'Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns (Includes The Tenth Inning)' DVD Box Set Review

Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns (Includes The Tenth Inning)


An epic overflowing with heroes and hopefuls, scoundrels and screwballs. 

• Babe Ruth
• Jackie Robinson
• Shoeless Joe Jackson
• Sandy Koufax
• Satchel Paige
• Pete Rose
• Roberto Clemente
• Casey Stengel
• Hank Aaron
• Joe DiMaggio
• Ichiro Suzuki
• Barry Bonds
• Pedro Martinez

It is a saga spanning the quest for racial justice, the clash of labor and management, the immigrant experience, the transformation of popular culture, and the enduring appeal of the national pastime. -- from Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. 

(C) 2010 PBS Distribution and Florentine Films

On September 18, 1994, the 300 or so member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired Our Game, the first episode (or "inning") of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. Co-written by Burns with historian (and frequent collaborator) Geoffrey C. Ward, the 112-minute long episode explores the beginning of America's national pastime and explodes various myths, including the story that General Abner Doubleday, a Civil War hero, invented the game that eventually became America's pastime.

The series' original broadcast run ended 10 days later with Inning 9: Home (1970-1992), an examination of such topics as free agency, the designated hitter, multi-million-dollar salaries, and a gambling scandal that shook the sport to its very core. But as they do throughout the previous eight "innings," Burns and Ward also remark on the timelessness of baseball - the very quality that is at the heart of the sport's lasting appeal.

Well — it's our game; that's the chief fact in connection with it; America's game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions; fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.

— Walt Whitman

The series aired - sadly - when much of the 1994 Major League Baseball season (and the World Series) were canceled on account of a players' strike. It earned good ratings (not as high as Burns' The Civil War, but still better than average for a PBS series) and an Emmy Award for best documentary. And even though it has been criticized for focusing too much on New York and Boston teams and perpetuating negative accounts of Ty Cobb's life, Baseball performed well enough to not only merit re-airings on PBS and elsewhere, but a rare follow-up by Ken Burns in 2010's Baseball: The Tenth Inning: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick.

Fast forward to October 5, 2010: 16 years after Baseball's original broadcast run, PBS Distribution released Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns (Includes the Tenth Inning), a 10-disc DVD box set that includes Burns' original 1994 documentary and Baseball: The Tenth Inning: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, a two-part follow-up that consists of Top of the Tenth (1992-1999) and Bottom of the Tenth (1999-2009).    

Narrator: It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers' fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.

I'm not a die-hard baseball fan, mind you, but I have been to a few Major League Baseball games and enjoyed them. But by the same token, I am a fan of the films by Ken Burns and his team of collaborators, including The Civil War, The West, The Central Park Five, and the recently aired The Vietnam War. Consequently, I recently purchased this 11-disc set. 

The original 1994 Emmy Award-winning documentary series consists of nine episodes which are charmingly called "innings." They are:

• Our Game (1840s-1900)
• Something Like a War (1900-1910)
• The Faith of Fifty Million People (1910-1920)
• A National Heirloom (1920-1930)
• Shadow Ball (1930-1940)
• The National Pastime (1940-1950)
• The Capital of Baseball (1950-1960)
• A Whole New Ballgame (1960-1970)
• Home (1970-1992)

The original nine innings are narrated by former NBC News anchor John Chancellor.

The 2010 box set includes the aforementioned The Tenth Inning: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, which covers the years 1992-2009. It was co-written by Burns, Novick, and David McMahon.  Because Baseball's  original narrator died in 1996, actor Keith David, who had worked with Florentine Films on the seven part documentary The War, was hired to take his place as the inning's narrative voice.

The series relies on the visual techniques used by Ken Burns in all of his major documentaries, including slow pans over still art (photos and paintings) of the 19th Century and the use of black-and-white and color footage from newsreels and contemporary TV/film coverage of games and other public events that take place in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Interestingly, Burns (in his executive producer gig) not only uses music from the specific eras covered in the 10 innings, but he also recycles cues that were used in other Florentine Films productions. In Our Game, for example, I heard songs and melodies that I had heard when I watched The Civil War and The West (which was produced concurrently with Baseball and was thus directed by Stephen Ives). It's kind of a cheat, some people might think, but it makes sense, both aesthetically and financially. 

As I said earlier, I am not particularly enamored with the sport of baseball. I've gone to a few games, including a New York Yankees spring training game at the now closed Bobby Maduro Stadium and a Florida Marlins game against Cincinnati during its first championship season in 1993. I am familiar with it, but not enough to know when a player steals a base or a pitcher makes a save. 

By the same token, I wasn't a Civil War buff before The Civil War aired in the fall of 1990, nor was I fascinated by the issue of Prohibition before I saw Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's eponymous three-part series back in 2011. But I love my country, the United States of America, and these two events, plus the other topics that Florentine Films' crew has chronicled, are tiles in the mosaic that tells the history of us, as it were.

This box set from PBS Distribution is worth getting, as is the series itself, even though some baseball fanatics have told me that Burns and Ward got some facts about Ty Cobb wrong. (To wit, the documentary tends to highlight Cobb's alleged racism and anger issues, traits which some of the players' early biographers attributed to him but are probably either exaggerated or totally bogus. I don't know who is right, but I mention the discrepancy in the interests of fairness.)

The 11 DVD discs come in the slim plastic cases that became popular for storing multi-disc sets around 2008. Each disc contains an "inning" of the original nine-part Baseball series; The Tenth Inning, however, is split into two discs, one with the "Top of the Tenth," the other with "Bottom of the Tenth."  There are six plastic cases in all; all of which except for one - the case for "Home" - store two DVDs apiece.

So it's fair to say that even though I have only seen the first two "innings" of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, I think that America's best-known documentary filmmaker has hit another home run out of the ball park. Stay tuned for more - and don't forget to get some peanuts and Cracker Jack! 

DVD Technical Specifications

Running Time: 1380 minutes

Video

• Codec: MPEG-2
• Encoding format: 4:3
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Original aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Audio

• English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles

• English, Spanish

Discs

• DVD
• Eleven-disc set (11 DVDs)

Packaging

• Custom

Playback

• Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)