Christmas Day

[Steven Tyler]

MLBTV will air Ken Burn's documentry "Baseball" (all nine episodes) on Christmas Day starting at 6ET. It will be a chance for some to see it for the first time or for viewers to watch the special again if interested.

So if you have nothing special to do Christmas Day, this might be something to while away to hours.

[TxUmp]

I already have this series on DVD, but I hughly recommend it to all our members. It is THE definitive baseball documentary. The commentary by Buck O'Neill alone is worth the cost of the series.

If you don't have time to watch it all on Christmas, try to record it for later viewing and/or to add to your library.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

[Kevin Finnerty]

You can call Ken Burns' BASEBALL a lot of things, including entertaining, and at some points, even informative, but it is most decidedly not the definitive baseball documentary. It's certainly the longest. And it certainly has more non-baseball people in it than any other documentary on baseball. Actually, if that is the best baseball documentary, then there is no definitive documentary of baseball.

Of those 18 looooonnng hours, just how much was devoted to the period from 1960-on? And just how much of that 18 hours was devoted to baseball played west of New York?

I hope a filmmaker who is a true baseball man, and not simply a documentary maker with a bunch of high-brow friends, puts together the definitive baseball documentary someday soon—filled with actual baseball people. It's long overdue.

[TxUmp]

So Buck O'Neill is not a "Baseball person". I would be intetrested in hearing your definition of what comprises a true baseball person.

[Kevin Finnerty]

"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.