Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill Meissner. Spirits in the Grass. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2008. 288 pp. Cloth $25. A maxim of baseball fiction is that it has to be about something other than the game, and Meissner's novel fits this definition when it strives to portray small-town life and address political issues surrounding the treatment of Native Americans. In spite of baseball's relative absence in the novel, the game makes up the center of Meissner's narrative: at age 37 Luke Tanner is looking to make a comeback for his town team of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Baseball thus serves as the motivation for his character as well as the source of conflict between him and his domestic partner, Louise Stiller. Despite the relative lack of game action, Spirits in the Grass echoes earlier baseball novels. Meissner invokes the fiction of W. P. Kinsella when he has Luke working on the baseball field as a spiritual connection to his late father, who was a local baseball star in his own right. Louise, however, is no Annie to Luke's Ray, since she wants Luke to get on with his life and take her away from their small-town midwestern existence. By giving Luke a delayed bildungsroman narrative, designing his character around transitional values, and seeking to show how baseball can serve as the center of small-town culture, Meissner takes his book to deeper levels by plugging into the well-established baseball fiction formula first used by Noah Brooks almost 125 years earlier in Our Base Ball Club and How It Won the Championship. Although Luke's job at the local sod business does not offer him the opportunity to advance in the usual Horatio Alger mode, Luke looks to prove his ultimate maturity by demonstrating he can compete with the twenty year olds who are also trying out for the town team. To further demonstrate Luke's path toward maturity, Meissner has him ask Louise to marry him, but she wants him to be more in touch with his inner spirituality, which is very much in keeping with contemporary definitions of masculinity. Meissner's book further echoes Our Base Ball Club when he shows how baseball is central to the culture of Clearwater. After Luke discovers Native American artifacts at the ball diamond and the chance to play the season is threatened, the town is more concerned about baseball than repatriating the bones. Much of this discussion of the game's importance takes place at the diner, which serves as the stage for Meissner to introduce several types of small-town local color (the know-it-all, the bigot, the lawyer, the maternal waitress, etc.), and the conversation there brings out the conflicts between whites and the Native Americans who are operating a casino in the county. …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.019 |
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".