Ken Burns' Baseball goes into extra innings

A whole chapter for Musial? Show me where. From what I can find, Musial got one mention, for about 30 seconds, in the Eighth Inning on the 1960s. The Cardinals, as a whole, got mostly ignored.

Schmidt, arguably the best player of the 1970s, didn't get mentioned a single time in the entire documentary.

 

I have the companion book, a coffee table item which is (admittedly) quite nice.

 

I forget what part, but they call him Staislaus Musuwkowski (no I am not looking up the spelling) from DeNora. Found in a church league as a pitcher. Sucked as a pitcher and as a last resort, talked the coach into letting him hit... yada yada yada

Then Will talked about 1675 hits at home and 1675 hits on the road or something like that. Costas said the famous I hit the ball on the top half and then on the bottom yada yada yada.

Aaron was in it and it talked about all the hate mail he received chasing Ruth.

Schmidt was mentioned with the Phillies in the final inning when they won the Series with Rose and Tug.

 

I have the CD soundtrack, which is also quite nice.

And my intention here is not to knock Ken Burns, because I love a lot of his stuff -- the Jack Johnson documentary was one of the best I've ever seen. Civil War was also great, as was Jazz.

Admittedly, my thoughts on the film are not first-hand; I haven't seen the whole thing in 15 years. But I wish he would have done "Baseball" as a documentary strictly about black baseball. I've read that's where the project started anyway -- he wanted to do a project on Jackie Robinson (career, legacy, etc.), but Rachel wouldn't give him the rights to use a lot of material. So he expanded the film and used all of his Negro Leagues and black baseball background in "Baseball" instead. Except it kind of distorted the project into almost a political agenda instead of a comprehensive documentary about baseball. It was also unfocused: there was so much time spent on the Negro Leagues while ignoring the minor leagues; so much time on the NYC corridor while ignoring the rest of the country; so much time demonizing Cobb in order to lift up Robinson and others.

 

There is no way everyone was going to happy. You know, there was a ton of Negro League material.

Overall, I thought it was very good.

 

Oh, I don't mind that everyone wasn't happy. The omissions were going to happen no matter what. I can live with that.

What I meant was, for a, what, 20-hour documentary ... it was very unfocused (for instance, every other decade gets its own Inning, but the Ninth Inning just zooms right from 1970 on into the 1990s, an era when the game changed arguably more than any other) and very agenda-driven (for instance, Cobb dominated the material in the Second Inning -- but Burns, with help from his commentators, turned him into a completely one-dimensional racist boogeyman. I thought that was unfair.)

It was good. It wasn't great.

 

As a Cardinal fan, I find little reason to watch the film. Fortunately I'm a baseball fan in general, which gets me through much of it (except the Goodwin parts).