Ken Burns’s Baseball, Third Inning: The Faith of Fifty Million People

Well, it isn’t like the Black Sox scandal of 1919 is ever going to fade into the backwaters of baseball lore or anything. It’s probably the longest section of Ken Burns’s Baseball’s Third Inning, The Faith of Fifty Million People. I was quite happy at this point just to see that Burns decided not to dwell on trying to make a case for the innocence of Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose innocence is contestable on the best of days. In my official capacity as a White Sox fan, I actually felt a little relieved by Burns’s way of covering the Black Sox scandal. He didn’t try to center it by using Jackson as the entire scandal’s moral fulcrum, which is a common aspect of most portrayals of the Black Sox that pisses me off. Jackson isn’t treated any differently than any of the other folks who were nailed in the Black Sox episode.

Unfortunately, Burns doesn’t get his facts completely straight, either. He does wholeheartedly sell us on two other commonly told half-truths about the Black Sox scandal: The first is that people began staying away from the ballpark in droves. If there’s any real truth in this, it isn’t nearly as much as people like to believe. When told about the devastation of the Black Sox, one tends to imagine players playing games in the middle of nearly empty ballparks. This just wasn’t true – baseball had survived scandals before the Black Sox, a few of which were related to gambling. People seemed to have at least a little bit of knowledge that the game wasn’t entirely on the level. Yet, they attended games anyway. The Black Sox didn’t keep that many people out of the ballparks. In fact, knowing what we know now about baseball and the fans, the very idea of a gambling scandal scaring off the public is insanely farfetched. The other big myth was that the White Sox were a dynamo that would have overpowered the Cincinnati Reds no matter the circumstances. Well folks, in 1919 the Reds went 96-44, as opposed to Chicago’s 88-52. The Reds finished nine games ahead while the White Sox finished three and a half games ahead. Cincinnati actually had a better pitching rotation that year, though Chicago’s batters were miles better than the Reds. An objective argument over which team was actually better could go well into the early hours.

Inning Three also contains a little bit of detail about the batting contest between Ty Cobb and Napoleon Lajoie. Burns expounds a little bit more on Cobb, mentioning the time he went into the stands to beat up the guy with no hands. And once again, Cobb’s racism is the main angle. Once again, there’s nothing about the handful of ballplayers were were full-fledged members of the Ku Klux Klan – and that includes Tris Speaker, whom Burns felt obligated to mention on a detour about a handful of the decade’s notable stars.

Ken Burns is a fan of the Boston Red Sox, so it should come as no surprise that he tends to dote on his team a little bit. The Faith of Fifty Million People can be excused for doing that in this case, though, because it was during this era that the Red Sox reached their apex of on-field success and possibly their apex of importance to the league. Four of Boston’s seven World Series titles were won during this decade, and they were led by this young pitching phenomenon they found named George Herman Ruth. The Philadelphia Athletics – particularly Connie Mack – also get a bit of time devoted to them, and of course there was The New York Team. In this case, though, that was the New York Giants, the John McGraw-led team tearing up the National League. The Cubs are barely mentioned, if at all.

One of the important things to remember about Ken Burns’s Baseball is that it’s not a documentary about Major League Baseball. It’s a documentary about BASEBALL. The lack of those two words is very important, because Burns tends to frequently tip his hat to many of the things that were happening outside of Major League Baseball at the time. The Negro Leagues were getting started right about now, and one team tried to pass off a black player with lighter skin as a member of a different race to keep him on a team. This says a lot about racial attitudes. Consider: There were members of every race in Major League Baseball except blacks, and a team actually tried to pass off a black man as a member of a different non-white race that was getting more rights than black people. It’s a hell of a condemnation if you really think about it.

Workers’ leagues are also talked about briefly. Once upon a time, it was in vogue for corporations to offer extracurricular activities to workers in order to keep them away from the unions. I would have loved to know more about the workers’ leagues, how they operated, and the kinds of lives their players lived as both workers and ballplayers, and how they might have differed from those of workers who didn’t take the option of being ballplayers. I’ll write this off, though, because most of the noteworthy events of baseball were in the big leagues, and the histories of the workers’ leagues were likely written by their rich bosses anyway. Minor league baseball is barely mentioned, which is also unfortunate because Major League Baseball never moved south of Washington or west of St. Louis until after 1950, and this could end up ignoring a lot of events that were happening elsewhere in the country.

Once again, even though there’s live-action footage in The Faith of Fifty Million People, Burns is still stuck with a bit of clever editing with old newspaper stills. I’m not sure how much the movies had caught on by the 10′s, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to have made real footage of baseball games widely available. I couldn’t help but come away from The Faith of Fifty Million People a little bit disappointed. So far, it’s the most pedestrian entry into Ken Burns’s Baseball.

A-Rod by Selena Roberts

A-Rod, by Selena Roberts, doesn’t take long to cut to the heart of what it really is. You can tell what it is easily by looking to the top of the cover, where it mentions that Roberts is the Sports Illustrated writer who broke A-Rods steroids scandal.

As far as tomes to the fallen baseball heroes we once loved and wanted to believe in go, A-Rod is even more egregious and angry-written than Jeff Pearlman’s The Rocket that Fell to Earth, a biography of Roger Clemens in which Pearlman writes fed up. While I was reading A-Rod, I kept getting the impression that Roberts was not only airing the dirty laundry of Alex Rodriguez, but that she was doing so in a real hurry, as if she needed to finish the book before the A-Rod steroid story cooled down. She also seemed to be writing it out with an attitude reminiscent of a kid whose lunch money kept getting stolen.

When I read through the epilogue, my suspicion was basically confirmed. Roberts takes a first-person viewpoint and writes out a sizable retort to Rodriguez’s personal attack on her on a news show. Now, I can grant her a free pass for writing that out at the least. After all, she’s a reporter who doesn’t even have her photo on the book flap while A-Rod is a universally known and beloved baseball superstar, so that left her with pretty much no choice but to defend herself against the things Rodriguez said about her on national TV. And lord knows that way Rodriguez has been acting in public lately places the benefit of the doubt squarely in Roberts’s corner.

