(3 of 4)
Burns' own experience with the game has more down-to-earth origins. He played in Little League while growing up in Delaware, partly to distract himself from a "horrible childhood" marked by his mother's dying of cancer. He was a speedy catcher who would run alongside batters to back up the first baseman -- "and so involve myself in the most important play in Little League baseball, which is the overthrow at first base." He settled on baseball as the subject for his next big project in 1985, when he was just beginning The Civil War. "Baseball seemed a particularly appropriate way to follow the history of the country we've become since the Civil War," he says, "because it touches on so many aspects of our lives. It is a kind of American No drama of who we are."
The centerpiece of that drama for Burns is the battle to end the "gentleman's agreement" among baseball owners that, for more than half a century, kept blacks out of the major leagues. Periodic attempts had been made to break the ban (when baseball pioneer and longtime Giants manager John McGraw died in 1934, his wife found among his effects a list of all the black ballplayers he secretly wished he could have hired). But segregation held firm until Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey picked a talented young infielder from the Negro Leagues to be the man who would make a revolution. Jackie Robinson's debut at Ebbets Field in April 1947 (after he promised Rickey to turn the other cheek to racial taunts for three years) is the documentary's dramatic fulcrum as well as its high point.
While concerned with broad issues, Baseball doesn't ignore the on-field action or the emotional resonance those events have had for ordinary fans. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould recalls listening to Bobby Thomson hit his dramatic homer to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants: "It was probably the greatest moment of pure joy in my life." Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a childhood Dodger fan, says she was so crushed that she didn't leave her house for days.
The show's dogged, decade-by-decade approach is a little rigid, and the format can be precious (each of the nine episodes is called an "inning" and opens with The Star-Spangled Banner; the seventh installment even has a "seventh-inning stretch"). But Baseball puts a wealth of material into intelligent order. There are vivid sketches of greats both ancient (Christy Mathewson, a model of rectitude during the game's early, roughhousing years) and more recent (the ornery, complicated but incomparable Ted Williams). And Burns, as usual, fills his narrative with evocative anecdotes and fascinating trivia. Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers, of the fabled Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield combination, didn't speak to each other for two years after a dispute over cab fare. The Star-Spangled Banner was first sung at a ball game during the 1918 World Series, as a patriotic gesture near the end of World War I; the practice instantly caught on, though the song did not become the national anthem until years later.