Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game by Dan Taylor (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game by Dan Taylor David Bohmer Dan Taylor. Baseball at the Abyss: The Scandals of 1926, Babe Ruth, and the Unlikely Savior Who Rescued a Tarnished Game. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. 203 pp. Cloth, $36.00. This is an interesting and well-written book, often paced like a novel. Its primary focus is the alleged gambling scandal in 1919 that emerged after the 1926 season involving Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb, "Smoky Joe" Wood, and Dutch Leonard. At the same time it is equally a story about Babe Ruth and his publicist [End Page 136] Christy Walsh dealing in part with the Babe's offseason exploits as well as his stellar performance during the 1927 season. The key segment of the story, suggested by the title, is the surfacing of a gambling scandal between the four players mentioned above to throw a couple of games between the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers near the end of the 1919 season. The allegations were serious enough that the American League president, Ban Johnson, prohibited Cobb and Speaker from playing in 1927. He was overruled by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who allowed them to play, but only if they changed teams. Once again Major League Baseball seemed to be rocked by a gambling scandal similar to when the White Sox fixing the 1919 World Series was exposed near the end of the 1920 season. Once again just as Babe Ruth helped to bring baseball fans back to the game with his home runs in 1921, so he did again by breaking his own home run record in 1927. In telling that story Taylor also presents some interesting asides, including Ruth acting in the lead role of a Hollywood movie during the off season and the slugger's commitment to a fitness regimen to control his weight and ensure his readiness for the coming season. Both are fascinating sidelines to the ultimate thesis—that Ruth, with an assist from Walsh, would once again save baseball from scandal. All of that creates an entertaining story made more so by the author's writing skills. The major problem is with the title—suggesting baseball was at an abyss, a black hole. It implies that the future of the game was threatened. The American League did suffer a decrease in attendance in 1927, though less of a decline than in the season following the exposure of the White Sox scandal. While Cleveland had a large drop in attendance after losing Speaker, Detroit's ticket sales actually increased without Cobb. Since the National League had an increase in attendance of more than 350,000 fans in 1927, it seems likely that the AL decline had more to do with the Yankees dominating the league from the very beginning of the season. That hardly suggests an "abyss." In fact both the Great Depression and World War II would prove to be far greater threats to baseball. The other problem is the book's sources. It is rich with excellent primary materials, but there is no mention of any secondary references. Yet there are excellent biographies of Landis, Cobb, Speaker, and Wood, all of which discuss the alleged gambling scandal. There are also numerous biographies of Babe Ruth and one of the most recent goes into great detail about the Ruth-Walsh relationship. The lack of reference to these important books certainly seems to be an omission. [End Page 137] This is an interesting and entertaining book for anyone wishing to learn more about the supposed scandal that came to light in 1926 involving some of baseball's greats, as well as Ruth's endeavors in 1926 and 1927. However, suggesting in the title that baseball was seriously threatened by it seems to be overkill. So, too, is the failure to cite biographies of all the major participants in the scandal and its resolution. The reader should keep that in mind while reading this book. [End Page 138] Copyright © 2024 University of Nebraska Press
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.007 |
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".