'Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns' Episode Review: "Inning 5: Shadow Ball (1930-1940)'

Inning 5: Shadow Ball (1930-1940)

Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns

Throughout America, and even on the baseball diamonds in New York's Central Park, thousands of homeless people build shantytowns called "Hoovervilles." More than ever, America needs heroes. And even as it struggles to make it through the Depression, baseball provides them. 

But the heroes do not come only from the Major Leagues. The Negro Leagues bring baseball to towns the Major Leagues ignore...to people the Major Leagues spurn. To delight the fans, they develop an elaborate warm-up routine in pantomime; throwing and hitting an invisible ball so convincingly spectators can't believe it's not real. It's called "shadow ball."

In the fall of 1994, Major League Baseball was crippled by a players' strike that prematurely ended that year's season at the midway point and led to the cancellation of the '94 World Series. Millions of fans of the national pastime had to get their "fix" for spitballs, curve balls, home runs, strikeouts, and stolen bases elsewhere. 

Some baseball fans found relief from the "drought" by attending local Little League, high school or college-level games. Others played "fantasy baseball" games or video games such as Hardball! - which featured commentary by sports announcer Al Michaels - and Tommy Lasorda Baseball. 

However, for millions of fans who depended on television for coverage of their favorite sport, the best game in town was Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, a nine-part series that aired during that long, sad fall on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

(C) 1994-2010 The Baseball Film Project, PBS Distribution

 On September 22, 1994, over 300 PBS member stations across the U.S. premiered Inning 5: Shadow Ball (1930-1940), the fifth episode of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. This episode, which was written by Burns with historian and frequent collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward, examines the hard times of the Great Depression, the effects that the world-wide economic crisis had on American society and the game, and the shameful legacy of racism that prevented talented black baseball players like Leroy (Satchel) Paige from playing in the Major Leagues. 

Inning Five, Shadow Ball, tells the story of the Negro Leagues in the 1930s. The title refers to a common pre-game feature in which the players staged a mock game with an imaginary ball. Though unintended, the pantomime was an apt metaphor for the exclusion of blacks from major league play at that time. - Episode description, Official Baseball site at PBS.org.

Following the format established in The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns and other Florentine Films productions, Each "inning" of Baseball is separated into several chapters, each one introduced with a fadeout and a stark white on black title card. Moreover, every episode in Baseball  is structured like a baseball game, with tops and bottoms of innings, a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner - which became America's official national anthem in the time frame of Shadow Ball - and more. (The only thing missing, I think, is the presence of hot dog and popcorn vendors hawking their wares to hungry fans!)

Inning 5: Shadow Ball (1930-1940) is divided into 23 chapters. They are:

1. Top of the Fifth
2. Baseball
3. Shadow Ball
4. Like We Invented the Game
5. The National Tonic
6. The Old School
7. Midnight Rider
8. You Lucky Bum
9. Josh
10. The Daffiness Boys
11. Carrying the News
12. Two to a Mule
13. The Gashouse Gang
14. I'd Want Carl Hubbel
15. Plain Prejudice
16. Bottom of the Fifth
17. Goodbye Baseball
18. Heroes
19. Rhubarb
20. I Ain't Sorry
21. For the Good of the Team
22. The Best
23. Nobody Hits Satchel

As in the previous four innings, director Ken Burns and producer Lynn Novick rely on archival footage and still photographs from the period to create the visuals for A National Heirloom. This is intercut with contemporary (1990s) cinematography by lensman Buddy Squires that features interviews with Daniel Okrent, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Costas, and Shelby Foote.

In addition to "talking head" sequences with baseball fans, sports commentators, and historians who share their insights and anecdotes about Satchel Paige, the Negro Leagues, and the effects of the Depression on baseball and America at large, this episode of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns also has a great voice cast: 

Narrated By

John Chancellor

Voices

Adam Arkin
Mike Barnicle
Philip Bosco
Keith Carradine
John Cusack
Ossie Davis
Loren Dean
Anthony Hopkins
Garrison Keillor
Delroy Lindo
Amy Madigan
Charley McDowell
Arthur Miller
Michael Moriarty
Gregory Peck
Jody Powell
Jason Robards
Paul Roebling
Jerry Stiller
Studs Terkel
Eli Wallach

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

My Take

When PBS first broadcast Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns in the fall of 1994, I was not one of the millions of viewers who watched the series. Growing up in a household that included a widowed mother and an older half-sister who had little interest in sports, much less America's pastime, I was never seriously an avid sports fan. I did briefly consider watching the first "inning" when I read abot it in TV Guide magazine, but I ended up watching other shows instead. 

Fortunately, the existence of affordable home video formats such as DVD and Blu-ray discs makes it possible for me to correct the errors of my ways and add documentaries such as Ken Burns Presents: The West  and The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns to my video collection. And when I found that Baseball and Jazz were part of Burns' American Trilogy, I overcame my narrow-mindedness and purchased the box sets of both documentaries. 

And although you still won't catch me watching Major League Baseball games on cable television or picking a favorite team to follow loyally through thick and thin during baseball season, I do enjoy watching this series.

Let's face it. Ken Burns and his team at Florentine Films (Lynn Novick, Geoffrey C. Ward, Stephen Ives - a producer of this series and Burns' "designated hitter" as director of The West - and countless  others)  are interested in only one thing: making American history come alive. From Burns' point of view - and this is obvious if you've watched any of his documentaries - history should not be treated as a set of dry facts and statistics that seem irrelevant to the average person. It is, as Burns has said many times, the story of us, literally. 

A running theme throughout Burns' videography is this: the more that we understand our past - both the good and the bad aspects of it - the more clearly we can see why our country, our culture, and our society is the way it is now. 

Do you think that life in America was better, say, in the 1930s and 1940s? Some people say it was, especially if they are white, wealthy, male, and predominantly Protestant. Not everyone in the U.S. suffered hardship during the Great Depression, and those that did are either dead or were too young to remember how dire things were before America's late entry into World War II. 

Baseball  - especially in Shadow Ball and other episodes that delve into the segregation of the sport - shows that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Racism - institutionalized and casual - was a big issue in both the business aspect and the athletics side of big-league sports. Back then, the so-called Gentlemen's Agreement between Major League Baseball owners prohibited black players - or Negroes, as black Americans were called at the time - from playing on the same teams as whites, even if players with dark skins played as well - or even better - than their lighter-skinned counterparts. 

Now, 71 years after Jackie Robinson broke the "color barrier" when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed him on to play at Ebbets Field and elsewhere, the ugly stain of racism still shows up in the fabric of our sports culture. Back in the days chronicled in Shadow Ball the question was "Why can't Negro players play alongside white players?" In 2018 - in Trump Era America, the question is "Why can't black players peacefully protest how black men are horribly mistreated and killed by mostly-white police officers?" 

Obviously, 1994's Shadow Ball was made and aired nearly a quarter century ago, a span of years long enough for Burns to make one follow-up documentary (Baseball: The Tenth Inning) and announce plans for a further sequel (The 11th Inning). So the current situation regarding racial relations is not mentioned in this episode - but the issue's constancy is. 

Of course, Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns also focuses on the positive aspects of both the sport it chronicles and the nation that is its birthplace. Baseball is, after all, a reflection of the American character. Like the country itself, baseball is true to its traditions and has not changed its basic principles. It is resilient and bounces back from adversity. And quite often, in spite of itself, the sport eventually adjusts to vast social and cultural changes and does the right thing.