Selena Roberts seems to have wanted to shed a little light on the mysterious, veiled, enigmatic figure that is Alex Rodriguez, something which the New York City media has been cheerfully doing ever since his arrival in The Bronx. The Rodriguez facade had already crumbled to dust long before A-Rod was ever written because no one really wants to leave him alone these days. I find that the trouble with Roberts’s book here is that it’s a real rush job in that she just doesn’t come off with any point besides trying to make Rodriguez look bad. Alex Rodriguez the sympathetic little kid is the subject of a couple of chapters, but once that’s wrapped up, the bulk of A-Rod is a straight battering. So much of A-Rod focuses on Rodriguez’s steroid use and contracts that the title might as well have been “Money and Muscles: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez.”

A-Rod reads like the Hollywood tabloids. Rodriguez comes off as an anti-hero at the best of times, and a two-dimensional villain in the worst of times. Rodriguez’s impressive accomplishments on the baseball diamond are minimized, and that allows us a full picture of Alex Rodriguez the cartoon character. It allows us to look at Rodriguez the same way Roberts writes about Rodriguez looking at himself: A man who believes his greatest accomplishments aren’t his batting statistics or the impressive home run totals he hit, but his ridiculous contracts with the Texas Rangers and New York Yankees. Rodriguez is written as a man who thinks his greatest feat is reaching the height of celebrity, and who looks at baseball as nothing more than the vessel that brought him up to it.

I think the scariest information I got out of A-Rod is about just how rampant steroids are apparently running in high school athletics. That is, according to Roberts, the time Rodriguez was first exposed to steroids. Now, I can admit I really don’t give a crap about how many players use steroids, and I’ve said before that I believe they should be legalized. The scary part about high schoolers on steroids is the fact that so many of these kids are pressured into using them because they see baseball as their only possible way of life. Therefore, they feel an intense need to focus on and succeed in baseball, and things simply shouldn’t be that way.

Throughout A-Rod, Roberts doesn’t do much more than spew out the same information the tabloids and New York City media have been giving us ever since Rodriguez became a Bomber. She tends to draw out the information a little bit more, and give us more behind the scenes details: Things like how Scott Boras became Rodriguez’s agent, how Rodriguez really felt about Yankees teammate Derek Jeter, and his taste in women leading him to both Cynthia Scurtis and Madonna. She writes him as a man who just isn’t very good at getting swallowed up by the celebrity lifestyle once he gets to the Yankees, after years of playing the squeaky-clean good guy with the Rangers and Seattle Mariners so many people want popular athletes to be.

I didn’t get anything out of A-Rod. It comes off as too rushed, too hostile, and more about the material things Alex Rodriguez wanted as celebrity coups than the man himself. Although Roberts writes that Rodriguez does have a good side, it doesn’t crop up very often in this book. A-Rod feels flat, but if there’s one thing a reader can really learn from it, it’s that famous athletes frequently have sides they don’t show to the public. Honestly, after the recent Lance Armstrong fiasco, nothing would surprise me anymore, so it’s really time we quit lionizing these people as examples of how to live righteous lives. (I’ve written about my frustration over this, too.)

The biggest blow against A-Rod is the fact that Selena Roberts appears to be another person who believes fans care about steroids. Any fan being honest will admit he just doesn’t, and that’s why we still watch. In this respect, A-Rod can be taken as a condemnation of sports journalism, which is chock full of writers who think they speak for the fans, but who are, in reality, so out of touch that it’s embarrassing.

The Big Bam by Leigh Montville

Imagine – Babe Ruth, The Bambino himself, slipping around on a pair of ice skates trying to give hockey a shot. I have to smile at that. Apparently, The Babe gave ice hockey a shot during his years with the Red Sox.

The Big Bam, by Leigh Montville, contains a lot of the same old things we’ve come to know and love. Yeah, we all know Babe Ruth was a relentless carouser who loved his beer, women, and franks. We all know he started loosening his belt at an early age and might as well have tried to eat and drink himself out of baseball. Now, I’d like to first point out that Ruth is another great myth about baseball, so those images don’t necessarily match up with the reality the way we expect them to. Hell, one surprising thing Montville argues is that Ruth turning Home Run King didn’t do anything to save baseball after the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The people, it turned out, didn’t stop lining up outside the gates just because a few Chicago White Sox players decided they were going to cripple the rest of their team in the World Series.

But I want to point out an angle Montville took with The Big Bam which I thought was more interesting than any other. I’m not sure if it was Montville’s intent or not, but what Montville was really writing about in The Big Bam was the rise of an entirely new concept: Babe Ruth was the birth of what is now the modern celebrity. Babe Ruth was the first person to truly become an icon of the country, the first person to have someone manage his relationship with the press and public, the first one who had a public image which was at least somewhat crafted and cultivated, and the first one to ever have to issue a public apology. If you really think about it, Ruth’s PR man, Christy Walsh, is still working his magic in a way. Babe Ruth is a figure f baseball mythology. Not just baseball history, but baseball mythology, something that gives him superhuman abilities and makes him seem larger than life.

In some ways, Ruth WAS larger than life. The way he lived, the way he set records which are shockingly inhuman by today’s standards, and even the way he was sold to the New York Yankees, the latter of which is now being given a little bit of revisionist history to make Harry Frazee look a bit more savvy. Speaking of which, Montville confirms the originally written history that Ruth truly was dealt for a play which, a few years later, was turned into the musical No, No, Nanette. I had heretofore bought into the revisionist story about the Ruth sale, because the idea of a baseball guy making a galactic mistake like that in order to finance a freaking play was just way too absurd. But Montville says it happened, that Frazee’s first love and concern was the theater, and there’s even a documented quote in the book where Frazee says his plays aren’t doing very well.

