‘Baseball’ Like the Game: Some Hits, Runs, Errors

For his contributions to the historical documentary, Ken Burns deserves to have his number retired.

He is the nation’s foremost telestorian. His impressive body of work on PBS culminated in 1990 with “The Civil War,” a seminal, 11-hour series whose spectacular critical praise and surprising popularity at least briefly transfused TV documentaries and enabled his Florentine Films to proceed at full speed with his latest tome.

The even-longer--much, much longer--”Baseball.”

Starting Sunday: An extraordinary 18 1/2 hours split into nine evenings--or episodes, called “Innings”--a chronology from the 1840s to the 1990s, during which Burns exhilarates you . . . and bores you. Yogi Berra was right: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

“Baseball” takes a long time getting over. At times, in fact, you might think you’re in reverse, watching “The Civil War” again, so closely do the new documentary’s opening hours, in particular, resemble its predecessor in style and presentation.

Imagine hearing the following, backed by a sorrowful violin: “Virginia, April 3, 1862. It is astonishing how indifferent a person can become to danger. . . .”

No, it’s not Northern trooper Elisha Hunt Rhodes checking in from the battlefield, but another Union soldier writing home about playing “bat ball” as a diversion from the war. The resemblance to “The Civil War” is furthered by the return of many of its off-camera voices. And if you didn’t know John Chancellor was supplying the narration--quite adroitly, by the way--you’d swear it was David McCullough.

Much of this familiarity intensifies the torpor you experience from time to time as this incremental marathon plays out. Yet even when “Baseball” is finally done--and you’re as limp as someone who has sat through an 18-inning game while praying for someone to mercifully hit one out of the park and end it--you have the impression that Burns and his collaborators are still on the edges of their seats desiring more, having bitten off less than they want to chew.

So great is their worship at the cleats of baseball.

The irony of the “Baseball” scheduling--timed originally to immediately precede the Major League playoffs and World Series--has Ruthian size. We now know there won’t be postseason play in 1994. There won’t even be any more pre-postseason. Just Wednesday, the rest of the season was canceled due to a players’ strike that has forced Americans to live without the game that “Baseball” asserts Americans cannot possibly live without. Yet, so far, life for most has proceeded routinely minus the sport that writer Robert Creamer insists in “Baseball” is “more fun than anything else.”

In large patches, so is this documentary. At its very best, “Baseball” soars over the timeless plain of U.S. history like a ball being lofted out of the park. Again echoing “The Civil War,” it entertainingly relives the texture of the times, unfurling itself like Old Glory, conveying with humor, scholarship, music, diary readings, anecdotes and wonderful old grainy archival footage how the sport’s evolution has tightly interlocked with the evolution of the nation. And how, as a common denominator, it permeates all layers of society.

At its very, very best, “Baseball” plucks from the shadows of relative obscurity the old Negro Leagues that sprouted and blossomed in response to the sport’s segregation.

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“Baseball” is never more charming than when a couple of black old-timers spin tales about fabled hurler Satchel Paige. At long last, Burns mounts the likes of Paige and the lesser-known Buck O’Neil and Josh Gibson on the pedestal they deserve. In fact, he tracks white and black baseball almost as parallel stories, ones that will intersect at the juncture of Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey in the mid-1940s.

Robinson’s courage in the face of ignorance as the first black player of the modern era allowed into the lily-white majors--here was an athlete whose on-field prowess did translate to heroism--is heroically recounted here. As are the stories of Curt Flood, Ty Cobb and, naturally, the bamboozing bambino himself, Babe Ruth. “In an age of conspicuous consumption,” says Chancellor, “he was the most conspicuous consumer of them all.”

“Baseball” at times is so laborious, however, that it takes Burns more than five hours just to get to the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. But this blemish on the sport, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were bribed to throw the World Series, is so indelibly depicted that it’s well worth the wait.

The first two-hour episode of “Baseball” is a melodic overture, introducing a sports history rich in color, legend and continuity. Words from 1868: “Somehow or other, they don’t play ball the way they used to eight or 10 years ago.” Words from 1870: “Baseball is a business now.”

In one old photo, Civil War soldiers play ball in front of their tents. In another, men in black derbies are eyes left, their attention riveted to the field. We see the first curveball, the first professional team, the first Louisville Slugger bat, the first hot dog. We see early experimental uniforms, a different color for each position that, someone observes, looked “like a Dutch bed of tulips.”

Throughout its history, baseball’s legends have fattened on hyperbole--ever-growing fish stories that have fused with contemporary sports culture. Walter Johnson’s famed fastball, Cobb is said to have said, “just hissed with danger.” And as for the volatile Cobb himself, a sportswriter wrote, he was “a cyclone, a tornado, a typhoon, all rolled into one.” So much so that we hear of opposing players “fleeing the field to avoid his raised spikes.”

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Meanwhile, Grover Cleveland Alexander didn’t merely walk to the mound. No, sir, he strode “in from the bullpen through the gray mist.” And “Cool Papa” Bell was said to be “so fast he once scored from first on a sacrifice bunt.”

“Baseball” amiably accepts at face value these so-called eyewitness accounts passed down from generation to generation. And with no TV pictures to rebut them--nothing reduces an immortal to ordinary size like seeing him muff a fly ball in the outfield--they’re now part of the lore.

No wonder, then, that the nearer “Baseball” gets to the present, the thinner its magic. The last several hours’ devotion to various World Series and players in the 1970s-1990s era come across as a variation on a theme by ESPN. At this point, in particular, the wordiness becomes oppressive.

“Baseball” needs more of those “mini-seconds of stillness” that one of its contributors, poet Donald Hall, attributes to the sport. At its very worst, it is too long, too repetitious, too tediously thick with the gaseously pretentious rhetoric of professional super-fans who form a human internet of adoration, sounding like addicts in praise of heroin. When they speak about baseball, their eyes light up like electronic scoreboards. Couldn’t Billy Crystal say baseball’s just mahhhhvelous and leave it at that?

Never has a single metaphor been stretched by so many. You have the impression that Burns himself could make a metaphor even out of Jacks (round rubber ball like the globe . . .). In this documentary, baseball is inflated into a metaphor not only for the United States but also for all humankind. You could just as easily stretch a baseball cover across a bowling ball.

You know it’s time for some people to get a life when:

* Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell says baseball “makes the more important moments of living bearable.”

* Writer-editor Dan Okrent likens baseball to a “Russian novel” and, in only half jest, calls the game “the Darwinian product of centuries of movement of people and continents and oceans and something rising from the sea and their turning eventually, after years of evolution, to Barry Bonds.”

* Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin says that Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk’s vivid body language, while seeing his dramatic home run in the 1975 World Series almost drift foul, represents “all of us (wishing) we could control our destiny.”

As if to justify this hemorrhaging of air time, there’s even more gale-force hot air about baseball’s significance. Okrent sees uniqueness in baseball’s “common language of statistics,” as if other sports did not speak that language.

“It highlights the individual like no other sport does,” says Bob Costas. Tell that to Joe Montana or Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson.

“It is a community,” says former minor leaguer Mario Cuomo, now governor of New York. “You need all nine people helping each other.” As if teamwork were not equally as crucial in other sports.

It remains to be seen just how many viewers will stay around even to hear all of this. Make a documentary and they will come? Perhaps not.

* “Baseball” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 7 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24. It will continue through Thursday at the same times, then will be off for two days, resuming Sept. 25-28. * PRE-SELLING THE SHOW

“Baseball” will be in video stores next Friday--before it ends on PBS. F22