It
has been a great year for baseball even if you haven’t been paying attention.
This past May Miguel Cabrera, one of the greatest hitters of all time, took his
official place among the immortals when he obtained his 3000th hit.
(I personally witnessed numbers 2997-2999.) Albert Pujols, one of the greatest
players in the history of the game, has been enjoyed a well-earned career revival
with his old team the St. Louis Cardinals; a week ago became only the fourth
player in history to reach 700 home runs and we will see him in the postseason.
Of course, the story that has captivated the world beyond baseball has been
Aaron Judge’s pursuit of the American League (and in the minds of the many, the
genuine) home run record held by Roger Maris for 61 years. It was a frustrating
week for millions before he tied it Wednesday night against the Blue Jays with
his 61st home run. It seems inevitable he’ll break it – but he was
stuck on 60 for more than a week. Will he do it? Will the Yankees manage to win the World
Series? Will Judge win the Triple Crown? And most of all, will Judge stay with
the Yankees this year?
I
have been a more or less devoted baseball fan for my entire life. But the reason
I’m writing this article is that my path from casual observer to full-on
fanatic took a route that I’m pretty sure most fans don’t follow.
Growing
up, I was a casual baseball observer. I followed the Mets and Yankees on PIX 11
and Channel 9. I would occasionally watch Nolan Ryan pitch with my father. And
I did watch every World Series. But back then, it was just something I did
because the TV was always tuned to those games in our house. I did the same
thing when we watched the Giants and the Jets and football in general. It was
something to do. My transformation did not begin until September 1994 (which is
ironic for reasons that I will soon explain)
One
Sunday night, while channel chasing, I tuned to PBS which was in the middle of
showing a documentary series called Baseball. I knew vaguely who Ken
Burns was, but it would have meant nothing. I spent the next hour and a half
riveting as the tones of John Chancellor took me through the summer of 1941,
while Joe DiMaggio was engaged in a fifty-six-game hitting streak and Ted
Williams was batting .406. There were several interviews with Williams. I then
watched the story of baseball during the second World War and eventually learned
the saga of Jackie Robinson, which Burns made the center of the second half of
the episode. I was riveted.
I
watched the next three ‘innings utterly fascinated. When the documentary was
rerun two weeks later, I more or less watched the entire thing. Less than three
weeks later, I persuaded my father to spend over $150 for the entire series on
VHS. I’m still not sure how I managed to win him over.
I
would watch and rewatch the entire documentary at least half a dozen times
until I graduated high school. The VHS had a prominent place in our house to
this day, even in the age of DVDs. And
that was the beginning of my devotion to baseball, though even then it took a
circuitous path.
I
still followed the Yankees, the Mets and the postseason (the former two
overlapped with the latter quite a bit in the late 1990s) but my devotion to
the sport followed what could be best described as a literary path. I began
reading every single book I could find in both my school and local libraries
about baseball. The history of the sport, of the players and many of the teams.
Much of this ended up focusing on the Yankees (it’s nearly impossible to
separate from the sport) but much of it also focused on many of the individuals
who were highlighted within that same documentary, many of whom had devoted
their lives to the sport. I tracked down the collections that Roger Angell had
written over a quarter of a century in The New Yorker (I may even have
gotten a subscription under the possibility of reading his articles which came quarterly
well into his eighties). I did the same for Thomas Boswell, a sportswriter for The
Washington Post who for most of his life didn’t have a home team to root
for. (He focused many of his articles on the Orioles, which was a decent substitute
– for a while.) I found the definitive biographies by Robert Creamer of Babe
Ruth and Casey Stengel. The first book of Doris Kearns Goodwin I ever read was
not a historical biography but a personal one of growing up rooting for the
Brooklyn Dodgers.
By
the time, I graduated college I was a full-fledged fan. Oddly enough, much of
my fandom has rarely been for the home teams or even out of state teams but
more often for individual players. I spent much of teenage years following Tony
Gwynn of the Padres, perhaps the last true high-average singles hitter baseball
has ever seen. I marveled at the accomplishments of what may be the greatest three-man
rotation in history – Greg Maddux, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine of the Atlanta
Braves. And I was not immune to the home
run chases that happened in the late 1990s by McGwire, Sosa and Bonds (though I
was pulling for Ken Griffey Jr, who as far as we know was never used steroids.)