Montville spends the first few chapters writing a lot about the fog, a metaphor he created in order to describe the fact that we know very little about Ruth’s first few years, before he was sent to the orphanage in Baltimore where he grew up. Instead of de-mystifying and therefore demythologizing Ruth, Montville does something unusual by actually adding another layer of fog. There is apparently just one single, lone picture of Ruth’s mother, and it’s a group photo. The story doesn’t really begin until Ruth is dropped off at the orphanage. Despite a couple of attempts by people to adopt him, his story always wound up back there, and he resided there through most of his childhood, until he was signed to his first baseball contract.

After Ruth gets sold to the Yankees, Montville begins filling up the book with rock star anecdotes and you’ll-never-believe-how-wild-this-guy-was stories. Ruth wasn’t just the first modern celebrity – he may have been the first modern rock star as well. A lot of the stories told in The Big Bam wouldn’t be out of place in the autobiography of Motley Crue or Guns ‘n’ Roses. Ruth crashed his cars an awful lot, saw a lot of women, and ate lots of food. The stories about his appetite for, well, everything are well-known and from the stories told in The Big Bam, his reputation for living large is well-deserved.

In the middle of all the fast, high times, Montville also paints a picture of a tremendous, dominant, and gifted athlete. One of the aspects of Ruthian mythology is the idea that he was a guy who paid no attention to his body and carelessly trashed it. Ruth’s career, though, ran for over 20 years, and people who beat up their bodies the way Ruth is said to have done are usually lucky to make it through only half that time. We are reminded constantly that Ruth, when he was first signed, was a marvelous athlete whose body was pure muscle. And even when he did start letting himself go a little bit, he started getting back in shape after awhile because his career was in danger of flaming out, just like that after a bellyache put him in the hospital. He found the gym of a man named Artie McGovern, who helped him return to baseball shape, and apparently was very serious about his body and the idea of taking things in moderation so he wouldn’t be put out of baseball before his time was up. Most of the insults tilted at Ruth were based more on race – Ruth was a target of racial epithets because he had “black features.” While the flap of The Big Bam claims the book explores the idea of Ruth having a black parent, Montville never actually does this.

Naturally, most of The Big Bam is taken up by The Babe’s adventures as a Yankee. Montville takes more time describing Ruth’s Yankee adventures than he does in any other place. We learn a lot about Ruth’s contracts, how wealthy he really got, how elaborate his spending really was, and even some of his favorite things to do during Spring Training. We’re also told about what his relationship with Lou Gehrig was really like, although Montville doesn’t expound a LOT of detail on just why the two of them eventually grew so distant. While it begins to feel a little repetitive after awhile, Montville regales us with a lot of fun anecdotes about Ruth’s life with the Yankees, and as he writes, he humanizes Ruth by concentrating more on Ruth the person than on Ruth the ballplayer. Even during descriptions of certain World Series games, there is very little buildup and time wasted on the games themselves, even when it comes to The Called Shot and the failed steal which ended the 1926 World Series, sealing victory for the St. Louis Cardinals. I like the fact that the focus is so little on the baseball itself because The Big Bam tells a story about a man, not just a man playing a game. Let’s face it, reliance of descriptions about the action during a ballgame can really slow down the flow of a narrative, so Montville minimizes the problem by writing more about Ruth’s adventures behind the scenes.

The Big Bam ends almost as inauspiciously as it begins. Once Ruth’s stint with the Yankees ends, there’s not much more to the book. One thing I did appreciate was the fact that Montville tells us just why Ruth was so ineffective when he signed with the Boston Braves, with whom he spent less than half a season. His body was starting to take too much of a toll by then. Ironically, around that time, there was a proposal for a player in the lineup who could take the place of a pitcher and be assigned to nothing but hitting – the first time the idea of the designated hitter was floated. I was very satisfied with the writing on Ruth’s time with the Braves. However, his years in retirement go by almost as quickly as his years as a kid. I guess I can grant Montville a pass on that, though, because Ruth really didn’t seem to have a lot going after retirement.

Of all the biographies I’ve read, The Big Bam was the most fun, and most rock star-like. It gives a little bit of the history of the whole concept of celebrity while being extremely entertaining at the same time. If you’re hoping to have the foggier areas of Babe Ruth’s life cleared, though, you’re going to have to wait a lot longer.

Ken Burns’s Baseball – Inning Two: Something Like a War

Footage! Ken Burns’s Baseball now comes with real, old-school footage!

Since this was still the olden days, though, that doesn’t mean there’s a whole hell of a lot of it. We don’t get footage of anything significant, although there is a scene from the 1909 World Series where Ty Cobb is talking to Honus Wagner and, from the looks of the scene, apparently being cordial.

In the second part of Ken Burns’s massive documentary about baseball, I continue to be fascinated by the early goings of the professional sport. In Second Inning, Burns presents a part of baseball’s history that flew fast and loose as an up and coming form of entertainment which was not unlike the movies in that it was still very new and people hadn’t quite figured out just what to do with it yet. One of the facts from Second Inning that I didn’t know beforehand actually makes a kind of parallel connection between them: In the offseason, a lot of the big stars and popular players would go into the vaudeville circuit to supplement their incomes. I was amused to learn that John McGraw went into vaudeville to basically stand on a stage and be himself, reciting monologues and answering questions.

By now, baseball is such an established an unquestioned institution in the United States that we tend to forget that it had any kind of beginning at all. Burns spends a lot of time in Second inning showing us not just the development of the sport, but the development of the ballpark experience itself, including the concessions and hot dogs. It does a lot to remind us that the prototypical ballpark experience wasn’t always the ballpark experience. Burns also introduces us to the Royal Rooters, a fan club in Boston. Thats a reminder that the idea of adopting one team to follow and enjoy over the others wasn’t a thing once upon a time. Professional baseball didn’t exist at one time. Professional sports, in fact, didn’t exist at one time. Therefore, selling crappy food and clothes at the parks also didn’t exist at one time, and we start to realize that, like the sport itself, the idea of a fandom came from gradual evolution rather than being thought up all at one time. Seeing it in narration and old photographs right in our faces helps us appreciate that.

