THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409190228
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY BONKO, TELEVISION COLUMNIST
LENGTH: Long : 198 lines
AND YOU thought baseball was just a game.
In the mind of filmmaker Ken Burns, baseball is life - at least life as Americans have lived it for the past 125 years or so.
``Everything that we are since the Civil War has been played out on a baseball diamond,'' Burns said in Los Angeles not long ago when he gave TV reporters a preview of ``Baseball,'' his 18 1/2-hour miniseries that begins at 8 tonight today (Sunday) on PBS at 8 p.m.
At that time, when talk of a lengthy baseball strike was building to a crescendo, Burns said an American autumn without the World Series was unthinkable. ``I can't imagine life in October without baseball.''
Would the players dare let that happen? The owners?
``The last thing we want is a baseball strike,'' said Burns. ``We want to be there on the television screen with our series as Major League Baseball is thriving on the field in pennant races and heading for the playoffs.''
It was not to be. Team owners voted last week to shut down the season.
Now the PBS bosses are left to wonder: Will ``Baseball'' be the hit they expected it to be when they contracted for the miniseries in 1990 or will viewers who feel let down by the players and owners turn their backs on it? Millions invested in the production and merchandising of ``Baseball'' are at stake here.
If you have never been captivated by baseball, or feel betrayed by the millionaires who snatched it away from you in 1994, watch ``Baseball'' anyway.
You'll learn a thing or two about your ancestors who played the game on battlefields, in frontier cattle towns and in big-city neighborhoods of immigrants. You'll also learn a thing or two about greed in the sporting life.
Look how much wiser you are after watching Burns' last TV triumph, ``The Civil War.''
If you revel in the game, miss not a minute of ``Baseball.''
See the first-base umpire give Joe DiMaggio an affectionate pat on the fanny after the New York Yankees' outfielder hit safely in 42 straight games in 1941. His streak would not stop until 14 games later. Then it started again for another 16 games - 73 games during which he hit safely in 72 of them.
Had it gone to 57 straight, DiMaggio would have been $10,000 richer because that is the sum the makers of Heinz 57 sauce were willing to pay him for an endorsement.
See Babe Ruth sliding home head first. ``Yer out, Babe!''
See Ted Williams in the clubhouse honing the barrel of his bat on a hunk of soup bone to give it a musical click when bat met ball. He called it the joy zone.
See people in cities large and small gathering on street corners to follow the progress of World Series games on a giant scoreboard called the Play-O-Gram. That was before television, before radio play-by-play.
Even before Harry Caray.
See a one-armed outfielder named Pete Gray who played a full season in the major leagues 50 years ago, striking out only 11 times in 234 times at bat.
See the contempt on the face of infielder Hal Chase who, according to the script of ``Baseball,'' supplemented his income by working closely with gamblers to throw games.
This was before the Black Sox scandal of 1919 shook the game.
See, as Burns suggests, a wonderful television event about a game that is the American society as viewed through a looking glass.
``The game of baseball is the story of remarkable human beings, heroic figures, villainous figures and foolish figures. Our story of baseball is not only the story of a great and wonderful sport, a repository of anecdote, memory and feeling, but also a mirror of our country as a whole.''
``Baseball'' brings to viewers a large number of unforgettable characters - almost as many as Burns introduced in the Civil War miniseries.
One of those was author Shelby Foote. He is back before the camera in ``Baseball.''
In ``Baseball,'' there is also Ty Cobb, who lit out after a heckler in the stands and beat him unmercifully, paying no mind to the fact the man was crippled. There was the pitcher in Japan who struck out Ruth and Lou Gehrig when the Yankees were barnstorming in Tokyo, and later fought against Americans in World War II.
There was the team called the House of David - talented athletes in long, flowing beards who played in just about every city and small town in America.
Two names leap out from the miniseries and tower above all the others in ``Baseball.''
One is Ruth. The other is Jackie Robinson.
Said Burns, ``When Jackie Robinson, the grandson of a slave, walked out onto Ebbets Field in early April, 1947, it was the first progress in civil rights since the Civil War. This breakthrough took place not at a lunch counter, not on a city bus in Alabama, not even in the military, but rather on the diamonds of our national pastime.
``Baseball is the story of immigration and assimilation, of tension between labor and management, of the growth and decay of cities. Baseball provides a window through which we can see reflected and refracted many of the tensions of our country.''
The tensions between the players and the people who own the teams began as long ago as 1879 when owners put in place the reserve clause which would bind the athletes to one team. In 1994, labor and management clashed again.
Burns reveals in his nine innings of ``Baseball'' how players, who were once as blue-collar as the people in the stands, have distanced themselves from the people who now watch the games. In the last century, the average player earned seven times the average working man's salary.
