22 hours of viewing that we slowly pecked away at all summer, an hour here and an hour there, and we finally finished all 10 innings of Ken Burns’s Baseball. I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t have a particular attraction to the sport of baseball. For about a 3-year period in my early adolescence (an appropriate age), I was entranced by the sport, keeping track of box scores, memorizing stats, and I became an avid collector of the stories surrounding the game, but I hadn’t returned to those stories for most of the rest of my life.
After all of those hours watching Ken Burns’s documentary, I do not have any more love for the game than I did before. But I do have a tremendous deal more respect for who we are as Americans. Despite many of the commentators in the documentary repeating that “Baseball is the greatest game in the world,” I can still not come even close to concurring. With baseball only played in a handful of countries in Latin America, Korea, Japan and hardly noticed in Canada, I can hardly think of baseball as a universal game. For those in the Caribbean, the game is a ticket to the United States. Soccer wins most universal and most loved in the world. At a more subjective level, I find football to be the more cerebral, complex game and basketball to be more exciting than baseball.
It turns out that Ken Burns doesn’t have that great of a penchant for the sport either (what we learned in an interview in the “making of” adding to our 22-hour total). As in all of his documentaries, Ken Burns isn’t telling us a story about baseball but a story about what it means to be American through the lens of baseball.
Indeed, baseball is who we are as a people, for better or worse, and its history has told our story as a people. It is no exaggeration that the 20th century can be broken into pre- and post-Jackie Robinson. Certainly, Jackie Robinson’s entry into the game in 1947 was one of the emotional climaxes of the documentary and it was fascinating hearing all of the backstories of this momentous event from those involved, like Robinson’s wife. What still stings is how long it took just one of the enlightened owners, Branch Rickey, to end the gentlemen’s agreement and finally realize that black men should be able to play in the majors. The great ghost surrounding the event is that we will never know if Josh Gibson was better than Babe Ruth. Gibson is the symbol of all the wonderful players that most of America could never experience because they were relegated to the Negro Leagues.
Another highlight of the documentary is any moment when Buck O’Neal is speaking. A more charming and gracious speaker you will never find, as O’Neal told wonderful stories of his time in the Negro Leagues but with also deep appreciation and no sense of the deep bitterness of what was happening in the Majors.
The great lesson of the documentary, though, and my big takeaway, came in the bottom of the 10th when describing the steroid problem. Like all of the momentous changes that came in baseball’s history, such as the idea that black people could be treated as human beings when Americans saw that they could play the game like Jackie Robinson, the steroid problem in baseball describes a deep character flaw that we have as a people. The insatiable desire to be the best, at all costs, is not relegated to baseball. Indeed, all major sports have the steroid problem. All major activities (business and politics are clear examples) do as well. Baseball just became the poster boy for the problem. Indeed, any normal human being, if offered the chance, would take a pill to make themselves better at their job and increase their salary by a million-fold. So it wasn’t surprising that young twenty-year olds were experimenting with all sorts of chemicals to make themselves better. It happens in just about every industry.
Yet the big moment of the documentary came when describing Barry Bonds, who could be the most hated figure in sports history. During this section, one of the commentators explains how John Keats describes why William Shakespeare was the greatest writer that ever lived because he had what Keats called “Negative Capability.” Negative Capability might just be a convoluted way to say that Shakespeare could both see and describe the good and bad in every situation, making us aware of the complexities of the human situation, and the idea that “ the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration,” and so one has to see the beauty in baseball and even Bonds, because there is just such an enormous character to see in him. Barry Bonds is the classic case of having so much good and bad to describe.
Long before Bonds started “allegedly” taking PEDs, he was on track to be as good as Willie Mays, his godfather and arguably the greatest all-around player in baseball history. With 400 home runs, 400 stolen bases, an outstanding outfielder with a gun of an arm, and one of the smartest hitters ever, the skinny pre-PED Bonds was an absolutely devastating athlete. His desire to get even better, spurred by the PED-enhanced Mark McGwire breaking Roger Maris’s single season home run record, is totally understandable, even by the fans who constantly berated him with the asterisk placards and nasty comments. Yet Maris was the original asterisk (even Yankee fans treacherously said he would never be as good as Ruth after he broke Ruth’s record because Maris did it in the 162-game season). McGwire, of course, has a gigantic asterisk by his name, but nobody talked about his asterisk at the time because it wasn’t en vogue to talk about PEDs in the season when McGwire broke the record.