Of course, one name player who gets brought into the act in Second Inning is Ty Cobb. You have to mention Cobb’s name in baseball history because he may still be the greatest ballplayer ever. Now, I’ve seen a lot of different angles on Cobb. Some people say he was just a mean dude, others say he was just overreacting to some psychological trauma or sense of inadequacy. Some say he was a hardline racist, others say he gets too much crap for his racism because it wasn’t any different than any other Georgia man in his time and because his racism was more bark than bite. And Cobb’s life is one area where Burns chose to simplify everything. Burns gives him a very two-dimensional portrayal. Even though Burns does make room to talk about Cobb’s father and his motivations, he still gives us the one defining angle on Cobb: Racism, racism, racism. Burns didn’t attack Cap Anson this much, and Anson did a lot more to hold back equality than Cobb ever did. I’m actually a bit surprised Burns hasn’t brought up Cobb beating up a man with no arms yet, but that may have happened in the 1910′s. I wonder if Burns is going to bring up Rogers Hornsby and Tris Speaker being part of the KKK. Considering how much trouble Burns is taking to get several different angles on a lot of different things, his one-dimensional approach to Cobb is just lazy as hell.

The 00′s are the decade when the World Series first saw the light of day, and the explanation and photos of the first one between the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates are another reminder of just how different and new the ballpark experience was back in those days. There are some very impressive pictures of that first World Series, especially of the scenes in Boston where the fans all crowded along the foul lines and in the outfield. One wonders just how the players were able to actually get the games played during the whole fiasco.

One of the other important things Burns also covers is the first dynasty in baseball history: The Chicago Cubs. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe these days, but for half of professional baseball’s very existence, the Cubs were a dynamo of a team who struck fear into all their opponents. With players like Three Finger Brown, Orval Overall, and their Tinker to Evers to Chance combination, the Cubbies (who, as Cait Murphy reminded us in Crazy ’08, would have killed us for referring to them as the Cubbies) went on a spree which saw them set a regular season record in 1906, only to lose the first-ever crosstown World Series to the White Sox; win it all in 1907 and 1908; and return to the Series in 1910.

Fred Merkle is given coverage, of course, and we learn about the aftermath of his famous mistake in 1908. Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson are also featured. But for every story we know about baseball, there are other, more hidden stories which we don’t get, and Burns gives us two of those hidden stories of note: The first is the development of independent professional black baseball teams. The second is the story of a woman named Alta Weiss, a semi-pro pitcher who played for boys’ teams starting at age 14 and was playing semipro baseball with the men by 17. She became a sensation and a huge draw for whom special trains were being run out from Cleveland whenever she pitched. Weiss made enough money to put herself through medical school, became a physician, and played baseball on and off through the 20′s.

So far, all is pretty well in Ken Burns’s massive documentary. It looks like I have to wait until the next part for any significant mention of my favorite teams, though, the Yankees and White Sox.

Ken Burns’s Baseball: First Inning

The First Inning chapter of Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary at first feels like it’s going to be the popular picket fence images I detest so much. He spends the first 20 minutes ruminating nostalgic like one speaking starry-eyed on the good old days. Yeah, he was throwing bones to the darker aspects of it, but even so, those 20 minutes do a lot to set of tone, as if baseball is some sacred pastime sanctioned by the gods of Mount Olympus.

Over the following 80 or so minutes, he does everything to reinforce that image, while deconstructing it at the same time. The first part covers baseball from its origins to the beginning of the modern era, about the 1900′s. This is especially interesting because it doesn’t just show the start of a single professional league. It shows the entire founding of the entire sport of baseball. When it gets to leagues, in fact, it might as well be telling the entire history of professional sports in the United States, or at least the founding of them. After all, before baseball began organizing, there wasn’t any going out for an escape at the ballpark.

To be honest, I was a little bit fearful of how the first part would play out. After the sickening first 20 minutes, it isn’t long before Burns takes us through the founding of baseball by Abner Doubleday, step by step, without the slightest hint of sarcasm or irony. After hearing that, I was about to just hit my off button and throwthe rest of this project right by the wayside. But then, Burns abruptly interrupts himself to tell us the reality about the founding of baseball. Doubleday had nothing to do with it, and he begins to go through the evolution of baseball from the British and how it evolved into a number of different versions. It eventually makes its way right up to Alexander Cartwright, the man given the credit with inventing baseball in its current form. It was upon seeing Burns do this that I figured something out: Ken Burns is undergoing a massive reverential project here, trying to cover everything about baseball in its entirety. He understands that baseball’s myths, while separate from the facts by varying degrees, are as important to the game and its history as the facts themselves. He appreciates both the fantasy and reality of it.

Since there was no structure to the beginning of baseball, there’s really not much of a structure to the first 45 minutes to an hour of First Inning, either. Burns does what he can on the bare minimum, and it actually comes off a lot smoother than it is. That’s a great testament to Burns’s talent as a filmmaker. The First Inning starts to really get interesting during the second half. Every professional sports league in the United States underwent some kind of insane, anything-goes era for a couple of decades after starting out. This went doubly so for baseball, because the idea of people making a living by playing a kids’ game at a professional level was unheard of at the time, and teams and entire leagues regularly popped and folded into and out of existence, no matter how they finished in the standings – provided, of course, that the standings themselves were even rigid enough to have meant anything.

