COVER STORY : He’s Rounding Third . . . : Following the wild success of his ‘The Civil War,’ documentarian Ken Burns is finishing ‘Baseball,’ a painstaking look at another American institution due on PBS around World Series time--next year

Looking down from the wall to the right as Ken Burns sits at his desk in his converted-barn office is a fine, slightly sepia photo portrait of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball this century. Robinson sits in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform with a bat on his shoulder, appearing at once serene and unflappable and, conversely, intense and passionate.

For Burns, the filmmaker whose epic 11-hour “The Civil War,” first shown on the Public Broadcasting Service in 1990, made him an icon among American documentarians, Robinson and his emotions are the focus around which all of baseball spins. And around baseball spins the panoply of American culture.

The spirals and the complexities and, really, the fun of it all are what drive Burns in his latest project, an 18-hour film titled, simply, “Baseball,” scheduled to air on PBS in the fall of 1994.

“Truly, baseball mirrors American society in so many ways, be it labor relations, big business, making heroes, language and, of course, race relations,” Burns said. “It is a daunting experience to try to capture baseball and its place in American history.

“Baseball films have always had the problem of treacly nostalgia. One of the reasons why is that no one has ever tried to do a narrative history of baseball on film. It is just too complicated,” he said. “I can only hope we are successful.”

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B urns, like his hero Robinson, appears both serene and intense. Fourteen years ago, four years out of college and disenchanted with New York, he chose to live in this one-gas-station, Norman Rockwellesque town along the Connecticut River border with Vermont, far in both distance and spirit from the bustle of the Hollywood and Manhattan filmmaking centers. It was a move calculated to save both money and chaos, and for Burns, at least, it has worked. All of his films have been created here, most to great acclaim.

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” his first historical film (1981), won an Academy Award nomination for documentaries. “The Statue of Liberty” (1985) got both Emmy and Oscar nominations. In between, Burns produced “The Shakers” (1984) and “Huey Long” (1985), and since, “Thomas Hart Benton” (1988), “The Congress” (1989) and “Empire of the Air” (1992), about the men who invented radio.

But all of this work was overshadowed--no, overwhelmed--by “The Civil War.” It received carloads of awards; its companion coffee-table book sold more than 700,000 copies at $50 a pop; the audio version, narrated by Burns, is still a bestseller. “The Civil War” also catapulted Burns into a strange subset of the famous.

“I’ve enjoyed a nutritional celebrity,” said Burns, a thin fellow of average height whose most distinctive feature is a mop of hair that is a cross between Moe Howard of the Three Stooges and early Beatles. “People don’t run after me and try to rip my clothes off and that sort of stuff. They want to talk, and that’s great. The most satisfying thing about it is that I can be traveling somewhere, in a diner, and someone recognizes me. Within two seconds, they are talking as if I’m a friend, seemingly continuing a conversation we had just a little while ago. That’s how history develops.”

“The Civil War” has also given Burns newfound financial comfort. He said he often turns down five-figure speeches (“I feel like a history whore if I do too many,” he said). And besides the ancillary profits from “The Civil War,” General Motors, which funded “The Civil War,” has given Burns grants to do biographical films through the year 2000. He is already starting to plan films on Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark and feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

But for now, the consuming passion is “Baseball,” a project he began with a long interview with the late broadcaster Red Barber before “The Civil War” ever aired. “Had I known of the success of ‘The Civil War,’ I certainly would have taken a year off,” Burns said. “But, frankly, at the time, I needed the work.”

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As with all of his projects, Burns has put on film for “Baseball” vastly more than he could ever need. His editing studio, in a fine old white Cape Cod house in what passes for downtown Walpole, is crammed with film boxes and files containing literally hundreds of thousands of shots of some aspect of the game.

He has put thousands of old photographs on film--culled from, among other places, The Sporting News, the Hall of Fame and numerous private collectors--and has done more than 80 interviews with folks from Hall of Famer Ted Williams to New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. People scurry up and down the narrow staircases and hallways past myriad strips of film hanging from seemingly every type of appliance.

Aside from the actual editing bays, the setup at Florentine Films (named in honor of a teacher Burns had at Hampshire College who lived in Florence, Mass.) is surprisingly chockablock and primitive. Burns built his own recording room in a random closet, made soundproof with the same spongy eggshell casing you might find in boxes holding new stereos.

“If they made equipment from Erector Sets, we’d probably use it,” Burns said. “I’m decidedly low-tech. I use the same kinds of cameras and easels and lighting and all that I did when I started. The film, not the equipment, is the thing.”

