Ken Burns is a romantic about baseball, so it is hardly surprising that the current major league strike causes him dismay. "The thing I feel most passionately about is that these guys are custodians of something a lot more important than their own bottom line," he says. "The history of baseball is the history of phenomenal human beings and events, like Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs. To think that across the board, for both owners and players, something could be more important than Ken Griffey or Frank Thomas or Matt Williams hitting that many home runs -- I find it just abhorrent."
At the same time, Burns is a pragmatic producer of TV documentaries who knows the strike will most likely only add to the interest in Baseball, his eagerly awaited nine-part history of the national pastime. More than four years in the making, Burns' first mini-series since The Civil War (which set all-time viewing records when it was broadcast on pbs in September 1990) was carefully scheduled so that it would air in the sweet spot of the baseball season: on consecutive nights (with a two-day weekend break) starting Sept. 18, just as pennant fever was heating up but before the play-offs and World Series. Now, with a strike settlement seemingly as far off as ever, Baseball may well give fans their only trip to the ballpark this fall. "If the strike affects us," says Burns, "I think it's going to help, because we'll be the only game in town."
And what a game. Four years ago, Burns managed to tell the story of America's bloodiest, most traumatic war in 11 1/2 hours. His account of our favorite sport takes up more than 18. It is not just a history of the game -- from Ty Cobb's vicious slides to Bob Gibson's fast ball, from Babe Ruth's records to Red Sox heartbreaks -- but also a slice of Americana that spans 150 years. The series covers the impact of the Depression and two World Wars; player-owner conflicts that go back more than a century (the reserve clause that prevented players from switching teams was hated even in the 1880s); and the long struggle to achieve racial integration. Baseball celebrates great hitters like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, great characters like Casey Stengel and Rube Waddell (who had to be restrained from chasing fire engines during games), great disasters like the Merkle Boner and the 1919 Black Sox scandal. It gives us Red Barber's famous radio calls, Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine and more versions of Take Me Out to the Ball Game than you imagined were possible. For baseball lovers it's the World Series, All-Star Game and Fan Appreciation Day rolled into one, with all the hot dogs and frosty malts you can wolf down.