'Baseball'-- A Review

I never really understood the appeal of baseball. It seemed to take forever- the game dragged on and on and on and on- and the season! Mother of God, the Season just seemed to last FOREVER. To me, it seemed to be a lot like an American version of cricket: utterly incomprehensible, yet revered by many.

But I suddenly found myself with an itch to learn more. First, there was the Series where the Red Sox finally broke their vaunted Curse. It marked the first time in my life that I paid attention to baseball and watched an entire game. Second, there was my move to Minnesota- I can count on one hand the number of events that brought high school to a screeching halt- most of them of great national and international import, but when the high school I was working in at the time screeched to a halt for the Twins playoff game against Oakland I quickly realized that I had to reassess the sport. There was something that I just wasn't picking up on.

So, I went to the one man guaranteed to produce a documentary filled to the brim with everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about any given subject: Ken Burns. Who apparently loves baseball more than he loves the Civil War, because he produced eleven episodes covering the entire history of the game- literally everything a person could possibly want to know about the game of baseball. And Mr. Burns once again delivers- in excrutiating, painstaking, glorious detail.

It's hard to really sum up nearly 200 years of history into any given review, but give Burns credit: he tackles the big issues- from the tragedy of racial segregation that tainted the sport for so long and the lost promise of what might have been had the best of the Negro League stars been able to play against their white contemporaries in the majors. His '10th Inning' sequel takes a remarkably clear-eyed look at the steroid era, acknowledging the misdeeds of various stars but raising the question: if they weren't illegal in baseball at the time, does that make them bad? It was a point of view I found irritating at first, but the more I watched, the more I realized Burns was correct to examine all sides of the debate.

There is an awful lot of misty-eyed nostalgia that can get irritating after awhile. You could write whole books about the Baby Boomers and their strange, psychological profiles which long for 'the good old days' when baseball was pure and the Dodgers played in Brooklyn and all that jazz. It's hard for me to connect to that dreary vision of Americana goneby. I never had grandparents who took me to ballparks when I was young. To be fair, they might have taken me to cricket grounds or football pitches given the chance, but not having had that mythical connection, it's hard for me to really understand what these people are getting at. It might be a complex, quintessentially American game, but at the end of the day, it's still just a game.

Overall: this is everything you wanted to know about baseball but were afraid to ask. If you're looking to get your knowledge on (as I was) this will help you to become if not a devotee of the game, then certainly a mild appreciator of our national pasttime. If you're a hardcore baseball fan to begin with, this will probably be your fan dream come true. Either way, it's an interesting, all encompassing, deeply engrossing look at America's national pasttime and well worth watching.