Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Bush League Blues by Mike Floyd Chad S. Wise Mike Floyd. Bush League Blues. Blanch, NC: Lee Street Press, 2022. 299 pp. Paperback, $19.95. At the start of every baseball season, many fans dream of putting on the stirrups, caps, and gloves to have just one moment on a big league field. Mike Floyd, author of Bush League Blues, never quite lived out his dream of playing in the majors, but he spent enough time in the minor leagues to fill an entire book with stories and memories from relatively unknown players to [End Page 132] future Hall of Famers. Floyd played for nine years, 1967–1975, making it as high as AAA. The teams he played for were the affiliate teams of the Los Angeles Dodgers, California Angels, and Houston Astros. He hit seventy-five home runs in 740 games, with a lifetime batting average of .275. Floyd spent those years traveling by beat-up buses, staying in cheap hotels, and spending countless nights (some of which turned into mornings) chasing women and above average beer. In his book Floyd shares his experiences at all levels of the minor leagues in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both in the United States and Mexico. Bush League Blues describes Floyd's life in the minors. He covered the blues music scene in San Diego for several publications and even played harmonica in numerous bands. He was also a blues photojournalist for twenty-five years. Though the phrase has been around since the early 1900s, "bush league" in Floyd's story refers to a 1971 incident in Salt Lake City. Floyd was on the Salt Lake City Angels, and the team welcomed seasoned veterans towards the end of the season. Greg Goosen was one such player who joined the team in the fall. The "Goose" (not to be confused with Hall of Fame pitcher Rich "Goose" Gossage) was at bat one August night and struck out. Fans started booing him, and one yelled, "Hey Goose, why don't you go back to the bush leagues, you bum!" Goose spun around and yelled, "Where in the fu** do you think this is?" (79). Among the many stories Floyd shares, his time with manager Del Rice through four seasons from 1968–1971 stands out. In 1971 the team was staying in Phoenix and had just made it to their hotel. Floyd states, "It wasn't the most luxurious hotel/motel for accommodations, but it had two features that made it to the top of the list for minor league ballplayers: an awesome pool and a coffee shop with the best Double Cheeseburger Platter in the league" (105). After winning their fourth game and becoming division champions, it was time to celebrate, and the party really hit its crescendo around 2:00 a.m.! Floyd continues, "We apparently didn't bother any of the motel guests that night as their room air conditioners drowned out all the whooping cannonballs. Where was our manager through all of this partying? He was out there in white trunks doing flips and half gainers off the wooden diving board and getting into water fights with all of us like we were schoolboys" (106). Floyd shows readers why players loved Del Rice as their manager; he was hard-nosed but knew how to celebrate a job well done. Rodney Earl Gaspar, also known as "The Rocket" (with apologies to Hall of Famer Roger "The Rocket" Clemens), was a teammate of Floyd's in 1965 and 1966 in California and was known for drawing walks. He took as long as he could, sometimes 30–40 seconds per pitch, to frustrate the pitchers. According to Gaspar, "Today's game can sometimes take three to four hours for a nine-inning [End Page 133] game. Managers are constantly bringing in relievers and you hardly see a starting pitcher complete a game. The time I spent in five normal at-bats might add another twenty minutes to a game" (109). Perhaps of all the stories shared in Bush League Blues, the chapter on Art "The Caveman" Kusnyer paints the perfect picture of life in the minors. Floyd states, "I got...
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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 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.068 | 0.035 |
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".