|
"And it certainly has more non-baseball people in it than any other documentary on baseball."
You cite one man. One. The film was 18 hours long and indulged a bunch of outsiders---more outsiders than baseball men. Far more. Burns himself is an outsider. So was the script's author. And for every outsider, there were 20 guys you could think of whose faces and stories were missing. That's one baseball man you mentioned, and there were several more, and Buck O'Neill was a true highlight. But watch it again and you can put together a Hall of Fame roster of greats that were never even mentioned. How about all of the broadcasting legends that were missing?
At the time it came out, Burns did a tour promoting it. He got blasted so often by baseball people at these gatherings that he canceled the rest of the tour. There were some of the interviewees that panned it and wished they never appeared in it.
I love the game as much as possible. And some of that film was truly enjoyable. But it is woefully incomplete and a sometimes laughably misguided attempt at a documentary on our game by a man whose interpretations and distortions and oversights should be confined to things like The Civil War, whose legion of experts number drastically less than the number of baseball experts.
I hungered for an expansive, inclusive, accurate documentary on baseball. Thanks to an unqualified PBS darling and his bloated 18-hour salute to himself and his friends, I still hunger for it.
|