Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond by Eric C. Gray (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond by Eric C. Gray Anna Adams and Alisa Chirkova-Holland Eric C. Gray. Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond. Charleston, SC: Palmetto Publishing Group, 2022. 385 pp. Paperback, $21.95. Baseball has been widely considered to be the quintessential American pastime for over a hundred and fifty years. The sport has spanned generations of Americans, serving as a bonding medium for spouses, parents and their children, grandparents and grandchildren, and even total strangers. Given the impact baseball has had on so many people, it is not surprising that those people would have many stories to tell about how baseball has affected their lives. Eric C. Gray's book Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond functions to capture those stories and share them with others who have a common love of baseball. Gray's book is written for baseball fans who are passionate about the game and whose lives are deeply connected to it; the book serves as a pleasant medium through which to connect with other individuals who share that passion through the memories they have chosen to relate. Backyards to Ballparks is a collection of hundreds of baseball anecdotes from people across the United States and around the world. The stories are categorized and grouped into chapters according to type, with their content ranging from recollections of fans' first games to stories about run-ins with famous players. Readers will find that each chapter title is a self-explanatory guide to the theme of the chapters' contents, but they can still expect to find a great deal of variety within each. For example, the chapter entitled "The Bats and Balls and Gloves that Bind: Family and Baseball" includes stories about [End Page 118] both Senior Baseball Leagues and sitting across from JFK at a game. Many of the stories are personal, even bordering on sentimental, such as ones of childhood memories at the ballpark, learning valuable life lessons, restoring familial ties, and sharing baseball reminiscences with loved ones. Others relate moments when individuals witnessed significant events such as women making history in the sport and the Cubs winning the World Series after 108 years. The extensive variety of stories included in Backyards to Ballparks speaks to the effect baseball has had on many peoples' lives. With the diversity of content found in the collection, including not only anecdotes but even a few poems, at least one of the pieces is bound to resonate with readers who have a personal connection to baseball. The collection is highly edited and polished which, though making the stories very legible and cohesive, does sacrifice some of the original texture and voice one might expect to find in a compilation of hundreds of individuals' anecdotes. The book's homogeneity of style, which is likely due to the necessity of extensively editing so many stories collected over the span of several years, could result in a monotone reading experience. Furthermore, stories with similar or identical themes are often arranged back-to-back to the effect of compromising the uniqueness of the stories themselves. For example, a story about a boy at his first MLB game with his dad is followed by a story about a girl at her first MLB game with her dad, and they both begin and end with similar phrasing. However, the layout of the book suggests that the reader is meant to select stories from different sections of the book to read at a time rather than reading each chapter straight through. Though perhaps too monotonous for a cover-to-cover readthrough, the sheer number and variety of stories makes the book fun to browse for an occasional pleasure read. Moreover, most pieces take less than five minutes to read, allowing readers who may not have a lot of time to set aside for a novel to enjoy baseball stories without having to make a large time commitment. Gray's book is written with the baseball enthusiast in mind. Therefore, and as is to be expected, the stories are heavily laden with baseball terminology that...
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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) | 0.037 | 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".