'Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns' Episode Review: 'Inning 8: A Whole New Ballgame (1960-1970)'

© 1994, 2010 The Baseball Film Project, PBS Distribution

Inning 8: A Whole New Ballgame (1960-1970

Directed by: Ken Burns

Written by: Ken Burns & Geoffrey C. Ward

The 1960s are a turbulent decade for America. There are race riots, anti-war protests, hippies, Woodstock. It is also a turbulent decade for baseball, as one by one the "sacred" institutions fail.

It starts with Bill Mazeroski bringing down the mighty Yankees with one dramatic home run, the first ever to end a World Series. 

Then, in 1961, Roger Maris pursues Babe Ruth's "untouchable" record. In 1962, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants are replaced by the New York Mets, who compile the worst single-season record of the century. 

On Tuesday, September 27, 1994, the 300 member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service aired Inning 8: A Whole New Ballgame (1960-1970), the penultimate (at the time) episode of Ken Burns' documentary miniseries Baseball. Co-written by Burns with historian (and long-time collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward, the 114-minute-long installment covers the tumultuous Sixties and covers a wide range of subjects, including Roger Maris' bid to break George Herman "Babe" Ruth's single-season record for consecutive games played, race relations in baseball and the larger society at large, and the shocks of the Kennedy-King assassinations, turmoil over the Vietnam War, and changing cultural tastes in both sports and the arts.

Roger Angell: [about the 1962 Mets] An amazing thing happened, which was that New York took this losing team to its bosom. Everybody thinks New York only cares about champions, but we cared about the Mets. I remember going to some games in June of that year. And they were getting walloped, they were getting horribly beaten. But the crowds came out to the Polo Grounds in great numbers. And people brought horns and blew these horns. And after a while, I realized this was probably anti-matter to the Yankees, who were across the river and had won so long. Winning is not a whole lot of fun if it goes on. But the Mets were human, and that horn, I began to realize, was blowing for me. There's more Met than Yankee in all of us. What we experience in our lives, there's much more losing than winning, which is why we love the Mets.

Beginning with the end of the New York Yankees' long reign at the top of baseball's food chain and ending with Curt Flood's Quixotic quest to challenge Major League Baseball's reserve clause (which gave owners total control over the destinies of players and their careers), A Whole New Ballgame gives viewers an insight into the vast changes in the National Pastime. From the move westward by the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California to the building of large and often impersonal stadiums built to replace older, more intimate ones built in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the aptly titled eighth "inning" reflects the game's ability to adjust to changing times and mores while staying steeped in its traditions.

Inning Eight, A Whole New Ball Game, moves the field to the 1960s. This episode traces the emergence of television, the expansion to new cities and the building of anonymous multipurpose stadiums that robbed the game of its intimacy and some of its urban following. - Official "Baseball" site, PBS.org

Following the format established in The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns and other Florentine Films productions, each installment of Baseball is divided into several chapters, each of which is introduced with a fadeout and a stark white-on-black title card. Moreover, every episode mimics the sequence of events in a baseball game, including tops and bottoms of innings, as well as a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, which became America's official national anthem in 1931.

Curt Flood: I guess you really have to understand who that person, who that Curt Flood was. I'm a child of the '60s, a man of the '60s. During that time, this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution. In the South, we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assassinated and we lost the Kennedys, and to think that merely because I was a professional baseball player I could ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium is truly hypocrisy. And now I find that all of those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn't have in my own profession.

 A Whole New Ballgame is divided into the following chapters:

1. Top of the Eighth
2. Baseball
3. A Whole New Ballgame
4. Expansion
5. The World's Lousy
6. A Tough Year for The Babe
7. The Jewish Kid
8. The Boyfriend
9. ¡Yo La Tengo!
10. The Man
11. In the Course of Time
12. Bottom of the Eighth
13. The Plantation
14. Not For Your Whole Team
15. The Question is Why
16. They Did Not Get a Chance
17. Yaz
18. Pondering Inaction
19. We Do This Everyday
20. Heaven
21. The Greatest Game of Them All
22. I Am a Man

My Take

I am not much of a baseball fan. As a kid growing up in both the United States and - for a six-year period (1966-1972) - Colombia, I lived with a widowed mother who wasn't very much into sports. She didn't discourage me from enjoying sports, mind you, but I didn't have much of an inclination to either play baseball with kids my own age or follow Major League Baseball teams on a regular basis.

At best, you could say that I can go and enjoy watching a baseball game if I'm invited to go to one, but I won't go out of my way to sit down and watch a Florida Marlins or Tampa Bay Rays game on TV.

That having been said, I've enjoyed watching A Whole New Ballgame (1960-1970) and the other episodes of Ken Burns' epic documentary miniseries about what Walt Whitman, writing in the Brooklyn Eagle over 150 years ago, called "our Game." 

As in the previous seven innings, director Ken Burns and producer Lynn Novick rely on archival film and television footage and still photographs from the period to create the visuals for The National Pastime. This is intercut with contemporary (1990s) cinematography by lensman Buddy Squires that features interviews with Daniel Okrent, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Costas, Curt Flood, and sportswriting legend Roger Angell.

The soundtrack is also chock-full of great music. Selections include songs that were popular between 1960 and 1969; we hear Jimi Hendrix's rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, Carly Simon's cover of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, as well as Chubby Checker's The Twist, Green Onions by Booker T. & the M.G.s, as well as performances by Jacqueline Schwab, Molly Mason, Jay Ungar, Matt Glaser, and George Rabbai

In addition to "talking head" sequences with baseball fans, sports commentators, and historians who share their insights and anecdotes about the changes in the game and in the American cultural landscape during this turbulent period, 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

Everything about this 114-minute long episode reflects an all-out effort by everyone at Florentine Films to produce an entertaining and riveting documentary that is both informative and emotionally moving. From the script by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns to the use of traditional and pop music from various eras by Burns (who also served as the series' musical director), the love and attention to detail lavished on Baseball is right there for all to see on TVs and on other A/V-capable devices, including smartphones and computers. 

I strongly recommend Baseball to anyone - regardless of whether you're a fan of the sport or not - who wants to understand the American national character.