—I am hoping to thank him again for the time he gave me a few days earlier— when suddenly a shout comes from the stands behind him. I look in the direction of the noise and see a middle-aged man standing in the third or fourth row holding a baseball. "Mr. Robinson!" he calls. "Can I have your autograph?! Would you sign this, please?! Here! Catch!" He lobs a baseball toward Robinson. It is a gentle underhand throw that travels no more than eight or ten feet. A ten-year-old can catch it easily. But Robinson, who is nearly blind, doesn't see it coming and it hits him in the forehead, hurting him. The man is aghast at what he has done. "I'm so sorry, so sorry," he calls as Robinson is led away. This is my last view of him. I am relieved when I learn later that he has not been seriously injured. The attention that baseball pays to Robinson's integration of baseball in 1947 has become a growth industry in recent years. His uniform number, 42, has been retired throughout baseball—no other player has ever had that distinction—except on April 15, the anniversary of his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, when every player in the major leagues wears it on his jersey. [End Page 35] The seventy-fifth anniversary of Robinson's historic achievement occurred in 2022, and it was celebrated with all the spectacle of its recent predecessors and more. There were festivities at major league stadiums around the country. There were speeches by baseball dignitaries and a recitation of his accomplishments on and off the field. There was a salute to the college scholarships for minority youngsters that are coordinated by the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which is underwritten by the financial support of Major League Baseball, as was the construction of the Jackie Robinson Museum in New York, which opened to great fanfare in 2022. Baseball also used the occasion to promote itself as an important thread in the fabric of American history by noting, as it likes to do, that it was integrated before the nation's military and its schools. But as Robinson has become an officially revered symbol of baseball, one that allows the sport to comfortably align itself with the growing movement for Black empowerment, I have found myself being nagged by a deep disconnect. It centers around the fact that in all the tributes paid to the courage and tenacity Robinson displayed in breaking a barrier that had been impregnable ever since baseball was organized nearly half a century earlier, no mention is ever made of who constructed those barriers in the first place. In the years prior to Robinson's debut, baseball was cagey about its lack of Black players. Its bylaws didn't codify their exclusion in the manner of the Professional Golfers Association, whose rules contained a "Caucasians Only" clause as late at 1961. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's commissioner from 1920 until his death in 1944, would sometimes say there was nothing to prevent teams from signing Black players, but at no time during his lengthy iron-fisted rule did he ever any express support for integration or work to promote it.2 Baseball's team owners were similarly averse to expressing any on-the-record opposition to hiring Black players. Occasionally...
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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) | 0.063 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".