| Baseball | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary film |
| Distributed by | PBS |
| Creator | Ken Burns |
| Produced by | Ken Burns Lynn Novick |
| Written by | Geoffrey C. Ward Ken Burns |
| Narrated by | John Chancellor |
| Starring | see text |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Original channel | PBS |
| Original run | September 18, 1994 – September 28, 1994 |
| Running time | approx. 18.5 hours total |
| No. of episodes | 9 |
| Followed by | The Tenth Inning |
Baseball (1994) is an 18½ hour, Emmy Award-winning documentary series by Ken Burns about the game of baseball. First broadcast on PBS, this was Burns' ninth documentary.
Contents |
Baseball is similar to Burns' previous documentaries such as The Civil War, in the use of archived pictures and film footage mixed with interviews for visual presentation. Actors provide voice over reciting written work (letters, speeches, etc.) over pictures and video. The episodes are interspersed with the music of the times taken from previous Burns series, original played music, or recordings ranging from Louis Armstrong to Elvis Presley. The series was narrated by journalist John Chancellor, best known as the anchor of NBC Nightly News between 1970 and 1982.
The documentary is divided into nine parts, each referred to as an "inning", following the division of a baseball game. Each "inning" reviews a particular era in time, and begins with a brief prologue that acts as an insight to the game during that era. The prologue ends with the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" just as a real baseball game would begin, with the particular rendition played as it might have been in the era being covered in that inning. While covering the 1960s, the rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" used is the version played by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. In some "inning" episodes, a period version of the baseball anthem "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is used. Before the main feature, a brief preview and the events of the time of the "inning" to come follows.
Major themes explored throughout the documentary are those of race, business, labour relations, and the relationship between baseball and society. The series had an audience of 45 million viewers, which makes it the most watched program in Public Television history.
The film begins with an introduction by narrator John Chancellor:
It is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds, prison yards, in back alleys and farmers’ fields; by small boys and old men, raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed; the only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years; while they conquered a continent, warred with each other and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and with the meaning of freedom.
At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating, and has excluded as many as it has included. A profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American Odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers, and it reflects a host of age-old American tensions; between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.
It is a haunted game in which every player is measured with the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.
The game’s greatest figures have come from everywhere: coal mines and college campuses, city slums and country crossroads. A brawling Irish immigrant’s son [John McGraw] who for more than half a century preached a rough and scrambling brand of baseball in which anything went so as long victory was achieved; and his favorite player, a college-educated right-hander [Christy Mathewson] so uniformly virtuous that millions of schoolboys worshipped him as The Christian Gentleman.
A mill hand who could neither read nor write [Joe Jackson] who might have been one of the game's greatest heroes if temptation had not proved too great. A flamboyant federal judge [Kenesaw Mountain Landis] who at first saved baseball from a scandal that threatened to destroy it, but later became an implacable enemy of reform.
A miner’s son [Mickey Mantle] from Commerce, Oklahoma, who made himself the game’s most powerful switch-hitter despite 17 seasons of ceaseless pain. A tight-fisted Methodist [Branch Rickey], ‘a cross’, one sportswriter said, ‘between a statistician and an evangelist’, who profoundly changed the game twice. And there were those whose true greatness was never fully measured because of the stubborn prejudice that permeated the nation and its favorite game.
Two of baseball's best began life in rural Georgia: A swift and savage competitor [Ty Cobb] who may have been the greatest player of all time, but whose uncontrollable rage in the end made him more enemies than friends; and another no less fierce competitor [Jackie Robinson] who, because he managed to hold his temper, made professional baseball a truly national pastime more than a century after it was born.
And then there was the Baltimore saloonkeeper’s turbulent son [Babe Ruth], who became the best-known and best-loved athlete in American history.[1]
Original airdate: Sunday, September 18, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Monday, September 19, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Tuesday, September 20, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Wednesday, September 21, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Thursday, September 22, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Sunday, September 25, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Monday, September 26, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Tuesday, September 27, 1994.[2]
Original airdate: Wednesday, September 28, 1994.[2]
At a preview screening of his 2007 documentary The War, Ken Burns spoke of the possibility of coming up to date in the history of baseball with a "Tenth Inning" episode of his Baseball documentary.[3] This was officially confirmed by Burns in an MLB Network interview, and later to the NBC LA web site during the winter Television Critics Association media tour January 8. It aired in Fall 2010 and covered the period from the 1994 strike through the 2009 season.
During in-game coverage of a Texas Rangers game during July 2009, Ken was interviewed, and said the Tenth Inning would air "about a year from now" on PBS. He also went on to state that it would be two two-hour programs. One would be the "top of the 10th", and the other would be the "bottom of the 10th". He also said that "the good Lord willing", there would be an 11th Inning and a 12th Inning some years down the road. His aim is to air the 11th Inning in 2020 opening with Armando Galarraga.[4] Burns also said that Baseball is the only one of his documentaries to which he was ever interested in doing a "sequel" (of sorts).
The Tenth Inning premiered on PBS on September 28, 2010. The Inning was broken into two halves airing on September 28 and 29, 2010 and October 5, 2010. The documentary discussed the major stories of the last fifteen years in baseball. It focuses heavily on examining Barry Bonds and the Steroid era but also discusses other major issues in baseball, such as how baseball rebounded from the 1994 strike, the return to prominence of the Yankees, the influence of international players (specifically Dominican and Japanese players) on the game, and the drama of the 2003 and 2004 American League Championship Series. The website for Baseball: The Tenth Inning is at http://www.pbs.org/baseball-the-tenth-inning/ As a postscript, Marcos Breton, the Sacramento Bee writer who was interviewed extensively during the film finally realized his boyhood dream of watching the Giants win its first World Championship in San Francisco shortly after the film premiered on PBS.
The documentary is made available to local PBS stations to air as part of their programming. Usually these can be found on weekends or during pledge drives.
Starting in 2009 the series also can be found on MLB Network Sunday nights at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT. These airings include commercial breaks which stretch the run time of each episode from around 1 hour to 2 or even 3 depending on how many breaks MLB Network adds to the episode. As the series was intended to air commercial free on public television the breaks are often quite abrupt. The first episode to air on the network also had utterances of the word "nigger" (as read from first person accounts or quotes from the time) bleeped out, despite the offensive language of the episode being heard uncensored on over-the-air PBS stations for years. Later episodes dropped this censoring but added a disclaimer at the beginning of the program warning that it contained offensive language.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of people not involved in baseball who were interviewed in the documentary:
The following is a non-exhaustive list of people who were more involved in the game of baseball, and were interviewed in the documentary:
The following did voices of characters in Baseball:
The entire series was released on a ten-disc DVD set on September 28, 2004, with each inning on a separate disc and a tenth disc of unaired material titled Extra Innings featuring a making of Baseball among other features.
A revised DVD set, now including The Tenth Inning, was released on October 5, 2010, as was a standalone Blu-ray disc containing only The Tenth Inning.
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