Fans Called Him “Turkey,” I Called Him Dad: A Daughter Remembers Baseball Hall of Famer Norman Thomas Stearnes by Rosilyn Stearnes-Brown (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Fans Called Him "Turkey," I Called Him Dad: A Daughter Remembers Baseball Hall of Famer Norman Thomas Stearnes by Rosilyn Stearnes-Brown J. L. Steele Rosilyn Stearnes-Brown. Fans Called Him "Turkey," I Called Him Dad: A Daughter Remembers Baseball Hall of Famer Norman Thomas Stearnes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023. 169 pp. Paperback. $29.95 Norman "Turkey" Stearnes was one of the greatest players in the Negro Leagues. SABR member Dick Clark once said, "Stearnes was the greatest black ballplayer in Detroit baseball history. Not Major League or Detroit Tigers history, but baseball history" (150). Beyond the career statistics compiled by Gary Ashwill in this book's appendix, however, readers of this book will learn nothing about what made Stearnes great on the field during his seventeen years in the Negro Leagues. There are no anecdotes from his playing days, no tales from teammates or Stearnes himself about his career or what it was like to play in the league. Instead readers will learn about the man Stearnes was after his baseball career ended. This book was written by Stearnes's oldest daughter Rosilyn, who was born six years after her dad retired from baseball. The book is a great tribute to the man Stearnes was after his playing career ended. It tells the tale of their family, the type of husband and father he was, the example he was to his daughters and those around him, and the life he built after baseball. Readers who had great relationships with their own fathers may appreciate this narrative and might, perhaps, recall the lives of those men. Of course, one's perspective of their father will probably be biased, and that can be seen in this book. Stearnes-Brown does write about a reunion of Negro League players her father attended in 1976, but she herself wasn't there. Turkey was accompanied by his other daughter, Joyce. The memories of that reunion and the other former players in attendance are narrated by Joyce, but again, readers are left to [End Page 129] wonder about what those legendary players discussed and about the stories they must have told. Beyond recounting memories of what Stearnes's postbaseball life was like, the thrust of the book is about the effort to get Turkey inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which finally happened in 2000. For a reader interested more in the baseball aspect of Stearnes's life, this will be the most informative section of the book. There are no footnotes or endnotes, which seems troubling in at least two instances. It is well known that former Detroit Tigers owner Walter Briggs was racist. The author reminds readers that the Tigers were one of the last major league teams to integrate and in doing so, says that Briggs "was quoted as saying, 'No jigs at Briggs'" (18). However likely it seems that Briggs would have said that, a source would have been helpful and would give the quote more credence. Writing about exhibition games between the Negro League players and major league players, Stearnes-Brown writes, "Dad said Ty Cobb refused to play them. Ty Cobb is quoted as saying, 'I'm not going to let those niggers beat me'" (16). Considering how much recent research has been done exploring the negative myths of Cobb, this seems to be a rather important quote to pin on the man without a source. Whether the reader is interested in Turkey Stearnes as a player or as a man, they are sure to appreciate the recounting of his birth and early years in Nashville, which culminated in his leaving home for the Negro Leagues at the age of fifteen. The author includes several pictures throughout the book, mostly of her mom, sister, and extended family. Unfortunately only two of them are of Turkey Stearnes himself. Life was certainly not easy for a Black man in Stearnes's era. This book is testament to the type of man he must have been in raising and providing for his family, inspiring his two daughters and helping those around him while working a physically demanding job in a foundry. Casual readers or those just learning about...
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.024 |
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".