Reviewing Ken Burns’s Baseball

I had watched the Tenth Inning of Ken Burns’s Baseball (before watching the original nine innings) a few years ago and wrote about it here.  Having watched it again, this time on the other side of the original series, I’ve decided not to rehash what I wrote previously.  Instead, now that I’m finished, I’ve decided to look at the series as a whole.

Overall, the series provides a look at the history of baseball in a way that simultaneously provides a bit of breadth and a bit of depth.  Discussing baseball from its earliest days all the way into the twenty-first century is no small feat.  Baseball has existed on record for well over 150 years, approaching two hundred years at this point, and that existence is not confined to any one place or in any one form.  A myriad of leagues have formed and gone under over the course of the game’s history, and each of these leagues were riddled with superstars, legendary teams, and exciting games and stories.

Baseball focuses primarily on five teams, all of which played a large and central role in baseball’s history: the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Red Sox.  That’s not to say that Burns completely ignores the rest of the teams in Major League Baseball, they just don’t get as much attention.  If a team was lucky enough to have a Ty Cobb or a Pete Rose, or to get riddled by some kind of scandal, they’d get some coverage.  Otherwise, most teams, especially newer teams, barely received more than a passing nod in the documentary.  While it would have been nice for Burns to have spread the love a bit more, given the tremendous scope of this project, he can certainly be forgiven for choosing his battles.  Had Burns taken on coverage of everything that fans might have liked to have seen, Baseball would have needed to at least quadruple the size of the series — and it already sits at eleven DVDs total.

I do like and appreciate that Burns does not gloss over the not-so-pretty aspects of the game and its history.  Rather, the series unwaveringly takes on exploration of the 1919 Black Sox scandal and rampant gambling surrounding the game; it pounds away at the reserve clause and the implications it had on the business side of professional baseball; a spotlight is shone on the “gentleman’s agreement” among owners and the pervading racism throughout Major League Baseball’s history; and issues like the players’ strike and steroid use taking place in more recent history receive a long, thorough look in the Tenth Inning.

As much as I applaud the scope of this documentary, I will admit that same scope does make it rather daunting to take on.  If you’ve been following along with my journey through Baseball, you’ll know that I started with the First Inning of the series back in October, before the 2017 MLB season had even fully ended.  Now, here we are only days away from the start of 2018 Spring Training, and I have finally reached the end of the documentary.  It is a marathon, for sure, though it is a marathon that most true baseball fans will no doubt be willing to push through because it is definitely worth it.  Most Americans, even among those who consider themselves fans of the game, remain wholly ignorant of much of baseball’s history.  For anyone who decides they genuinely want to learn more about the game, its history, its players, and the forces that have shaped it, this is definitely a great place to start.

If you would like to read my summaries of all the individual innings, you can do so by following the Ken Burns tag here.