A lot of well-known lore is covered – I already know the story of Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first black man to ever play professional baseball. I knew blacks at the time were ostracized frequently by their own teammates, and that a lion’s share of responsibility for the segregation of baseball belongs to Cap Anson of the Chicago White Stockings (today’s Chicago Cubs) for his refusal to allow his team to play against any team fielding a black player. I didn’t know the story of professional baseball’s first gambling scandal. It was an important moment for the sport, and it grows when you give it a little thought: After surviving a scandal such as that, professional baseball probably realized at that moment that it would be able to get away with doing anything. That’s still very true today.

Even if it is in a wistful tone, Ken Burns reminds us that baseball – far from the images the old guard tricked us into thinking about the sport of the past – was, even from those humble origins, a game of cheating, scoundrels, scandals, and unsavory figures. Baseball may represent an ideal, but it has always been irrepressibly human, and the humans who have played it on a major level have always been flawed. It’s why I think the Hall of Fame is a big stinking tank of BS with the way it decides who gets in and stays out, more so after this last vote.

Some things get covered that many people don’t even think of. The beginning of the idea of fans is one of them. Cait Murphy mentioned it in her book Crazy ’08, of course, but she didn’t go into the details of it the way Burns does. He talks about the first stars of baseball, including Anson and King Kelly. Unfortunately, he also misses the Cleveland Spiders of 1899, a subject I would have loved to learn more about.

Burns keeps First Inning interesting despite his limited resources. This wasn’t an era of baseball which was able to give us advanced sabremetrics or complex statistics or exacting records or footage. Burns had basically nothing with which to make an interesting documentary except a bunch of written accounts and interviewees and still drawings and photographs, but he makes the most of all of them to create a compelling if clumsy and somewhat haphazard narrative out of them. And that what First Inning is trying to present – a narrative that tends to jump around a lot and present individual parts of baseball as stories of their very own.

It isn’t until the end that Burns begins to present us with the early characters that most baseball fans have come to know of: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Branch Rickey among them. Still, First Inning manages to be very interesting despite the fact that the narrative is loose and the fact that Burns lacks many of the tools a modern film storyteller would need to effectively enhance the story so that it comes across well on film. Reviewing the other parts of Ken Burns’s Baseball is looking like it’s going to be very interesting.

Quick Message

I hate leaving little quickies like this because it feels like a cop out. Seeing as how this is the Christmas season, though, I don’t think I can be blamed. Anyway, it’s once again tougher to get my hands on decent books, so in order to keep getting things written, I will soon be turning my attention to the massive Ken Burns documentary about our beloved sport.

I don’t intend for it to be a one-shot deal, either. I want to do this whole-heartedly, and thus I intend to write individual reviews of each and every single part as I go along watching it.

Also, I’m going to try to start getting this blog a little bit of attention on Facebook. Hopefully I’ll have one of those Like buttons up and functioning within the next few months. Again, I apologize for my dormancy, but I AM one person whose life gets in the way every now and then.

Major League (Movie)

Maybe it’s just the recently-ended baseball season or the lack of wonderful bicycling weather talking, but upon watching Major League several times in order to write this review, I noticed that the classic baseball flick is starting to grow on me. That’s not to say I no longer believe it to be overrated. It has a lot more growing on me to do before I start running around comparing it to the incomparable Paul Newman/George Roy Hill flick Slap Shot, the gold standard of raunchy sports comedies. The difference is that these days, Major League compare to Slap Shot more favorably than it did the first time I saw it.

You already know the archtype story here. A group of ragtag misfits, through some set of odd circumstances, gets thrown onto the same team and, through differences thick and thin, brings out each other’s best and wins in an unwinnable year through grit, pluck, and a little good old-fashioned teamwork! Although Major League spends the whole story with a smarmy grin on its face, it plays through this whole story completely straight. This time it’s about the Cleveland Indians, one of baseball’s premier teams during the first half of the 20th century and about the AL equivalent to the Chicago Cubs during the second half. The Tribe won the World Series in 1920 and 1948, traded their keystone player Rocky Colavito in 1960, and hit the skids pretty much forever. The Curse of Rocky Colavito is actually considered well-known curse lore in baseball circles, as the team sucked balls for 34 years before a brief reprieve brought them back as one of the American League’s most dangerous teams. They won the 1995 Pennant but lost to the Atlanta Braves in six games despite being heavy favorites. In 1997 they won it again and lost a classic battle in seven games against the Florida Marlins, who staged a ninth-inning comeback with Cleveland just two outs away from the title. As far as fans are concerned, the team is still cursed. Back in 1989, Indians fan David Ward got so upset with his beloved team’s recent performances that he had to do something about it. Unfortunately, he was a movie guy, not a baseball guy, so the best he could do was write a fan fantasy script in which the Cleveland Indians overcame long odds to… Make the playoffs.

Yeah, there’s that weird situation in this movie where a filmmaker is for some reason reluctant to give them something worth bragging about – the World Series title itself or at least the Pennant. Guess that wouldn’t matter too much given the plot: A former Vegas showgirl named Rachel Phelps apparently married rich, and the hubby croaked, leaving the team to the wifey. Phelps wants to move the team to Miami, where she’s being offered a nice new stadium, but contractual agreements are preventing it: In order to enable the release, the Indians have to draw under 800,000 fans. Rachel has a fierce business acumen and knows people won’t go to Cleveland Municipal to watch losers, so she finds the worst players possible to see that the Indians fall to 1899 Cleveland Spiders-like levels of suckitude. See that? Nothing about so much as a division title there. It’s all about the draw. But the movie ditches that pretense because it’s not very convenient to the worst-to-first plot, and besides, everybody knows the good teams are the ones that draw!

