Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers by Erik Sherman (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers by Erik Sherman Claudia Caplan Wolff Erik Sherman. Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. 264 pp. Cloth, $32.95. In his book Daybreak at Chavez Ravine: Fernandomania and the Remaking of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Erik Sherman doesn't just give us an account of one of the greatest pitchers to ever wear Dodger blue. He situates the phenomenon that was Fernando Valenzuela in a Los Angeles in flux. Sherman writes that almost twenty years after the fact, Cesar Chavez, leader of the United Farm-workers of America, refused to go to Dodger Stadium because of the brutal displacement of Mexican families from Chavez Ravine in order to build the stadium. He wants the reader to understand that while the metamorphosis from Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles Dodgers was cheered by many, it left pain and displacement in its wake. And that even though the Dodgers themselves may not have been at fault, it reflected poorly on the O'Malleys and the team. Moving from this Sherman tells the tale of a round-faced, pudgy, Mexican kid who had a preternatural talent for throwing a baseball. This was Fernando Valenzuela—youngest of twelve children from a tiny spot on the map called Etchohuaquilla. Sherman has done his homework. His interviews with those who were there at the beginning, like Mike Brito, the scout who brought Fernando to the Dodgers, and Fernando's friend and translator Jaime Jarrín, lend dimension and color to the story. As Jarrín says early on, Walter O'Malley was looking for "a Mexican Sandy Koufax" (34). In Fernando the Dodgers found a pitcher so good that he won both Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award in 1981. [End Page 120] Unlike many major leaguers who spend years in the minors, Valenzuela showed up as a fully formed starting pitcher in 1980. His stuff baffled the best hitters in baseball. Sherman gives us a front row seat to Fernando's first season through the eyes of everyone from reporters who covered the Dodgers to General Manager Fred Claire. Most importantly much of the insight in this book comes from those who played with Valenzuela and those who had to face him in the batter's box. With so many great stories from which to choose, Sherman stands back and allows the voices of Dodgers like Rick Monday and Steve Garvey to give us a sense of being at the center of what came to be known as Fernandomania. Dusty Baker stands out as someone who knew Fernando well by virtue of the fact that he could speak Spanish with him. In a clubhouse full of veterans who had played together for years, it's obvious that Baker went out of his way to make Fernando feel at home and it is this social intelligence that has made Baker the great manager he is today. Inevitably Daybreak at Chavez Ravine leads us to the remarkable 1981 post-season—a sequence of seemingly impossible comebacks for the Dodgers led in great part by Valenzuela's dominant pitching and calm demeanor. Here Sherman offers some wonderful moments. His interview with Montreal pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee stands out. The eccentric Lee describes the opening in the roof of Olympic Stadium as "a giant bidet, like a place where Paul Bunyan's wife squatted to take a leak" (54). It doesn't get much better than that. Winning the 1981 World Series over the hated Yankees is the peak of both Fernandomania and of Sherman's book. Nowadays it's amazing to look back at a pitcher who routinely threw more than 150 pitches in a game and who racked up complete game after complete game. Until he took the mound for Game Three of the Series, Valenzuela had "a 1.71 ERA in four starts" in that postseason (171). Sherman quotes sportswriter Lyle Spencer, "You can't overstate the importance of that game . . . He just put the Dodgers on his shoulders" (175). Daybreak builds the excitement with accounts...
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".