The only player to crush Ruth’s lifetime record without an asterisk (that we know of) was Hank Aaron, who comes off as the most gracious, humble, kind-hearted human being in the documentary. When Bonds broke Aaron’s record, Aaron said that there should be no asterisk. Because Aaron, like Bonds, also received the death threats, and he knew the perseverance, dedication, smarts, it takes to hit more than 714 home runs over the course of a career in the big leagues. One also has to bear in mind that Bonds did what he did against pitching that was 100 times more sophisticated than what Ruth faced and 10 times more sophisticated than what Aaron faced. The pitchers in Bonds's era were also juicing, making them superhumans too. The great irony. Having been able to see Bonds play in person, I remember how whenever he came to the plate at PacBell Park, fans would come streaming down from the hot dog stands, everybody would stand at nervous attention, while during the rest of the game they would casually chat. Bonds had that great power that you did not want to miss a single second of one of his at-bats because he could do anything.
Long before Bonds started “allegedly” taking PEDs, he was on track to be as good as Willie Mays, his godfather and arguably the greatest all-around player in baseball history. With 400 home runs, 400 stolen bases, an outstanding outfielder with a gun of an arm, and one of the smartest hitters ever, the skinny pre-PED Bonds was an absolutely devastating athlete. His desire to get even better, spurred by the PED-enhanced Mark McGwire breaking Roger Maris’s single season home run record, is totally understandable, even by the fans who constantly berated him with the asterisk placards and nasty comments. Yet Maris was the original asterisk (even Yankee fans treacherously said he would never be as good as Ruth after he broke Ruth’s record because Maris did it in the 162-game season). McGwire, of course, has a gigantic asterisk by his name, but nobody talked about his asterisk at the time because it wasn’t en vogue to talk about PEDs in the season when McGwire broke the record.
The only player to crush Ruth’s lifetime record without an asterisk (that we know of) was Hank Aaron, who comes off as the most gracious, humble, kind-hearted human being in the documentary. When Bonds broke Aaron’s record, Aaron said that there should be no asterisk. Because Aaron, like Bonds, also received the death threats, and he knew the perseverance, dedication, smarts, it takes to hit more than 714 home runs over the course of a career in the big leagues. One also has to bear in mind that Bonds did what he did against pitching that was 100 times more sophisticated than what Ruth faced and 10 times more sophisticated than what Aaron faced. The pitchers in Bonds's era were also juicing, making them superhumans too. The great irony. Having been able to see Bonds play in person, I remember how whenever he came to the plate at PacBell Park, fans would come streaming down from the hot dog stands, everybody would stand at nervous attention, while during the rest of the game they would casually chat. Bonds had that great power that you did not want to miss a single second of one of his at-bats because he could do anything.
Negative Capability applies to Pete Rose, a sad story because we cannot recognize Rose’s outstanding accomplishments, even when he was one of the most exciting players to play the game. We are all human and have enormous faults and expecting a ball player to be perfect not only makes the ball player into a fantasy ideal, but it makes him tremendously boring and, dare I say it, not worth watching. Frank Deford has an outstanding story about why Pete Rose should be allowed into the Hall of Fame, and I can’t say if allowing Rose into the Hall is the right thing, but clemency is more powerful than vengeance and punishment of people, even if what they did is totally wrong (of which there is no doubt in my mind for Rose).
This negative capability, to see the beauty without all the consideration, was easily the most profound moment of the 22 hours of baseball, but there were so many other moments that even non-baseball fans could appreciate. I never realized just how Joe DiMaggio was this great American superhero and what a great guy he really was or seemed to be at least. Of course, the Babe is bigger than life, like a cartoon character and it was great to see old footage of this most American of characters. You could not find a more comic book character in a comic book.
Another one of the more touching moments was Mickey Mantle describing how he was about to quit in the minors and he called his father, who came out to get him and told him to pack his stuff. Expecting some sympathy and an inspiring speech, Mickey was surprised and his father said, “I thought I raised a man, but I must have raised a coward.” Clearly, Mantle was no coward and he just needed his dad.
The saddest story of them all was Curtis Flood, also an incredibly well-spoken, thoughtful, elegant human being. His stories about living marginalized as a negro player whose owners didn’t even know that the black players, even the stars, had to stay in separate hotels, were moving. Another sad story was the Dodgers’ move West that parallels the making of American suburbia, leaving behind the demolished Ebbetts Field (one of the sadder moments for baseball). This sad story captures the essence of what isn’t necessarily good or bad about baseball and America but what just is.
Whether you like baseball or not, Ken Burns’s Baseball is a monumental picture of who we are as Americans. And should be required viewing for all those who want to understand America better.
