As I said I believe Ken Burns’ Baseball is
a great triumph of documentary filmmaking that holds up even after more than a
quarter of a century. But after several rewatches in recent years, it has
become clear that are certain things that Burns and his writers deliberately
left out.
And no, I’m not
just talking about how so many of the greatest ballplayers of the twentieth
century are basically ignored. I imagine true fans of the game are still irked
that in nearly twenty hours, Baseball didn’t think to mention Lou Brock
or Rickey Henderson’s accomplishments in stolen bases; the high average hitting
of Rod Carew or the massive home runs struck by Harmon Killebrew; that George
Brett and Wade Boggs are only mentioned when it comes to being born, and that several
of the greatest pitchers of all time such as Warren Spahn, Whitey Ford, Nolan Ryan
and yes, Steve Carlton are either ignored or mentioned in the television
equivalent of footnotes. No documentary of baseball could ever adequately pay
tribute to every single player who made it to Cooperstown even thirty years
ago: frankly, it’s impressive the job that the filmmakers managed to pull off.
No, what Burns
leaves out of the documentary is far subtler and something that even the most
loyal fans of the game and all but the most devoted historians would have
noticed. It’s something that I didn’t pick up on even after years of reading
about so many of the players that are featured. But it is something that once you know how the
sport has worked since it became a professional sport, seems very hard to
understand why it was done. Let me give you the most obvious examples.
In telling the
saga of Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of the greatest and most tragic characters
in the history of the sport in The Fourth Inning, this is how the narration
says he ended up with the Cardinals:
“In the middle of
the 1926 season, the Chicago Cubs let Alexander go…But Branch Rickey had seen
something in the old man…and hired him for St. Louis.”
The Cardinals win
the pennant that year and…well, if you don’t know the story, by all means see
the documentary: it is one of the greatest stories in the history of sports and it is spellbinding even if you only
get an oral description of it. But look at the way it’s phrased: Alexander is let
go and Branch Rickey hires him. This leads to you believe the Cubs had no
faith in Alexander, and Rickey (who I’ll get back to later) was a genius to see
his skill. The thing is that’s not what happened. Alexander wasn’t released. He
was traded from Chicago to St. Louis. It’s a small detail, but a telling one.
It makes you think Alexander had control of his fate. If you’ve been watching the
documentary to this point, you know perfectly well he doesn’t.
A more telling
example of this comes in the eighth inning.
Here’s how we hear part of the saga of Frank Robinson:
“Cincinnati let
Robinson go, saying he was too old at thirty. He wasn’t. He signed with
Baltimore.”
This is something
that not only fans of that era know is false but is actually part of pop
culture by this point. Anyone who saw the movie Bull Durham will
remember how Susan Sarandon in describing bad trades says: “Who can forget
Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for goodness sakes?” It’s harder to overlook
this particular deviation considering how much of the eighth inning is devoted
to the labor struggles of baseball: Marvin Miller is interviewed and the
episode ends with Curt Flood’s response to being traded to Philadelphia and the
groundbreaking lawsuit he filed.
Burns is a brilliant
filmmaker and his team does their research. You could blame some of this on
this being a relatively early feature in Burns’ work or that so much of the
work they have to do is separating from truth from anecdote. I can’t see it
that way, for a very good reason.
From the start of
the documentary, Burns and his writers are at pains to mention the reserve
clause, the controversial part of every ballplayer’s contract that made him
property of his club for life. They are very clear at the unfairness of it for the
first eight parts of the documentary, how it kept salaries artificially slow,
smacked of slavery and essentially made the owners control the player’s destinies.
They visit every consequence of this action: the Players’ League revolt of 1890,
in which players formed their own league to try and break the monopoly of the
owners. The Federal League in 1914 where millionaires formed their own leagues
where the players were allowed to become free agents and how many league
baseball used it powers to ultimately crush it. There is an implication that
the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series in part because Charles Comiskey used
the reserve clause to pay his players so poorly. Even in the 1960s when they
gloss over Frank Robinson’s trade, they discuss in detail Sandy Koufax and Don
Drysdale’s joint holdout in order to get bigger salaries. They argue firmly
that baseball players are, to quote Flood, little more than well-paid slaves.
And then, in the
last inning, there’s a key change. After the Seitz decision which obliterated the
reserve clause, there’s a change in tone. We see an interview with Doris Kearns
Goodwin, a devoted Red Sox fan, in which she speaks in a disenchanted tone
about ballplayers choosing ‘to search for more money rather than stay with the
place that loves you.” The lockout of 1972 is not mentioned. Neither is the
strike of 1981 that nearly destroyed the season. The owner’s decision to
collude and destroy the free agent market is mentioned, but in a segment far
shorter than the one dealing with Pete Rose’s gambling scandal. It is mentioned
near the end that in 1976, the average ballplayer made eight times the working
man’s wage but in 1992, the average one made over 100 times that amount. This
is bracketed by clips of enormous contracts being given to many players and a
piece showing autographs and baseball cards being sold for millions, to ‘Money,
Money, Money’.
