Baseball documentary lacks revelations and a pulse

Ken Burns’ The Tenth Inning, the latest in his baseball documentary series, is a crashing bore, and the most that can be said on its behalf is that Stockholm syndrome sets in roughly halfway through.

For four hours, The Tenth Inning unfolds like a seemingly endless high school history lesson, covering the most scant basics of baseball’s  recent history from the beginning of the 1990s to the Boston Red Sox’s World Series win.

By the end, you begin to identify with the plethora of octogenarian sports writers who pontificate about the “finesse of the sport,” the importance of grit and heart, and the omniscient power of Cal Ripken.

The indomitable Keith Olbermann leads off for the wizened geezers by introducing the film with a statement on how baseball is great because it is essentially the same game as it was back at its creation in 1860.

Yes, Keith, modern baseball’s basically the same, except for the fact that pitchers now throw overhand, batters can’t tell them where to throw the ball, four balls make a walk, not eight, and foul balls are strikes. Oh, and the outfields now have fences too.

Yup, besides that, same game.

It is a dry recitation of the most basic facts about baseball over the last 20 years, a series of 10-minute episodes where the likes of George Will, Tom Boswell and Daniel Okrent opine about the 1998 home run chase, the start of the Yankee dynasty and the 1994 baseball strike.

These are not exactly obscure events. Everyone, fans and non-baseball fans alike, knows these stories and has most likely debated them ad nauseam. Do we really need a group of sports writers wringing their hands as they discuss how they and the owners covered up the steroid scandal for more than a decade? I hardly think so.

If you are going to cover events universally embedded within the social conscious, you’d better give me something new. Show how the popular conception is wrong, or take on an issue from a new and unique angle.

Look, for example, at what ESPN has been doing with its groundbreaking 30 for 30 documentary series. Specifically, look at Kirk Fraser’s documentary Without Bias about the life and tragic death of Len Bias, the University of Maryland star basketball player who died of a cocaine overdose the day after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986.

Unlike The Tenth Inning, Fraser’s documentary dives beneath the myth and looks at the man: what he meant to his family, his friends, his school and his sport, and how his life — and his death — has affected a generation of NBA stars and one of the league’s most storied franchises.

Fundamentally, The Tenth Inning represents all that is wrong with baseball and embodies the reason why the sport’s popularity lags so far behind that of football and why it is losing market shares to the NBA.

Both the documentary and subject fundamentally fail to realize that the market has changed.

It’s become younger and more dynamic, better informed. Statistical analysis in the form of Sabermetrics can now run circles around a sports writer’s gut. Fans tune in to watch mammoth home runs and blazing fastballs, not bunts and fundamental baseball.

We don’t want to hear about the love of the game and how history links generations, all the way from Babe Ruth to Albert Pujols. It doesn’t. We want to see a pro wrestling-sized freak mash the ball into geosynchronous orbit. We want to say “badass,” not “how profound.”

In all honesty, I do not know why this documentary was made. What is it supposed to achieve? All of the facts and stories presented in the four hours are common knowledge. Every fan knows them in minute detail. Tome upon tome has been written about them.

And if you don’t know? If you don’t know about the miracle that was the 2001 World Series or the tragedy that was the 1994 strike, are you really going to sit through a Burns documentary?

Ultimately, Burns produces a four-hour nostalgia trip, and if you want to take it, fine. But it’s a lazy piece of fluff reporting mired in the past, telling a story whose scribes are still mired in the belief that baseball is still the national pastime, Nielsen ratings be damned. As for me, leave me out. I’ve already taken my primer course on baseball history.

Sam Colen is a junior majoring in economics/mathematics. His column, “’O Lucky Critic,” runs Fridays.