The Chris Moeller Archives

Ken Burns still refuses to accept the existence of a Central Time Zone

When documentary filmmaker Ken Burns released his PBS miniseries "The West" during the mid-'90s, I remember thinking: That's a good title for this because his "Baseball" series of 1994 could have been called "The East." That 18 1/2 hour epic was all Red Sox/all Yankees, all the time. Ted Williams' hitting exploits were chronicled over three of the series' nine chapters despite the fact that his team never won a World Series, yet Stan Musial, his equal as a slugger and his superior as an overall ballplayer, received a three-minute afterthought in the narrative upon the timeline of his retirement.

New York City was quite literally dubbed by Ken Burns "The Capital of Baseball," yet I've been to that city several times, and I can promise you that three-fourths of the people living there do not give a shit one way or another about baseball, and it's certainly a far lesser percentage than the one for St. Louisans. The Red Sox' long World Series drought was covered in excruciatingly dramatic and endearing detail, with every near-miss exalted, yet the White Sox and Cubs, both with longer World Series droughts than the Red Sox and shockingly both playing their home games in the same city, were not even mentioned as existing franchises after Inning Two (the chapter devoted to the 1910s). The names "Harmon Killebrew" or "Harry Caray" were never uttered in Burns' "Baseball."

Well, I hate to report this to you, but Burns has outdone himself. Tonight, his series addendum "Baseball: The Tenth Inning" aired on taxpayer-supported television. In it, Burns recalls the era of Major League Baseball that has played out since his last series ended, and I can safely tell you after watching it, that it's all Yankees/Red Sox content again. How bad is the disparity in presentation? It is this bad-- and I am not joking: the home run chase of 1998 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa is not covered at all! That pinnacle of baseball's global popularity-- the month of September, 1998-- was skipped entirely. Is the documentary filmmaker committed to being a national "historian" really pretending now that that summer in baseball never happened? It's absurd.

The parochialism is as bad as ever, but the galling part is just how tone-deaf and out of step Burns' "experts" are with regard to the overall sentiment of fans on virtually every subject. Like the first film, the people talking in Burns' "Tenth Inning" are predominantly from the East Coast, they're predominantly baby boomers, and they grind their axes accordingly.

The fates of the Yankees and the Red Sox are of the most supreme importance, of course. Of the rivalry between the two teams, sportswriter Howard Bryant says that "nobody (other teams) could compete with their aura."-- my italics, but the word at the end of that sentence should be "payroll." The payroll discrepancy between New York/Boston teams and the rest of baseball is never addressed, yet team payroll is the overriding factor in how most Americans-- from individual city to individual city-- relate to the game of baseball.

He presents our history as if America was rooting for the Yankees against Arizona in the 2001 World Series because of the 9/11 attacks, but that's not how I remember it. The Yankees had just won four of the last five World Series, and nobody I know-- and I know a lot of baseball fans-- needed them to win another. Thomas Boswell (of the Washington Post) gets the award for horse's ass of the night when he refers to the '01 champion Diamondbacks as "two pitchers... they weren't a team." You get the impression that the time Burns spends with the Diamondbacks' noteworthy success story in '01 is just the setup for the later story about Curt Schilling pitching with Boston.

In the narrative, Barry Bonds is held up as the symbol of "the steroid era," and to Burns' credit, the slugger gets to tell his own story through several media clips, but two Red Sox stars who actually failed drug tests during their career, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, are never referenced as linked steroid users, only as the Red Sox World Champions they also have been. Talking head Bob Costas, who complained that he was too prominently featured in the first film, is nevertheless back for more this go-round. He reports that America found Bonds' pursuit of the all-time home record "joyless," yet the images backing the Bonds segments show stadiums filled with screaming, cheering fans.

In "The Tenth Inning," manager Joe Torre says he believes that baseball is "too beautiful to have a lasting scar" because of steroids, but Burns never reminds us in his story that Major League Baseball is a business already covered head-to-toe with scars. I do wish the filmmaker's perspective on the game didn't matter, but it does. His first film offering, aired in 1994, helped to launch the star-crossed Red Sox into becoming a "national team," though they had never been one during their first 90 years of existence. Along with their new heightened status came a graduation to the second most lucrative franchise behind the Yankees.

As for Midwestern baseball, "The Tenth Inning" might have been even worse than the original. Steve Bartman and the 2003 Cubs were afforded about five minutes of the two-hour show, even though that bizarre spectacle, and all it entailed, was clearly the most compelling narrative in American sports-- maybe ever. The ending of the Red Sox 1918-2004 championship drought warrants probably half an hour of time during the special, if we include the Curt Schilling setup in Phoenix, but there was nary a mention of the ending of the White Sox 1917-2005 championship drought. Maybe my math is off.

So what has Ken Burns given us with his update? Well, let's see. His last film on this subject matter wrapped in 1992, and this one is designed to pick up where the last one finished. He didn't talk about 1994 strike at all. He didn't reference Cal Ripken's consecutive games streak. He missed the 1998 and 1999 home run races entirely, like I said before. (Again, this is absolutely bewildering to me.) He actually didn't cover the Yankees' four championships between '96 and '00, and in his steroids coverage, he missed the fact that roughly half of the players on the Yankees '00 team would have their names eventually included in the Mitchell Report.

He forgot to mention that a former MLB team owner was actually elected President of the United States, even though it was referenced that the subject of steroids in baseball was mentioned one year during a State of the Union speech. He missed the White Sox 2005 Championship entirely, and then the greatest baseball player of the last decade, the decade in which Burns was primarily covering with his film-- Albert Pujols-- got the Harmon Killebrew/Harry Caray treatment. By my recall, the teams in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Houston, Kansas City, Detroit, Tampa, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, Montreal/Washington D.C, Toronto, and Cleveland were not mentioned at all. Nor am I remembering references to Bobby Cox, Ken Griffey Jr., Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, or Todd Helton. Very thorough, Burns. Nice job.

posted by CM @ 7:58 PM