And what a thing “Baseball” is. At 18 hours (“Almost as long as the average game,” joked one of Burns’ interns), it will dominate the PBS fall lineup next year. (PBS has not yet decided how the program will be scheduled.) Yet critics are sure to harp on what Burns has left out.

“In ‘Baseball,’ we’re doing not just a comprehensive piece, but a way to gather it up,” said Burns, who, in his overt fondness for metaphors and analogies, offers one. “You go to this orchard and there are so many apples you can’t pick all of them up. Upfront, we can’t be the Baseball Encyclopedia. But maybe we can pick up one apple that might really speak: ‘Apple!’ ”

The rough cut of “Baseball” has been completed with bare mention of the minor leagues and many of the major league teams. “Seattle fans will not be very happy if they think we’re going to do extensive Mariners history,” Burns said. But there will be long exegeses of critical moments and people:

* Forty-five minutes on the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox players were banished from baseball for allegedly conspiring to throw the World Series.

* Twenty minutes on the 1908 failure of New York Giant rookie Fred Merkle to touch second base to end the World Series.

* Fifteen minutes on the muff of a crucial fly ball by Fred Snodgrass in the 1912 World Series.

* Thirty minutes on Babe Ruth.

* Twenty minutes on the 1951 Bobby Thomson National League playoff game homer.

* Fifteen minutes on Ty Cobb.

And, to be sure, lots on the black-and-white of the game.

“Central to baseball (and “Baseball”) is race. That’s where you can really use baseball as a Trojan horse (to find out more about American history),” Burns said.

“You can go all the way back to 1867, as we do, when the African-American Pithians applied for membership in the Pennsylvania Assn. of Baseball Teams and were turned down,” he said. “The matter was taken up by the National Assn., and they were also turned down. Nevertheless, they played the City Items, a group of reporters from the Philadelphia newspapers, and they creamed them in the first recorded game of a black team beating a white team. Unfortunately, their captain, Octavius Catto, was murdered soon after the game in a race riot because blacks had the unmitigated gall to demonstrate in support of voting rights. There is a wonderful parallel there to society in general.”

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Burns prides himself on the collaborative nature of his films, though for a time there was a tension between him and his brother, Ric, who co-wrote and co-produced “The Civil War,” apparently because Ric felt he was not given the credit he deserved for the epic. (Ric Burns chose not to be part of the “Baseball” film, having started on his own projects. His “Donner Party” appeared on PBS last season and he is now working on a short history about the end of the Wild West.)

Though all the films are labeled “A film by Ken Burns,” most of them, including “The Civil War” and “Baseball,” were initially scripted by Geoffrey Ward, who is also writing the companion book for “Baseball.” Paul Barnes is the chief film editor for “Baseball,” as he was for “The Civil War.” Lynn Novick, a former producer for Bill Moyers, joined Burns at the end of “The Civil War” as more or less an office manager and is now his right-hand woman for “Baseball.”

In addition, there are about a dozen folks Burns lists as consultants for “Baseball,” including baseball historian John Thorn, statistics guru Bill James, Washington University Afro-American Studies Director Gerald Early and former Negro League star Buck O’Neill.

With the 18-hour film in rough-cut version, they are busy now “cutting and editing and trying to get the rhythm right between sections,” Burns said. “Actually, because of that, our hardest times are ahead.” The final images have to be locked in by November, while work on the music and vocal tracks continues until June, when the finished product is scheduled for delivery to PBS.

Burns’ insistence on staying in Walpole can sometimes cause his collaborators quite an inconvenience. Barnes has bitten the bullet and moved to New Hampshire. Novick, whose husband, Robert I. Smith Jr., is a fund-raiser for the Museum of Modern Art, stays with her 1-year-old daughter at Burns’ house during the week and goes home to Manhattan on weekends. Ward, Thorn and the rest make periodic pilgrimages to the Walpole mecca.

“I, for one, love the experience,” said Thorn, the author of “Total Baseball” and other rabid-fan tomes, who commutes weekly to Walpole from Upstate New York.

“I’m participating in the final year of editing when I’ve had no background in film except sitting in darkened theaters. I’m 46 years old and feel this is an invitation to run away and join the circus for a year. . . . But I have this deep sense that we are doing something profound and wonderful here with this film, building something of enduring value, using baseball as a prism through which you send the light that illuminates the country’s history.”

Ward tends to be slightly less poetic about his role and pragmatic about the credit he receives for Burns’ films.

