The Ken Burns Defect: Looking Back At 'Baseball'
by Tom Keiser
In 1994, four years removed from The Civil War, Ken Burns created Baseball, an eighteen-and-a-half hour (or “Nine Inning”) documentary on the national pastime. In anticipation of Tuesday’s premiere of The Tenth Inning, his four hour epilogue, I went back to watch the original in its entirety.
Baseball is as complicated and intriguing as America’s pastime, and yet it is as clunky and as excessive as its sole corporate sponsor, General Motors, was at the time. Moreover, both the film and GM lose their way somewhere around the 1950’s and 60’s. Baseball becomes one-sided, and what started out as an attempt at populist diversity in telling a story of a people descends into Red Sox bathos and opera-loving elitism.
It wasn’t all Burns’ fault. Baseball premiered only six days after Major League Baseball cancelled its first World Series since 1904. How could he know that instead of a potential Yankees/Expos matchup, this behemoth would be the only game in town?
As popular as Ken Burns was, Baseball had only a budget of around $7.6 million-an astronomical sum for a PBS documentary, but still relatively paltry for a two-hour film, much less one lasting nine times as long. (In comparison, Turner Home Video spent $25 million on promoting its VHS release.) The economy is obvious: the same photo of the Polo Grounds is shown several times. Most of the color footage is taken from the World Series, so, for example, footage of the 1969 Mets illustrates John Chancellor’s narration about their inaugural 40–120 squad of 1962. Most telling is the excessive use of “the Ken Burns effect”: taking a still photo and moving it around as a substitute for actual film. Burns did not originate this technique, but he is now both immortalized and saddled with the term.
Baseball also suffers from Burns’ own success as a prominent documentarian. With the help of PBS, GM, and an array of PR people, Burns saturated the public schools with educational tie-in supplements for Baseball, giving him a platform the Maysles or Errol Morris could only dream of. An entire generation grew up believing that the every documentary must include dramatic narration, black and white photography, and college professors thoughtfully ruminating on the topic.
Baseball also over-intellectualizes its subject. Burns’ frank depiction of racism in society is commendable, yet there is an elitist tone that offsets its progressivism. George Will comes off as a labor sympathizer, a liberal even, which should tell you enough. As Tony Kornheiser, writing in the Washington Post, put it, “It’s not that I don’t like baseball…[i]t’s just that I guess I didn’t go to the right private schools to fully appreciate it.”
In spite of the bourgeois talking heads, there are some great moments and great people in Baseball. The film rescued Negro League player/manager Buck O’Neil from obscurity. It made one almost appreciate the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. And it revealed the little-known fact that Rube Waddell, one of the greatest pitchers of his day, was said to have been distracted by puppies and shiny things.
And then we come to Curt Flood. A star centerfielder primarily with the St. Louis Cardinals, Flood was part of a seven player deal that sent him and Tim McCarver to the Philadelphia Phillies for Richie Allen and Cookie Rojas in 1969. Allen’s poor treatment by Philadelphia fans-not to mention the Phillies’ treatment of Jackie Robinson in 1947 and refusal to integrate for over a decade afterwards-gave Flood good reason not to accept the trade (being saddled with McCarver must not have helped either). And yet a rule known as the reserve clause prevented him from signing with another team. His lawsuit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was unsuccessful, yet it helped pave the way for the eventual elimination of the reserve clause and the birth of free agency.
Flood was a complicated man; he eventually fled to Spain for a few years, became known as a painter, and passed away of throat cancer in 1997. And yet during the fall of 1994, I felt contempt for what he stood for. In my mind, Curt Flood laid the groundwork for the strike. And while he had nothing directly to do with the strike-the reserve clause was struck down by a technicality in the wording in 1975-he was as much a scapegoat for me in the mid-90’s as he was twenty-five years earlier.
The recently deceased George Steinbrenner was also a victim of bad timing. By 1993, his New York Yankees had not reached the playoffs in over a decade, and Big Stein had just come off his second suspension from MLB. Baseball portrays him as the overbearing mismanager that he was between his second title and his third, yet as the show premiered, his legacy started to improve. Five World Series titles, seven AL pennants, and a mere three managers later, Steinbrenner was lauded after his July passing for making other teams play to his level. Perhaps saddest of all was that Baseball came right before George Costanza’s time with the New York Yankees, so there is no mention of suits smelling like calzones or misinterpretations of Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”.
None of this is as uncomfortable to watch as the constant self-pity of intellectual Boston Red Sox fans. Baseball came before the dramatic end to The Curse of The Bambino, and the recent renewal of the Yankees/Sox rivalry which culminated in two classic ALCS battles in 2003 and 2004. Most of the final “innings” are seen through the eyes of pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who as baseball goofs go, takes the game way too seriously. Also present at Red Sox Nation’s pity party is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has the bad luck of rooting for both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Red Sox, and difficulty in making that at all interesting.
One of the final great peaks of action in Baseball is Game Six of the 1986 World Series, but it is shown in such poor quality that you’d rather watch an RBI Baseball rendition of it. We get no mention of how a New York Met fan grasps the situation, no feeling of joy when Ray Knight scores on Bill Buckner’s error. And it distills what was the perhaps greatest playoffs in Major League Baseball history, full of extra innings and heartbreaking losses, into one giant bummer. We’re left only with feelings of what might have been for Boston, when the sad tale of Donnie Moore-who was blamed for the California Angels’ ALCS collapse that year and killed himself three years later-would have added much needed perspective were it mentioned alongside Buckner’s gaffe.
And that’s what we end with: Curt Flood playing the victim card for all its worth. John Chancellor lamenting the AstroTurf, exploding scoreboards, long hair and mascots that made so many people love the game. Red Sox fans feeling sorry for themselves, and baseball fans feeling sorry for the “decline” of the entire sport. The film spends all of two minutes between the 1979 World Series and Pete Rose’s 4,192nd hit, in 1985. Daniel Okrent is here comparing the 1975 World Series to a Russian novel, but ignored completely is his most important role, as the father of fantasy baseball. ESPN, which even then turned baseball into a 24/7 affair, is not mentioned by name. There are two mentions of opera the Ninth Inning alone!
The Tenth Inning, airing tomorrow and Wednesday, will address the game of baseball over the last twenty years. Themes will most likely repeat; replace “cocaine” with “steroids”, “Bill Buckner” with “Steve Bartman”, and “Pittsburgh Pirates” with “Pittsburgh Pirates”. I will watch again, hoping for something special, or at the very least a mention of my Philadelphia Phillies winning the 2008 World Series. This time I know I am playing a game, and the words of Boston fan and onetime Commissioner Bart Giamatti are as appropriate for Baseball as they were for baseball: “It is designed to break your heart.”
When Tom Keiser is not working at a department store, he Twitters here, and he Tumblrs here. He lives outside of Philadelphia.