In that sense, while I think the records
are tainted, I don’t blame any of the hitters of that era for doing what they
did. The sport, the press and the fans all deserved to be unindicted
co-conspirators in what happened.
More
to the point, as a fan of baseball I spent much of the last twenty years
rooting for – and appreciating perhaps more than any New Yorker can – the obliteration
of so many 20th Century curses. I agonized during the 2003
postseason, watching the collapse of the Cubs in Game 6 of the NLCS and Pedro
Martinez kept in far too long in the ALCS.
I think I agonized over the 2004 ALCS even more than that year’s
election and considering how the World Series ended that year, I probably made
the right call. I may have had more sympathy for the White Sox the next year –
who hadn’t won a World Series since 1917 or a pennant since 1959 – when they
managed to go all the way that year. And the 2016 World Series between the Cubs
and Cleveland was one that any true baseball fan in the world must have
agonized over. It was great for the Cubs
to win; the fact that Cleveland still has the longest drought without a
championship in baseball history is one that is agonizing. (Maybe this year.) And
I appreciated it when the Washington Nationals won the first World Series for
their city for the first time since 1924. I will confess that I spent many years
rooting for them and other second tier teams like the Pirates and the Reds to finally
prevail. I hope it happens someday.
I
truly believe my utter devotion to baseball would not have begun had I not seen
Burns’ documentary. I’ve seen several of them in the more than thirty years
since, and I don’t deny that most of them are extraordinary. His documentaries
on the Vietnam War and World War II were master classes. I found something in
his work on Country Music that I didn’t think possible. And I have a personal
admiration to his work on The Roosevelts. But at my core, I still consider
Baseball his crowning achievement, perhaps because it was the first one, I saw
but perhaps mainly because it’s the one I’ve seen the most. This is due to the
fact that the MLB Network every time the postseason ends spend the fall and
winter months mostly airing movies about baseball, fictional and non-fiction in
prime time. The documentary airs, on average, at least three to four times in
its entirety over those four to five months, two or three times over a two-week
period; two or three times in marathons. And almost inevitably every time it is
rerun, no matter what else is airing on other channels, I will stop what I am
watching and spend half an hour at least, watching several of my favorite
segments if not the whole part.
I
admit the documentary is far too laudatory to the sport it admires, talking
about it in rapturous and often poetic terms in stretches. But that doesn’t
change the fact that its an extraordinary piece of filmmaking. If you knew
nothing about the history of baseball, this is as good a primer as anything. It’s
not a perfect overview of the history of baseball, but no single documentary
not even one that clocks in at nineteen hours plus over nine parts, could.
What
Burns, Geoffrey Ward and his team of filmmakers do is what they have done so
many times afterwards. They collect information, have a single narrator
(Chancellor in this case) tell the overriding story and through pictures,
commentary and voiceovers tell the overarching and individual stories of their
subject. The ‘main characters’ of Baseball are essentially two teams:
the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. I have no doubt this was a deliberate choice: Burns
could have focused on the Yankees (they are a presence in almost every chapter),
but Burns chose to focus on two of the most intimate, historic and perennially frustrated
fandoms. The Dodgers spent their history the joke of New York (and indeed much
of the country) until finally achieving greatness, spent years being frustrated
by flukes that only seemed to happen in Brooklyn (a missed called third strike,
The Shot Hurt Round the World and the only perfect game in a World Series)
finally manage to win a world championship only to be pulled out of Brooklyn
two years later in a move that the borough is still recovering from. The Red
Sox (at the time of the documentary) were one of the storied franchises of the
American League, winners of the first world series and four more after that
before…well, much as the documentary argues, it really had nothing to do with
Babe Ruth. They spent the next seventy-five years suffering some of the most ignoble
fates in the history of baseball – and the documentary doesn’t touch on some of
the worst.