Before the 1994 strike, players were making an average of $1.1 million apiece or 50 times that of the typical wage earner.
Just as Burns goes deeply into the history of labor vs. management in America, he also goes deeply into racial strife of the past, telling much about the life and times of Robinson. When he was an Army officer, Robinson was court-martialed for refusing to obey an order to sit in the back of a bus.
We learn from ``Baseball,'' with its old and magnificent photographs, that Robinson was part of a prosperous league of black baseball that played side by side with white Major League Baseball, often in the same ball parks.
When Robinson advanced to Brooklyn in 1947, and broke baseball's color line, it meant that other stars from the the Negro leagues would soon follow.
``We were overjoyed to see Jackie made it to Brooklyn, but we realized that a big part of life as we knew it was over. Once, where there had been many black teams to root for, now there would be one black player in a world of white faces.''
That was 82-year-old Buck O'Neil, who played in the Negro leagues with the Kansas City Monarchs, recalling Robinson's ascent to Major League Baseball.
Long after he left the game, Robinson campaigned for more blacks in front-office positions in baseball. He pushed for black managers and black coaches. When another black man, Curt Flood, challenged the reserve clause in court in 1969, Robinson testified on Flood's behalf.
``By that time, Jackie had suffered two strokes and his hair was as white as snow. He barely made it to the courtroom. When he spoke, you could hear a pin drop. I had modeled my life after this man's life. And here he was standing up for me,'' said Flood.
Burns points out that when Brooklyn owner Branch Rickey elevated Robinson to the Dodgers from Montreal in 1947, he changed America forever. ``It was one of the great turning points in American social history,'' said Burns.
Black soldiers fought in World War II to preserve the American way of life. Now they wanted in on it, and that included playing Major League baseball.
They asked, ``If we can stop bullets, why not baseballs?''
Why not, indeed?
Babe Ruth playing baseball did not awaken America from a social nightmare, but his arrival on the scene as first a great pitcher, and later as an even greater slugger, did help to revive the game. After the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the game needed reviving, and quickly.
Enter Babe Ruth. ``He was a parade all by himself, a burst of dazzle and jingle. Babe Ruth is a national heirloom to be handed down from one generation to the next,'' wrote columnist Jimmy Cannon.
Ruth changed his silk shirts five or six times a day.
Burns will present ``Baseball'' to PBS viewers in segments called innings. The first five innings will be seen starting on Sunday and continuing through Thursday. After a two-day break - travel time, some baseball fans would call it - ``Baseball'' resumes Sept. 25.
Virtually all of ``Baseball'' is as delicious as Crackerjack.
You will hear umpteen versions of ``Take Me Out to the Ballgame,'' including a nifty rendition by Carly Simon. Here's your chance to learn all the lyrics.
The episodes I like best are the Sixth Inning, ``The National Pastime,'' which covers the events from 1940 through 1950, and the Third Inning, ``The Faith of Fifty Million People,'' which ends with the re-telling of Black Sox scandal.
The 1940s had so much.
There was 1941 when DiMaggio had his 56-game hitting streak and Williams batted .406. There was Enos Slaughter's famous dash for home in the 1946 World Series. There was Cookie Lavagetto breaking up a no-hitter in the 1947 World Series. And there were the World War II years, when women in skirts played hardball. It was the era of the Rockford Peaches.
The look and feel of ``Baseball'' is very much the same as the texture of ``The Civil War.'' The old made to look new.
Said Burns, ``We prefer to use still photographs as our building blocks. That is the best way to communicate history.''
To the devoted fan, Burns says, ``You will see the 50 or 60 great moments in the game's history in an entirely new light.''
You look at the old photographs of the eight men involved in helping the Chicago White Sox throw the 1919 World Series games, and you wonder why they did it, why they sold out the game. Then narrator John Chancellor comes in with that mellow-sounding voice of his to suggest why ``Shoeless'' Joe Jackson and his teammates sold out baseball.
They worked for a tight-fisted owner who would not pay the players a decent wage. In 1919, they were not called the Black Sox for the dirty deed of giving the series' title to Cincinnati on a silver platter. They were called the Black Sox because their uniforms were a mess.
Sox owner Charles Comiskey wouldn't pay to have the uniforms laundered. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Ken Burns
AMERICAN HEROES
Among the featured players (from top): Christy Mathewson, Satchel
Paige, Michey[sic] Mantle and Jackie Robinson.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTO, PROVIDED COURTESY OF GENERAL MOTORS
LEGENDARY PITCHER
Walter Johnson is one of the many baseball stars profiled in Ken
Burns' epic nine-part miniseries, ``Baseball,'' beginning tonight at
8 on PBS.
FILE PHOTOS
``Baseball'' tells how fans once ``watched'' games on a giant
scoreboard, as these Norfolk fans did during the 1933 World Series.
by CNB