Homer Epic

By Richard Zoglin

Ken Burns is a romantic about baseball, so it is hardly surprising that the current major league strike causes him dismay. "The thing I feel most passionately about is that these guys are custodians of something a lot more important than their own bottom line," he says. "The history of baseball is the history of phenomenal human beings and events, like Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs. To think that across the board, for both owners and players, something could be more important than Ken Griffey or Frank Thomas or Matt Williams hitting that many home runs -- I find it just abhorrent."

At the same time, Burns is a pragmatic producer of TV documentaries who knows the strike will most likely only add to the interest in Baseball, his eagerly awaited nine-part history of the national pastime. More than four years in the making, Burns' first mini-series since The Civil War (which set all-time viewing records when it was broadcast on pbs in September 1990) was carefully scheduled so that it would air in the sweet spot of the baseball season: on consecutive nights (with a two-day weekend break) starting Sept. 18, just as pennant fever was heating up but before the play-offs and World Series. Now, with a strike settlement seemingly as far off as ever, Baseball may well give fans their only trip to the ballpark this fall. "If the strike affects us," says Burns, "I think it's going to help, because we'll be the only game in town."

And what a game. Four years ago, Burns managed to tell the story of America's bloodiest, most traumatic war in 11 1/2 hours. His account of our favorite sport takes up more than 18. It is not just a history of the game -- from Ty Cobb's vicious slides to Bob Gibson's fast ball, from Babe Ruth's records to Red Sox heartbreaks -- but also a slice of Americana that spans 150 years. The series covers the impact of the Depression and two World Wars; player-owner conflicts that go back more than a century (the reserve clause that prevented players from switching teams was hated even in the 1880s); and the long struggle to achieve racial integration. Baseball celebrates great hitters like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, great characters like Casey Stengel and Rube Waddell (who had to be restrained from chasing fire engines during games), great disasters like the Merkle Boner and the 1919 Black Sox scandal. It gives us Red Barber's famous radio calls, Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine and more versions of Take Me Out to the Ball Game than you imagined were possible. For baseball lovers it's the World Series, All-Star Game and Fan Appreciation Day rolled into one, with all the hot dogs and frosty malts you can wolf down.

It is also a bit much. In its grandiloquent excess, Baseball reflects the sport's increasingly hallowed status in American life. Somewhere along the road from Cap Anson to Rickey Henderson, baseball ceased being merely a game; it became a poem. Grubby, declasse sports like football and basketball might draw more crowds and more national TV coverage, but for truly discriminating fans -- the ones with Ivy League degrees who never sit in the bleachers -- baseball became the sport supreme. It's the one with the perfect, immutable dimensions and no clock to artificially limit the action; the one that values finesse and strategy over muscle and speed; the one that spews out mountains of statistics that can give any armchair fan the illusion of expertise. It has inspired nostalgic reveries, romantic paeans and volumes of close analysis that would give James Joyce scholars pause.

The apotheosis of baseball reaches its apotheosis in Baseball. As he did so brilliantly in The Civil War and half a dozen other documentaries on American history (Brooklyn Bridge, Huey Long), Burns mixes archival footage with commentary from assorted experts -- sportswriters, ex-players and other students of the game. Ty Cobb once called baseball "something like a war"; these box-seat philosophers, shot in contemplative, dreamy-eyed closeup, treat it as something like a religion. "Baseball is a beautiful thing," says sportscaster Bob Costas. "The way the field fans out. The choreography of the sport. The pace and rhythm of it." Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York and a ^ former minor leaguer, praises baseball's celebration of community, symbolized by the sacrifice bunt: "Giving yourself up for the good of the whole -- that's Jeremiah, that's thousands of years of wisdom." Political commentator George Will sees the sport as ideally suited to our democratic nation: "Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience ... Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses."

And here are Burns and co-writer Geoffrey C. Ward, in the elegiac introduction to the series (as well as to the hefty companion book being issued simultaneously by Knopf): "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 against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope -- and coming home."

Burns' own experience with the game has more down-to-earth origins. He played in Little League while growing up in Delaware, partly to distract himself from a "horrible childhood" marked by his mother's dying of cancer. He was a speedy catcher who would run alongside batters to back up the first baseman -- "and so involve myself in the most important play in Little League baseball, which is the overthrow at first base." He settled on baseball as the subject for his next big project in 1985, when he was just beginning The Civil War. "Baseball seemed a particularly appropriate way to follow the history of the country we've become since the Civil War," he says, "because it touches on so many aspects of our lives. It is a kind of American No drama of who we are."

The centerpiece of that drama for Burns is the battle to end the "gentleman's agreement" among baseball owners that, for more than half a century, kept blacks out of the major leagues. Periodic attempts had been made to break the ban (when baseball pioneer and longtime Giants manager John McGraw died in 1934, his wife found among his effects a list of all the black ballplayers he secretly wished he could have hired). But segregation held firm until Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey picked a talented young infielder from the Negro Leagues to be the man who would make a revolution. Jackie Robinson's debut at Ebbets Field in April 1947 (after he promised Rickey to turn the other cheek to racial taunts for three years) is the documentary's dramatic fulcrum as well as its high point.

While concerned with broad issues, Baseball doesn't ignore the on-field action or the emotional resonance those events have had for ordinary fans. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould recalls listening to Bobby Thomson hit his dramatic homer to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants: "It was probably the greatest moment of pure joy in my life." Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a childhood Dodger fan, says she was so crushed that she didn't leave her house for days.

The show's dogged, decade-by-decade approach is a little rigid, and the format can be precious (each of the nine episodes is called an "inning" and opens with The Star-Spangled Banner; the seventh installment even has a "seventh-inning stretch"). But Baseball puts a wealth of material into intelligent order. There are vivid sketches of greats both ancient (Christy Mathewson, a model of rectitude during the game's early, roughhousing years) and more recent (the ornery, complicated but incomparable Ted Williams). And Burns, as usual, fills his narrative with evocative anecdotes and fascinating trivia. Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, of the fabled Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield combination, didn't speak to each other for two years after a dispute over cab fare. The Star-Spangled Banner was first sung at a ball game during the 1918 World Series, as a patriotic gesture near the end of World War I; the practice instantly caught on, though the song did not become the national anthem until years later.

Yet the series' bulging length and rhapsodic tone become wearying, even for a diehard fan. (It's difficult to imagine a nonfan sitting through anything close to the program's full 18 hours.) Baseball is rich in drama, irresistible as nostalgia and, yes, an instructive window into our national psychology. But it is, after all, a game. The lofty rhetoric of The Civil War seemed perfectly suited to the epic subject; in Baseball everything from Carl Hubbell's screwball to Mickey Mantle's bad knees is given the same sense of moment. Hard-hitting Mel Ott, we're told in portentous tones, was "so feared at the plate that he was once intentionally walked with the bases loaded." Negro League star "Cool Papa" Bell was "so fast he once scored from first on a sacrifice bunt." Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks was "so fond of playing that he liked to say, 'Let's play two."' It may be a game of finesse, but Baseball swings for the fences on every pitch.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York