Ken Burns' Baseball

With April comes the baseball season, and my favorite sport gets underway. What better time to write about a film devoted to it? Sometimes the subject of a movie is so close to my heart that I can overlook its faults. Such is the case with Ken Burns' 20+ hour ode to America's National Pastime, "Baseball."

The film traces the history of the game from its rudimentary beginnings as an ancestor of rounders and cricket to its place today as a second fiddle to the more popular national obsession of football. The film works very well because the people who made the film love the game, and the people Burns interviews love the game. In the accompanying book, the reader discovers that the film seeks to show how the national game mirrors the struggles of its country. As such, the filmmakers focus on the Boston Red Sox and Brooklyn Dodger as teams that play out that national drama. Furthermore, the Yankees receive much attention just due to their prowess.

The film also sprinkles in other names and anecdotes that are essential to the game's history. With such a grand history, Burns could not possibly cover it all. But he makes a fatal flaw by making the game so much about New York and Boston that one is unable to see the joy of those outside those cities. Two specific anecdotes come to mind. As Bill Maseroski hits his World Series winning HR in the 1960 World Series against the Yankees, we see no gleeful musings from Pirate fans, instead, we see Mickey Mantle talk about how he cried all the way home after the game(the Yanks had won 7 titles in the 50s, and would win two more in '61 and '62) and Stephen Jay Gould (the late paleontologist and Yankee fan) say how his friends must never bring up that HR in his presence. Also, in 2001, the film shows the D-Backs vanquish of the Yanks again as a tragedy for the Yanks, who had just won 3 titles in a row. In these cases, Burns fails to live up to his hypothesis that this is the national game. By not showing the winning side of the matter, he makes the game about the Northeast, and forgets how the passion of fans in Western PA, the Midwest, and the West also contribute to the drama of the game. Clearly, an attempt at an exhaustive look at the game's history would diminish the film, but the willful disregard of over 90% of the country and how it experiences this supposed national game is missing. The movie is at its best when it focuses on the Negro Leagues...it would have been nice to see similar focus on other smaller markets and their triumphs (1985 Royals, 1980 Phils, 2005 White Sox, etc.)

I love the film, but it is so flawed that it still frustrates me. I will soon cover another of Burns' films that I believe hits the right note. Until then, play ball!!