“These films are Ken’s visions. I don’t feel any different than the people who wrote Orson Welles’ films,” Ward said from his New York office. “I usually write the script after first talking with Ken. Meanwhile, he collects footage and interviews and archival material and then the two are altered for the final film.

“We have a similar view of history. I think it’s not villains and heroes. It’s complicated people on both sides of issues. And I like to do things bottom up, instead of top down.”

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Filmmaker Burns likes to repeat that he loves to take history away from the great men, the wars, the generals and the Presidents, “which seems paradoxical because I just came off five years of making ‘The Civil War,’ something about great men and war and generals and Presidents.” One of the gimmicks Burns uses to that end in “Baseball” is to follow the family of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and its relation to baseball throughout the film.

Burns was led to Goodwin through a piece she wrote for the Boston Red Sox yearbook a few years ago (Burns admits to being a devout Red Sox fan) about how her father helped her become a lifelong fan. Burns only intended to use a snippet of an interview with Goodwin but decided to give the stories she tells about her father, who watched Brooklyn’s famed Ebbets Field being built and died watching a Mets game on TV, more prominent play.

“It shows us how baseball can be a continuum in American family life. How the love of the game is passed down through generations. In that continuum, baseball is unlike other sports,” Burns said. “How many points does Michael Jordan have? How many did Wilt Chamberlain have? Does it matter? But how many home runs do Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth have? (755 and 714, respectively) The casual fan has a relationship. . . . You play not only who you are playing against today, but the ghosts of everyone who has ever played.”

Goodwin, who has written biographies of, among others, the Kennedy family, is a big fan of Burns’ style.

“His capacity to use photographs and write so those pictures come alive is fantastic,” she said. “My own sense is that there are so many different angles of reaching history, all that matters is the quality of material to make one feel as if you were there at the time, which is what Ken provides. I would say that his films actually send people to read books. I should be writing a baseball book now so that it will be out when this film comes out.”

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Burns acknowledges that he loves all the plaudits he gets for his films.

“But that and 50 cents, as they say, will get me a cup of coffee in Walpole,” he said. Though he has been approached to do feature work, he has so far stayed away from Hollywood. “I have not really gotten a better story to do than what I have done with the documentaries. But, really, this is the form I am comfortable with and seem good at. Besides, I have a great deal of control, something I’m sure I’d have to give up in features.”

It’s that desire for control that belies the apparent laid-back, serene, New Hampshire countryman in Burns. He is intense, passionate and diligent about his work. Because of the volume of work involved with “Baseball,” as well as the outside pressures on his time due to the success of “The Civil War,” he for the first time had to let someone else, associate producer Novick, do major interviews for one of his films. He likes to be there when every piece of film is shot, when every fact is being researched.

“People ask me why I don’t have some intern doing research,” Burns said indignantly. “Can you imagine having your lowest-level person doing research, the most important building block of a film?”

“Ken is really gifted in the obvious things, of course, but through his emotion and his drive he somehow manages to get a diverse group of people--writers, editors, musicians, what have you--to rise to the occasion as much as you can,” Novick said. “It’s a great gift, and, believe me, it’s necessary if you are going to spend four years or more on a project.”

Burns said he came to “Baseball” as a minor fan. He religiously watches the games of the Walpole Blues, for which his 10-year-old daughter, Sarah, pitches regular shutouts and hits .500. (Burns, who will be 40 on July 29, also has another daughter, Lilly, 6, and his wife, Amy, is a frequent contributor to his films.) He sees an occasional major league game, though Walpole is a four-hour drive from the nearest big league parks--New York’s Yankee Stadium and Boston’s Fenway Park.

“I wouldn’t turn to the sports pages first off,” he said. “I was not the guy who could shout out statistics. But I realized that this was, and has been, the American game, and I feel like I’m Samoa or Guam, an American possession. So ‘Baseball’ really was a natural for me.”

Burns has made “Baseball” in nine chronological chapters he likes to call innings. He is especially enamored of the early innings, the 19th and early 20th centuries, because few people care much about baseball in those times, yet there are so many parallels to today’s game and today’s problems in the country in general.

“For instance, we have a great George Steinbrenner character in the 1890s named Andrew Freedman, who owned the New York Giants and fired his managers something like 11 times in eight years,” Burns said. “The New York crowds came out to boo him, just like they booed Steinbrenner.

“In the later innings, I think we make lively an essentially boring subject like the players’ union and free agency and make them this absolute echo of something that has been going on since the late 19th Century, when players clamored for the same things.

