(2 of 4)
It is also a bit much. In its grandiloquent excess, Baseball reflects the sport's increasingly hallowed status in American life. Somewhere along the road from Cap Anson to Rickey Henderson, baseball ceased being merely a game; it became a poem. Grubby, declasse sports like football and basketball might draw more crowds and more national TV coverage, but for truly discriminating fans -- the ones with Ivy League degrees who never sit in the bleachers -- baseball became the sport supreme. It's the one with the perfect, immutable dimensions and no clock to artificially limit the action; the one that values finesse and strategy over muscle and speed; the one that spews out mountains of statistics that can give any armchair fan the illusion of expertise. It has inspired nostalgic reveries, romantic paeans and volumes of close analysis that would give James Joyce scholars pause.
The apotheosis of baseball reaches its apotheosis in Baseball. As he did so brilliantly in The Civil War and half a dozen other documentaries on American history (Brooklyn Bridge, Huey Long), Burns mixes archival footage with commentary from assorted experts -- sportswriters, ex-players and other students of the game. Ty Cobb once called baseball "something like a war"; these box-seat philosophers, shot in contemplative, dreamy-eyed closeup, treat it as something like a religion. "Baseball is a beautiful thing," says sportscaster Bob Costas. "The way the field fans out. The choreography of the sport. The pace and rhythm of it." Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York and a ^ former minor leaguer, praises baseball's celebration of community, symbolized by the sacrifice bunt: "Giving yourself up for the good of the whole -- that's Jeremiah, that's thousands of years of wisdom." Political commentator George Will sees the sport as ideally suited to our democratic nation: "Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience ... Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses."
And here are Burns and co-writer Geoffrey C. Ward, in the elegiac introduction to the series (as well as to the hefty companion book being issued simultaneously by Knopf): "At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective. It is a haunted game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope -- and coming home."