No one ever heard of the players Phelps is bringing in, of course. The ones they’ve heard of aren’t exactly past their primes – as one board member points out, most of them never had primes to begin with. One of them is dead, a fact to which Phelps’s response is “Cross him off the list, then!” upon being informed of that fact. Who’s there? There’s catcher Jake Taylor, who’s aging and a serial womanizer dying to get back with his ex. Third baseman Roger Dorn is more concerned about his pretty pitchman’s face than about any goings-on in the hot corner. Ricky Vaughn is nicknamed Wild Thing, a name no doubt picked up in his last league, California Penal, for stealing a car. Pedro Cerrano is a slugger who practices Vodun and can’t hit a curveball to save his life. Willie Mays Hayes wasn’t invited to training camp. He just kind of shows, where his speed is thought to be useful stealing bases…. IF he can get on base!

Toledo Mud Hens manager Lou Brown is promoted to The Show to fail. Lou has been around, seen it all, heard it all, and done it all, and in spite of his crusty shell he refuses to believe this team is hopeless. Is there anything I can spoil?

Well, the Indians start out bad, but not quite bad enough. Phelps begins to get a little upset, and she starts trying to screw with the team. First, their whirlpool and hot waters are cut. Their charter plane is replaced with a rickety prop job, which is in turn replaced with an equally rickety bus. No matter what she does, the team keeps getting better.

Major League attacks full force with cliches, but most of them are at least done in an entertaining way. I laughed constantly at Dorn, always looking for ways to preserve his fancy mug but getting shot down all the time. In one scene where Lou tries to get him to do situps, he waves his contract – which says he doesn’t have to do exercises which might be uncomfortable – in front of Lou, whose response is to throw it on the ground and whiz all over it. Later, after flubbing an easy ground ball, Jake visits Dorn and asks him about it. When Dorn responds with brutal honesty, Jake straightens him out by threatening to beat him up. Unfortunately, one of the cliches involves ultra-meaningful slo-mo during the final game. Another is an insufferable subplot in which Jake begins pining for his ex. Will he ever win her back? Of course! What kind of sports movie do you think this is?

Major League also scores major points for not catering to the family-friendlies. The big rallying point even involves a stripper cardboard cutout of Phelps, with removable clothes. This echoed a similar real-life rallying point for the Chicago White Sox nearly 20 years later, when the team brought inflatable dolls into their locker room after a slow start and ended up winning their division. Ozzie Guillen, of course, got in trouble for that. That’s kind of his thing. But since Major League doesn’t delude itself into believing baseball is full of family men, Ward points the script in a direction and hits the throttle full blast, and the result is some of the funniest scenes and dialogue heard in a sports movie. Nothing is off limits for Ward – one player’s wife hitting on Vaughn, superstitions, Jake catching opposing players off guard by distracting them, snot balls… In doing this, Major League avoids the supreme mistake of the jock movie and is free to, you know, be funny.

The story is cliched and has been done a million times, but it has rarely been this much fun. Unfortunately, I can’t give it as high a rating as I’d like, because the story between Jake and his ex gets in the way too much. But if you tire of visions of picket fence, head-in-sand baseball glorifying an American past that simply didn’t exist, Major League is a breath of fresh air.

Pinstripe Empire by Marty Appel

A great baseball team had better have a lot of truly great stories in its history, and with the New York Yankees, there are just tons. With the new book Pinstripe Empire, Marty Appel makes a concentrated, herculean effort to compile them all. I haven’t seen such an effort at a chronology of the Yankees since I read – but didn’t finish – I’d Rather be a Yankee, by John Tullius. That book was an oral history. Appel’s book is a narrative, and it’s lock, stock and barrel with not only the big stories Yankees fans have memorized into their computer brains as part of their beloved team’s lore, but little obscure trivias many of us don’t know, and some thing we thought we knew but really didn’t. There were things in Pinstripe Empire which totally floored me.

The thing that floored me the most was a bunch of little details about George Steinbrenner. I always was grateful to Steinbrenner for the success he brought to the Yankees, but I’ve also long thought my devotion to this juggernaut of uniformity was absurd and out of character. Steinbrenner’s method of operating and secrecy played a huge role in the way I see my own fandom. (In person, I’ve often referred to myself as a Mets fan who just happens to root for the Yankees.) I believed Steinbrenner was an enforcer of the old ways, a pompous One Percenter who always backed political candidates I would have hated and lacked a real sense of fairness, which is why baseball doesn’t have a salary cap. Well, here’s the truth according to Appel, who has worked for the Yankees for decades: First, Steinbrenner was famously caught making campaign donations to Richard Nixon…. But he also made a ton of contributions to Ted Kennedy. Second, Steinbrenner was in favor of revenue sharing, and also in favor of the luxury tax which cost his big-spending ways over $100 million extra. Basically, it looks like every assumption I ever made about The Boss was wrong.

With Appel having been in the employ of the team for so long, he of course looks at them through rose-clored goggles. Sometimes this is effective; when he writes about how Yankees players have to follow a certain dress code, he says they enforce it because it’s a way the Yankees try to stand out from the rest of the pack. The Yankees are expected to carry themselves with dignity and a sense of real professionalism, and at one point, one of the team managers actually made the players change uniforms between innings if the uniforms got ripped. Other times, his rose tint just comes off as excuses. The fact that the team took so long to integrate is the prime example of this. According to Appel, it took a long time because the Yankees weren’t able to find the right player who had both the talent and the attitude to conduct himself in the way that was expected of the Yankees. (Of course, when they did integrate, they scored big when their first black player, Elston Howard, became a major piece of the team’s incomparable legacy of great catchers. His performances in the ten World Series he played in rank him among the World Series best players, and no conversation about great Yankee catchers is complete without him. He went to twelve All-Star games, won two Gold Gloves, was the AL MVP in 1963, and the Yankees retired his number.)

