Long and languid–and determinedly so–detailed, devoted, and only occasionally dramatic, Ken Burns’s new documentary, Baseball, mimics the very pace and temperament of its chosen subject. It is, at times, somewhat arch in the way its structure apes that of a baseball game: the documentary airs in nine “innings” over the course of two weeks, beginning Sunday night on Channel 11. While each of those innings lasts precisely two hours (with a 30-minute epilogue, the total running time is 18 1/2 hours), and thus violates one of baseball’s most treasured traditions as one of the few sports without a clock, the documentary as a whole and each of its innings revel in that unhurried, deliberate feel unique to the game.
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The key to its success is that it reminds one, constantly, that it is not a textbook but a documentary. It tells its tale in a way that a textbook can’t begin to imitate. Babe Ruth is introduced as Louis Armstrong plays on the sound track, thus superimposing two titans of 20th-century American culture. Old photos and newsreel footage are edited together seamlessly with the contributions of aged witnesses describing the past, and younger theorists speculating on its meanings. Whenever people find that I’ve seen most of Baseball, they ask right away if it has that Civil War feel of a camera panning slowly across sepia-tone photos while someone’s words are read aloud and a solo piano tinkles away in the background. And, yes, there is every bit as much of that in Baseball. Yet that style–which is Burns’s style as a filmmaker and as an artist–never seems hackneyed; it is his distinctive way of telling a story, and he sticks to it with confidence because he knows it works so well. The trademark of that style–the slow pan across old photos by a camera that has zoomed in tight on even the smallest image–gives one the impression of really being there, of surveying the scene, as one scans the crowd at the Polo Grounds or a team portrait of the 1934 Saint Louis Cardinals, the Gas House Gang, noticing the little details that catch the eye one by one, just as they do in real life.
After burning through the 50-plus years of 19th-century baseball history in the first inning, Baseball follows the structure of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract for much of the rest of the way: it’s a decade an inning, following the arc of the game and players’ careers in arbitrary ten-year increments. The sport advances as an institution, but time is also made for remarkable in-and-of-themselves events–for instance, lavish detail is devoted to the 1912 World Series and to game six of the 1975 series. Each inning is self-contained; a viewer can drop in one night, miss the next, and come back without much disruption to the flow (although some delicious anecdotes of one sort or another will be missed). While Burns’s Civil War style is, of course, best suited to baseball’s early years, before the days of moving pictures, there’s no use denying that the documentary is deepened and enriched as it moves along, as the players actually spring into motion.
With minutiae like that, mixed with indelible images of men in motion and almost endless ruminations about their impact and meaning, the single adjective that best describes Baseball is Proustian. It is baseball’s made-for-TV version of Remembrance of Things Past. Yet just as Proust did, Burns finds ways to make the material cohere by establishing a few essential themes and motifs. Two are foremost: the longtime segregation of the sport (time and again, Burns takes pains to qualify the phrase “national pastime” until Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier, in 1947, to make baseball “truly the national pastime”) and–much more timely–the idea that baseball has always been a ruthless business masquerading as a game, as idle entertainment. Images of Jackie Robinson and references to the reserve clause recur the way Proust’s thoughts return to the Guermantes Way.