“I think the 19th Century is all an interesting template for what’s going on today. I have a gambling scandal, players being banned from baseball for life, an owner who reminds me of Steinbrenner. I have superlative play by upstanding ballplayers and rogues. And I’ve got a lot of people, all the way back to 1869, complaining that baseball ain’t what it used to be.”

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As in “The Civil War,” Burns has lined up wonderful and famous voices to read quotes from old players, managers, owners and fans. Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell, for instance, is Georgian Ty Cobb, to some eyes both the most evil and best player ever. Other voices will include actors Ossie Davis, Amy Madigan, Paul Newman, John Turturro, Gregory Peck and Paul Winfield, all of whom Burns has persuaded to read for union minimum day rates.

David McCullough, the Pulitzer-winning author (“Truman”), who was the main narrator of “The Civil War” and other Burns films, has begged off “Baseball,” telling Burns he was just not a baseball fan. Burns is still auditioning narrators and may possibly take on the role himself for the first time.

Like any director and his project, Burns has his favorite characters in “Baseball”: Jackie Robinson, of course, for his temperament and stature; early 20th-Century Philadelphia A’s pitcher Rube Waddell, who did nutty things like leave the stadium to chase fire engines and go batty when opposing players flashed shiny objects at him from the dugout; outlandish figures like Ruth; conundrums like Cobb (“I mean, what do you do with Ty Cobb? Is he bad? Yes. Is he good? Yes. He’s just a phenomenon”).

As a historian of the complex, he loves juxtapositions, like New York Giant manager John McGraw and his star pitcher, Christy Mathewson. “John McGraw was pretty corrupt but beloved. He gambled on games before the Black Sox scandal,” Burns said. “He was a cheater and a rogue and a rough-and-tumble guy. Mathewson was clearly the most virtuous baseball player who ever played, every inch the Frank Merriwell thing. Yet they were a pair, always thought of as together. It’s what makes history like this fascinating as a novel.

“History too, like baseball, has normally been about selling the convenient myth,” Burns said. “Abner Doubleday is said to have invented baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y. Didn’t happen. If I know you are telling the truth, that has one value. If you are lying to me and I know you are lying to me, you speak volumes. That is why myth, which is kind of a lie, is so important to understand. The fact that Cooperstown is a monument to a lie and still the best place you could ever put baseball’s alleged beginnings is a wonderful tension.”

But doing a film on baseball certainly has its limits. Not only are the lore and statistics mountainous, but the history actually suffers for having too many heroes. Even the most obscure scrub who has made it to the major leagues is a star, merely because he has made it there.

“In war, a private is a private, and he’s not going to go anywhere. So his letters home provide a great counterpoint to the general, who is more or less tracked by normal history,” Burns said. “But baseball is so democratic, it takes the private, so to speak, and makes him the general, not because he has been schooled, but because he can hit or pitch a baseball. In ‘Baseball,’ we suffer from not having a hierarchy--that is to say, there are no ordinary people, like we drew from in ‘The Civil War.’ ”

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B urns obviously likes his heroes too. In the few acres behind his small whitewashed home and adjacent office, he is building a replica of Thomas Jefferson’s garden-orchard at Monticello. The cement foundation for the large corner garden building was dug in mid-June, and the matching Colonial bricks will be laid through the summer. To surround the building, Burns has planted seeds descended from the apple trees at Monticello, all to inspire him for his Jefferson film biography.

But as he contemplates his new garden, and puts the final touches on “Baseball,” he worries a bit about his favorite game.

“I’m concerned about money and greed and TV particularly,” he said. “I would suggest that if baseball had had a better relationship in the clubhouse to blacks and if TV had been a little bit different, Michael Jordan would be playing baseball. I want the next Michael Jordan to play baseball.

“Baseball tells us about how life really is. Life is not about winning. It is more often than not about losing,” Burns said. “Right now, baseball is defensive. It wants to be like other sports by increasing the playoffs and changing the nature of TV coverage and trying to speed up the game, and that’s a mistake. That way, you play right into the worst feature of baseball, which is that when the guy you pay $3 million a year comes up in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and his team behind, he will invariably screw up more times than he will succeed. You give the ball to Michael Jordan with the reasonable assurance that two-thirds of the time he will succeed.

“But baseball is something else. It is about understanding the incredible moral, historical, psychological and artistic drama that is going on. It is about history at its best, which doesn’t say just who won and who lost but is about the answer: neither, and both.”