There are a lot of little details Appel mentions which have been lost to many baseball fans. These are helpful because they add a little bit of color to the game’s history, and they’ll definitely be appreciated by Yankees fans who will now know just how enormous the impact of our beloved team has been. The practice of wearing numbers on players’ backs began with the Yankees, who did it so fans would know a players’ spot in the batting order. (Names didn’t start until much later, when the Chicago White Sox started doing it.) The Yankees are also responsible for the practice of entrance music, when they began playing the classical music piece “Pomp and Circumstance” (better known as the graduation theme) in the 70′s to signify the entrance of their great closer, Sparky Lyle. Appel also mentions that for all the great pitchers who wore pinstripes, the Yankees never really had a pitcher who was particularly transcendent. With the exception of Whitey Ford, the Yankees never had a dominating starting rotation with a Grover Cleveland Alexander, a Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Walter Johnson, or Tom Seaver. But he also mentions the team’s catchers’ legacy with Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, Thurman Munson, and Jorge Posada. (What he doesn’t point out is the team’s legacy of dominant closers: Mariano Rivera is generally considered the greatest closer ever; Goose Gossage is often considered the sabremetric-heads’ thinking choice for greatest closer ever. Both are in the Hall of Fame. Sparky Lyle is one of the very few closers to ever win the Cy Young.)

Of course, the bigger myths are also covered. The Called Shot has always been a big one, and Appel actually brings us brief coverage of both sides. It seems like a few people who were there believe Ruth called his shot because they saw him do it, and then when they asked him about his gesture, he gave a vague answer which they misinterpreted. The way Appel writes about it, most people who saw what happened believe Ruth was calling the strikes Cubs pitcher Charlie Root had on him. Root himself believes that, and said that had he thought Ruth was calling his shot, his next pitch would have drilled Ruth.

There are points, especially in the front of the book, where Appel debunks some of the team’s misunderstood history. The team’s first ballpark, which is frequently called Hilltop Park, was never officially called Hilltop Park, and the Yankees weren’t officially called the Highlanders. Since the Yankees were the only American League team in New York City, for a long time, they were simply called the New York Americans and their park was just the New York American Baseball Park. Appel even provides the photos. He also explains the ways numbers came about, mentioning that other teams had tried shoulder numbers in the past, and the origins of the stripes which, despite being worn by so many other baseball teams, have become so synonymous with the Yankees that one of their nicknames is “The Pinstripers.”

Pinstripe Empire is a straight, cold narrative, but one mistake Appel avoids making is getting caught up describing too many games and plays. Sure, he has to describe some of the plays – this is the Yankees, after all, and they’ve had a ton of weird and unusual and famous moments that happened to them on the diamond. But Appel requires only a handful of sentences to describe them, so he can get right back to the big picture as soon as possible.

The result of that is a narrative that is always interesting and compelling. Appel covers every era of Yankees baseball with equal depth and detail, giving us everything he knows about the team. The dynasty eras receive as much coverage as the darkest days of the 60′s and early 90′s.

Since Appel works for the Yankees, yes, this sucker is totally biased. But still, the fact that he knows so much also lends a lot of details he might not of otherwise been able to give us. There aren’t a lot of straight team chronologies out there, certainly not many of teams as rich and important as the Yankees. This book is a must for any Yankees fan, and it’s also important for anyone curious about why the team is so important for baseball. (Appel argues that baseball was usually at its most profitable whenever the Yankees are doing well.) One thing stands true: No matter where your loyalties lie, you’ll at least walk away with a greater understanding of the mystique of the New York Yankees, and why the true fans of the Yankees feel such strong passion and loyalty for them.

Cincinnati Reds: Vintage World Series (Documentary)

No review for this. Not a proper one, anyway. Having not fulfilled my writing obligation last month and being in danger of not fulfilling it this month, I recently ordered a set of vintage World Series films from Netflix. Regular readers know I never, ever half-wit my work. If I’m not able to read something fully, I don’t review it. That’s actually part of the reason why my posts are coming up with less frequency. I don’t have the time I would like to finish everything I read. Lately I’ve been a little occupied with Marty Appel’s recent book Pinstripe Empire, a complete chronology of the New York Yankees.

Anyway. The set of vintage World Series films I ordered revolved around the Cincinnati Reds and their three most recent titles: 1975, 1976, and 1990. And you know what? I didn’t get anything out of them.

It was a set of three different very short documentaries about the three respective World Series I mentioned in the last paragraph. The two I really wanted to see were the 1975 and 1976 docs, because the first one was about the legendary 1975 World Series between the Reds and Boston Red Sox, and the 1976 doc followed the Series between the Reds and my Yankees. The first one was probably about halfway over when I realized that narrator Joe Garagiola wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t already know. Still, the Reds/Red Sox doc was good to see because it finally placed an image on this classic World Series which occurred six years before I was born.

Since the Reds/Yankees World Series the following year was a sweep, it wasn’t very long. Again, I appreciated the face to go with the name, even though my favorite team was badly overmatched and in over their heads for the whole thing. Both of those films had the graininess of the old 70′s TV specials, and I got the impression they were made for fans to take trips down memory lane. There was no inside information or inside-the-game viewpoints. Pleasant reminders for those who were there, but if you’re like me and fanatical about tracking down the stories behind the stories, both of them are totally empty.

The doc about the 1990 World Series is more the kind of doc I’ve come to expect. The players, families, and people behind the scenes were interviewed, and the sport and event were humanized. The details were presented, but it felt like this time, it was trying too hard to make up for the last two. With painstaking detail, it tried to give us everything, but a half hour after I turned it on, it wasn’t going anywhere. I got bored and shut it off.

I also had a problem with the apparent one-sidedness of the third. The Red Sox and Yankees Series docs were very even-handed. The third seemed to be concentrated way too heavily on the Reds, despite the introduction of how their opponents, the Oakland Athletics, got there.

The amateurish production values probably got in the way. In the first two, it wasn’t a problem, because all those docs wanted to do was give us what happened in the Series. In the third, it was quite a distraction, and the choice of music sounded like it reeks of the synthesized hubris of its era. Hey, MLB: I’m a freelance editor with nothing but the equipment my Mac came with. I could probably have done a better job.

Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? by Jimmy Breslin

Like every other baseball team, the New York Mets have fielded their fair share of squads revered by their fans, teams which struck a note with followers more than any of the others. They’ve been to the World Series four times, so those teams certainly have plenty of fans, and their effort in 2006 won over many people too because the Mets showed character and talent even as they ended up on the losing end of a classic NLCS series – the seventh game in that series is still the best baseball game I’ve ever seen.

Then there’s the 1962 New York Mets. They’re also a team that many Mets fans revere and see a lot of themselves in, and they’re one of the legendary squads in modern baseball. That’s unusual because the 1962 Mets weren’t a good team, not by any stretch of the imagination. They stank up the baseball diamond something fierce, set numerous dubious records, and lost 120 games, a record so bad that it didn’t even come under serious assault until 2003, when the Detroit Tigers closed their season just one game away from tying the loss record set by the Mets. Both of those teams actually had decent excuses; the Mets were an expansion club in their first season, while the Tigers were a case of implosion by design after a decade of playing resoundingly average baseball.

In 1963, Jimmy Breslin wrote an account of the Mets’ terrible first year. Using a quote from manager Casey Stengel, he called it Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? It’s a very quick-shot account of that bad but eventful season – it’s only 117 pages long, but it’s still considered one of the primary must-own books in Mets culture.

The Mets came along at a time when owners were trying to maximize revenue and monopolize sports by reducing every major league city down to one team. Until the 50′s, two-team cities were common; the Boston Braves fought it out with the more successful Boston Red Sox; the Saint Louis Cardinals were forced to compete with the Saint Louis Browns for the hearts and souls of Saint Louis fans; the Philadelphia Phillies battled with the Philadelphia Athletics to see who could bottom out first; and the other cities go without saying. Baseball got greedy and started placing the less popular teams in every which city to corner the pro sports market, but in New York City, it didn’t take very well. When two National League franchises leave and the people get nothing but the Yankees left, the people are going to feel a bit of wanting. Having just the Yankees didn’t sit very well with a man named William Shea, who absolutely NEEDED a second option in New York City at the very least. So Shea decided to form the Continental League, a massive bluff meant to get MLB’s attention. With help from the great Branch Rickey, he killed a bill in Washington which would have granted baseball exemption from anti-trust laws. Although the Continental League was a bluff, wiping out that bill made it a real possibility.

Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? is less a book about the how and more about the why of the Mets’ first year. Breslin wrote it in a tone of bemused affection with a lot of smarm. He explains how and why the New York Metropolitans Baseball Club came into being and talks a little bit about the misfortunes that befell them upon drunkenly lurching across the baseball diamond for the first time in history.

The Mets, as it turns out, were a very unlikely team. Not only did they have to fight with the MLB brass just for their right to exist, they also went through an owner who believed a better team name would have been the New York Meadowlarks; an embittered National League fanbase which had lost both its teams not five years before; and a roster reshuffling in the National League which prevented the National League expansion teams – the Mets and the Houston Colt .45s from getting any real talent.

The original New York Mets have been compared, on numerous occasions, to a minor league baseball team. That’s because with the American League expansion, the owners had seen the newly-created Los Angeles Angels do very well their first year – remembering this was written in 1963, Beslin even speculates that the Angels would be a thorn in the side of the junior league for years to come. The reshuffling made the owners ensure they wouldn’t be losing any of their talent whatsoever in the expansion draft, and so when the Mets arrived, they pretty much WERE a minor league team in every way except their official status as a major league team.

Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? is subtitled The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year. Yeah, a lot of things about this particular 1962 team were improbable. The founding of the team itself was a real mess that got all of baseball up in arms. They blew their draft picks on a lot of bad players, they somehow received funding for a new stadium (yet another sign of just how old this book is – Shea Stadium wasn’t even built when it was published!). As Breslin puts it, they were building a whole new stadium for Marvelous Marv Throneberry, the man who came to represent the Mets for those first few years.

This book is not a blow by blow account of a single baseball season. Very little of the season is actually covered. Only one of the chapters goes into any real detail about it, but it’s fun while it lasts. We get the sense there was a lot of fun and comaraderie on the original Mets. At one point, the owner asks a prognosticator what spot the Mets will finish in, and it’s predicted they’ll finish in last. The prognosticator doesn’t even make them any room for the new Houston team. Just last place, outright. At another point after the 1962 season, the owner says it would suck if the Mets lost another 120 games. So she sets a goal of losing only 119 games for an improvement! Breslin writes a little bit about the kinds of odd misfortunes and antics that summed up the Mets’ season, but he also gives us this quote from Richie Ashburn: “Any losing team I’ve ever been on had several things going on. One, the players gave up. Or they hated the manager. Or they had no team spirit. Or the fans turned into wolves. But there was none of this with the Mets. Nobody stopped trying. The manager was absolutely great, nobody grumbled about being with the club, and the fans we had, well, there haven’t been fans like this in baseball history. So we lose 120 games and there isn’t a gripe on the club. It was remarkable. You know, I can remember guys being mad even on a big winner.”

On this blog, I’ve made no secret of my loyalty to the Yankees, but on my personal blog which I write for my friends, readers know of my discontent for the Yankees. I’ve been poking fun at the Yankees a lot there lately out of a genuine contempt, and I’ve admitted to outright hating the Girardi squads as of late. They’ve been boring me to death, and they don’t fit me at all as a person. I’ve in fact bickered about why my hometown is so loyal to them (and the Red Sox, too). We should all be Mets fans. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mets, but it wasn’t until I started reading about them that I began to understand their appeal. Now that I do understand their appeal, I’m very close to making the switch outright. Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? has been an instigator. It reminds its readers that wins are worthless without strong characters, emotion, and fan relationships. It’s a quick read for anyone who relates more to the everyday image of the Mets more than the corporate image of the Yankees.