And I find it very
telling that of all the ballplayers they could have interviewed to express an
opinion on free agency, the one they choose to talk to is Bill Lee, one of the
most contrarian players in history who first calls it ‘The Emancipation Proclamation
of baseball’, refers to teams as ‘plantations’, and that the only people who
lost were ‘the fans, the integrity of baseball… and eventually the planet
Earth.”
I’ve been watching
Ken Burns for a very long time and the way he makes the radical turns around of
ballplayers as employees for eight and a half innings and then turns them into
little more than ungrateful millionaires is kind of astounding. (On a side note, I find it fascinating that
Goodwin and George Will, who have the opposite political views on everything
else, have reversed their politics on this: Goodwin takes the socially
conservative position on free agency and Will describes himself as a ‘neo-Marxist’
thinking the players should get ‘the lion’s share of the rewards.) How dare the
ballplayers, who spent a century being traded and treated as chattel at the
whim of the management of their club, pursue money and freedom?
Burns goes out of
his way to make the viewer believe that ballplayers stay with clubs for their
entire careers because they love the fans and the team. With very few exceptions
he never mentions the trades that even the legendary players had to suffer through
when they outlived their usefulness to the team. If you saw this documentary,
you would think that Ted Williams stayed with Boston or Bob Feller with
Cleveland for their entire careers because they had a choice. They don’t
mention how Willie Mays spent the final two years of career after being traded
to the Mets or that Ty Cobb, who spent twenty years with the Tigers, spent the
last two years with the Philadelphia A’s. Connie Mack is portrayed as a saintly
gentleman who owned the Philadelphia Athletics for fifty years. The fact that
he sold of two different championship teams, the latter time dooming the franchise
to disregard until it was forced to leave Philadelphia is basically considered
a quirk. (The irony that this documentary originally aired in a season that a
strike cancelled the postseason is not lost on me.)
This level of the
basic disregard to human decency even spills into the story that Burns wants us
to consider the greatest moment in baseball: Jackie Robinson’s integration with
Brooklyn. Branch Rickey is set up, if not the hero of Baseball, then
perhaps the main character: he is the only individual mentioned in every
episode either in a direct appearance or in passing. Rickey’s history is
revealed and his determination to integrate baseball after the Second World War
considered a triumph of morality.
But it glosses
over one critical detail. In 1945 Jackie Robinson was playing with the Kansas
City Monarchs, part of the Negro National League. They were one of the oldest –
and best – black baseball teams in the country. When Rickey signed Robinson,
not only did he ignore that he had a contract with Kansas City and not
compensate them for taking a player off their hands, he dismissed the team –
and by extension black baseball as ‘not a real league’.
Now I know Burns’
is trying to put a halo on both Rickey and Robinson but considering that he
spent most of the previous part, explaining how remarkable black baseball was –
going so far as to say it was ‘separate but athletically equal’, this is pretty
hard to overlook. The fact that this decision, which ended up destroying black baseball
as a business, was essentially founded on a white man stealing from black men –
no matter for how noble a reason – can not just be swept under the rug. Yet
that’s what Burns does.
He even goes so
far to do so when it comes to the end of Robinson’s career. In the Seventh
Inning, he says that Robinson had ‘chosen to retire in 1956’. In point of fact before he could announce, the Dodgers traded
him to the Giants. There is no mention of this either. (Perhaps it is followed
up on in the documentary Burns did on Robinson more than twenty years later. My
focus is on Baseball.)
The follow-up
documentary The Tenth Inning, made fifteen years after the original, does a
good job of dealing with many of the flaws in the previous one. It acknowledges
that, at least in part, the 1994 strike and its aftermath may have led to the
owners deciding to ignore the steady and increasingly visible use of steroids
in the game in order to protect their box office. It makes it very clear that what
players like McGwire and Barry Bonds – the lead who you come across with more
sympathy for when you know his life story – were enabled by an ownership gun-shy
because of the aftereffects of the strike, a press that didn’t want to hurt the
game, and a fan base that was ignoring the obvious and then turned on the players
when they learned the truth. The players
and owners are forced to bear equal responsibility for the strike and for
everything they have done and that does seem to be the overriding message that
we should take from it.
So when you watch
the documentary – and if you subscribe to the MLB network, you will get several
chances starting in November – do what I should I’ve done. Watch the whole
thing, take pleasure in the anecdotes, marvel in the quality of the
filmmaking. But a word of caution. If
you’re nostalgic for the days when ballplayers were ‘loyal’ and weren’t ‘obsessed
with money’, Baseball will make you
believe in the lie. But keep in mind that’s not how the game ever worked. And
for those of you who think the game was better before, there’s a quote in the
first hour of the first part that will make you laugh out loud as a veteran
from the 1860s tells you: “Somehow or other, they don’t play ball like they
used too.” You would do well remember that…and Burns would have too.
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