One
might argue that for a documentary about baseball, there are few actual players
interviewed. But what players. We get to hear Bob Feller talk about coming up
as a pitcher; Ted Williams as he discusses hitting .400 and his last day in
Boston; Mickey Mantle, coming up as a Yankee and his own disappointments, and
Henry Aaron discussing just what it meant to break Ruth’s record. We also spend
a lot of time with Curt Flood, who might be the most important ballplayer you’ve
heard of, and Bill Lee, who within two minutes you understand why he was
nicknamed ‘Spaceman’.
As
always, many of the ‘characters’ in Burns’ documentary are voiced by legendary
actors, and it’s a perfect mesh. Gregory Peck takes on the voice of Connie
Mack, the greatest owner and manager you’ve never heard of. Jason Robards is
Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball and the one man
who ran the game with the owners’ dancing to his whims. Eli Wallach and Ossie Davis are constants as
sportswriters, talking through the history of the game. And relative unknowns such
as Philip Bosco are perfect as saying everything.
You almost regret as
the sport passes into the era of motion pictures and television because you
genuinely want to hear more of the legends voiced by these acting legends. But
it’s hard not to argue that they don’t have their own merit as you get to hear
and see so many of the greatest moments in baseball history related by the men
and women who witnessed them: Angell talking about baseball in New York in the
1950s; Doris Kearns Goodwin about following Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers;
Billy Crystal about his memories of Yankee Stadium and his encounter with Ted
Williams, and all of the encounters we get with Buck O’Neill, a Negro League
manager and player who was by far the breakout ‘star’ of this documentary. And we get to hear two of the greatest legends
in broadcasting – Vin Scully and Red Barber relate their experiences with the
Dodgers, and Barber in particular telling the saga of Ebbets Field, Branch
Rickey and his immediate reaction to Robinson’s being recruiting. (He contemplated
resigning, but his experiences with Robinson changed his mind.)
And there is
footage of legendary moments: the Shot Heard Round the World, told from every
perspective. Willie Mays’ legendary catch in the 1954 World Series, seen half a
dozen times in the most primitive of angles. Bill Mazeroski’s home run to win
the 1960 World Series. Bob Gibson striking out 17 Detroit Tigers. And Game 6 of
the 1975 World Series, which ended in joy for the Red Sox… and Game 6 of the
1986 World Series, which ended in despair. Bob Costas, a constant throughout
the series, tells us what it was liking watching the 10th Inning in
the Red Sox locker room. It’s one of the most shocking play-by-plays in the
history of broadcasting.
The series also
spends much of its time giving us the sagas of the legends: we spend the first four
parts following John McGraw and Ty Cobb, learn the saga of Walter Johnson and
Grover Cleveland Alexander, and end up following the story of Babe Ruth. Overriding
much of the documentary is the bigotry that poisoned the game – we learn that
one of the greatest stars in 19th Century baseball may have caused
the exile of black players, who were making an inroad into the sport in the
1880s, from being exiled from it for sixty years. We hear attempts to integrate
that failed, the efforts of Rube Foster to build a Negro League and in the most
daring episode of the series ‘Shadow Ball’, Burns and his writers spend the
majority of the running time following the Negro Leagues of that era. It
climaxes with O’Neill relating a confrontation between Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige
in the Negro League World Series. It doesn’t matter if historians say it never
happened: when O’Neill relates it, you see it. And all the other
archives of pop culture in the world series: the history of ‘Take Me Out to the
Ballgame’ and Casey and the Bat, and novelty songs about ballplayers I’m
certain no one knew existed before this documentary. (The end credits of Season
7 feature Natalie Cole singing her heart out of one on Jackie Robinson.)
Baseball is
one of the great triumphs in documentary filmmaking in my opinion. But with all
that in mind, I must admit that having rewatched it several times in the past
few years, I can’t help but notice some of the blinders and gaps that Burns either
chose to ignore or deliberately omitted. I will go into them in the ‘bottom’ of
this article.
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