On Further Review

Maybe it’s the COVID, but I seem to be liking Ken Burns less and less these days. Actually. It goes back to his criticism of the Michael Jordan documentary, which sounded an awful lot like sour grapes. How dare another documentary get crazy reviews. So, it was in this slightly fevered (99.8 to 100.8 on any given night over the past eight days) state of mind I watched two episodes of Burns’ “Baseball” opus that ran on the MLB Network yesterday. The first thing that bothered me was his treatment of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; Burns made it seem that the league was about baseball from the start. It wasn’t. For openers, it actually started off as the All-American Girls Professional Softball League in 1943. The name changed before the season finished, but that doesn’t mean the players then switched over to baseball, too. Rather, the AAGPBL was a hybrid operation that steadily moved in the direction of baseball. It got there right around the time of the league’s last season in 1954. So, why did Burns skip over the evolutionary nature of the league? Maybe he didn’t want it to get in they way of his narrative. Then there’s the Seventh Inning, The Capital of Baseball, aka all teams New York in the 1950s. I once got into a pretty nasty fight with author Roger Kahn on this very subject; I dared venture the opinion that baseball was played west of the Hudson, too. Khan was not amused. So, I admit to having a certain chip on my shoulder concerning the subject. Still. Burns lets his interview subjects wax poetic on the glories of Ebbets Field and Yankee Stadium. In fact, he does such a good job invoking a sense of place that you can’t help but wonder why both facilities were discarded with so little regret. I mean, I would’ve expected Billy Crystal to chain himself outside the real Yankee Stadium before its “renovation” in the 1970s. But for all his interest in the game and the players, Burns displays a tin ear for the places where baseball has been played. He spends a lot of time on Willie Mays’s catch in the 1954 World Series without stopping to note it was only possible because center field in the Polo Grounds was 483-feet deep. Now, going back to Burns’ criticism of “The Last Dance” compromising its objectivity by allowing Jordan’s production company to be involved. OK, if that’s bad, what about letting “Baseball” run on the MLB Network? That raises a number of questions about conflicts, at least in my COVID-addled mind.