The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption by John Rosengren (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption by John Rosengren Douglas K. Lehman John Rosengren. The Fight of Their Lives: How Juan Marichal and John Roseboro Turned Baseball’s Ugliest Brawl into a Story of Forgiveness and Redemption. Guilford ct: Lyons, 2014. 277 pp. Cloth, $25.95. The Fight of Their Lives is a tale of frustration, forgiveness, and redemption. John Rosengren delves into the ugliest incident in the modern era of major-league baseball, the on-field attack by Juan Marichal on John Roseboro in 1965. Rosengren explores the lives and culture of both participants and clearly lays out the buildup to the incident. This is not the first time Rosengren has written about prejudice and conflict on the ball field, as he previously authored a biography of Hank Greenberg that chronicled the career of the great Jewish ballplayer. By the mid-1960s, African American and Latin ballplayers were regular participants in major-league baseball. All the major-league teams had integrated by the late 1950s, and several had a number of players from Latin America on their rosters. The Brooklyn Dodgers had led the way with integration in 1947 by bringing Jackie Robinson to the majors; and after their move to Los Angeles, they continued to be leaders in integration with players such as John Roseboro. The New York/San Francisco Giants were one of the early teams to sign large numbers of Latin ballplayers, including Juan Marichal from the Dominican Republic. Set against the domestic conflicts in the United States and the Dominican Republic in the mid-1960s, Rosengren details the early lives and careers of both Roseboro and Marichal. Roseboro was frequently seen by others as sullen and angry, while Marichal was considered to be a hot-blooded Latino. As with most generalizations, these were not accurate. Marichal was a Dominican who had grown up with dreams of playing major-league baseball. Roseboro was from Ashland, Ohio, a mostly white town in northeastern Ohio where he was often the only African American athlete. The events that set them on a collision path in August 1965 were being played out on television screens across America that summer. [End Page 148] As players, both Roseboro and Marichal had obstacles to overcome. Roseboro was the catcher who followed the Dodger great, Roy Campanella. Rose-boro was a great catcher; but compared to Campanella, he fell short in many fans’ estimation. He did not hit as well as Campanella, but he may have been a better defensive catcher. He also had a disposition that caused many to think him surly, while Campanella always had a smile on his face. Marichal had to contend with the perception that all Latin ballplayers were hot-blooded and hotheaded. Marichal also had a propensity for pitching on the inside of the plate, a common tactic of pitchers at the time. Most great pitchers from the 1960s felt they owned the inside half of the plate and batters needed to beware if they crowded the plate. The summer of 1965 brought events to a head in the Dominican Republic and in California. Civil war erupted in the Dominican Republic while Marichal was in the United States playing baseball. Communication with the island was difficult; and Marichal was in a poor state of mind as the summer progressed, as he could not find out what was happening with his family. At the same time, the racial situation in Los Angeles worsened, and eventually riots broke out in the Watts area. Roseboro attempted to help calm the populace, but what he saw wore on him and put him on edge. Mix all of this together with the normal Dodgers-Giants rivalry, and you had a powder keg just waiting to explode. From the years when the Dodgers were located in Brooklyn and the Giants were across the river in Manhattan, the two teams had engaged in many battles on the field. By the 1960s, both teams were now located in California, but the emotions of the fans and the teams still ran high. Marichal was an especially popular target...
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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) | 0.001 | 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".