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.

Tags: Babe Ruth, Branch Rickey, Old Time Baseball, Ty Cobb