Media
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA NO FALL CLASSIC BURNS'S 'BASEBALL' It's an irony that has already been repeated to death, but it bears repetition one more time, because it isn't just an irony but, I think, a key moment in...
...Even the most enthusiastic preshowing reviews of "Baseball" observed that it was all a tad overdone...
...Basketball and hockey, in the wake of the baseball strike, have made down-tools-and-walk noises, too...
...Some things need not be belabored: like, for instance, that the players and owners, in an orgy of selfishness right out of Neronian Rome, irretrievably polluted a century-old national myth—the myth that this game, of all games, was not just another raree-show, but was based on a contract of common passion/or the game itself between the players and the spectators...
...and tight-close-up interviews with people like Thomas Boswell and George Will, who do understand the game, but also interviews with celebrities whose only reason for being included is that they are famous and that one time or another they went to a game...
...And in one word, what went wrong with baseball is what made "Baseball" possible: TV...
...MEDIA NO FALL CLASSIC BURNS'S 'BASEBALL' It's an irony that has already been repeated to death, but it bears repetition one more time, because it isn't just an irony but, I think, a key moment in the underground, psychic, metaphorical life of the republic: In 1994, for the first time in ninety years, America didn't get a World Series...
...And some things probably should not be belabored...
...Nine almost unbroken nights of prime-time...
...Baseball" took up about as much time as the PBS broadcast of Wagner's Ring cycle...
...In other words: it's a wonderful and maddeningly flawed work, and its most salient flaws are an uncannily precise index of what went wrong with baseball itself...
...instead it got Ken Burns's massive documentary, "Baseball...
...And although I, for one, would rather sit through a 3-to-2 game played by bush-leaguers than, ever again, through a complete Das Rheingold, nevertheless one detects—as Henry James would have said—a certain fatal lack of proportion, a failure to grasp the dimensions of the done thing...
...But, though it's venal, it just isn't the same: these guys we knew were secular...
...but, on PBS, a plangent history of the game itself that was, obviously, originally meant as a love letter and that—in the event—is most likely an elegy...
...celebrity voices from Jason Robards to Studs Terkel to Carly Simon...
...No games on ABC or CBS or NBC...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
