The Ken Burns Effect in effect.
The good news is that we’re in his capable hands once again and there is plenty to like about The Tenth Inning. The bad news is that the filmmaking isn’t up to Burns’ usual lofty standards. It won’t spoil the experience, but it doesn’t feel elevated. Still, Burns creates some fine moments, like the scenes in the Dominican Republic, the most beautiful in the whole show. Burns still has a gimlet eye (the one highlight of Robbie Alomar is right one). There is a small, shirtless boy at the end of “The Star Spangled Banner” in the first segment that is classic Burns. “The Bottom of the Tenth” begins and ends with a montage of Boston sports talk radio over original photography of an empty Fenway Park. It’s a masterly touch, perfectly executed.
As for the narrative, Burns and company hit all the right notes, presenting their story in a sensitive and balanced fashion. Steroids is a major focus, of course, as are the continuing labor wars, the prominence of Latin stars, Joe Torre’s Yankees and the 2004 Red Sox. Cal Ripken, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro are all featured players, while Barry Bonds plays the central role.
Some familiar faces like George Will, Dan Okrent, John Thorn, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Bob Costas return from the original series. Tom Boswell might have even more airtime in The Tenth Inning than he did the first time around and he’s excellent. Billy Crystal is not here this time but Joe Torre is, and there are also winning contributions from journalists Marcos Breton, Verducci and Bryant, as well as cameos by Chris Rock, Felipe Alou and Omar Vizquel. Jon Miller is funny in a few spots, though his riff on VORP was goofy—not hostile or unfunny,just goofy (it would have been nice to hear Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell or Bill James here).
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Dan Evensen Posted: September 28, 2010 at 08:19 PM (#3650570)So we were LIED to!
"the prominence of Latin stars, Joe Torre’s Yankees and the 2004 Red Sox. Cal Ripken, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro are all featured players, while Barry Bonds plays the central role."
New York, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Seattle, San Francisco
I see a pretty good spread here. Now maybe it's going to be 239 minutes of Red Sox/Yankees and one minute of everything else and that would suck. To me if you were hitting the high points of the last decade, this list is pretty good.
Perpetual smirk with a haircut fit for a 5 year old. Odd looking fellow.
*What he says about Chris Rock is total b.s.
Do you really think that is his hair?
Now the ballpark boom....
George Will is for unrestricted free markets. It's not surprising that he would side with the players.
Also, the players were "right" in 1994 -- the owners forced that strike.
he should not be praised for this--he should be condemned
But he was also on the "blue ribbon panel", and was involved with the Padres and Orioles in ways I'm too old and senile to recall. I just expected him to be more of a management mouthpiece.
I didn't think the first part was too bad overall. A little jumpy in parts, but the segemtns on the Dominican baseball and McGwire-Sosa were well done. The absence of Doris Kearns Goodwin didn't hurt either.
Sigh.
At least that's what I learned tonight.
OK, as an aerospace engineer (son of a sanitation engineer) I feel i may have missed an opportunity to have been offended, or something. What is the story here? Should engineers dislike Ken Burns for some reason other than his mediocre baseball movies?
My Dad designed better planes than your Dad. :-)
I also thought there was one thing quite wrong in the piece, but it's open to debate. Burns (through the narrator) claims that the reason baseball turned to Latin America was because Latin players were cheaper. (This is the Torii Hunter line, too.) He contrasts the "cheap Latinos" with the expensive players from the draft, as if a typical draftee gets Stephen Strasburg money.
The problem with this argument is that it is very expensive to develop Latin players from age 16-18 in the academies, considering the fact that only a small percentage of them will ever reach the majors. And the Latin amateurs who look like they are going to be very good players are signed to a major league organization, their signing bonuses are far bigger than the U.S. high school players of their same age. So an Angel Villalona, who will never play in the majors, gets $2.1 million at age 16, and Michael Inoa gets $4.25 million and unless he comes back well from elbow reconstruction won't be a major leaguer, either.
What the Torii line ignores is that the draft tends to suppress the income of the draftees, having only one team to negotiate with. The free agency system in Latin America, while not perfect for the players, is a relative boon to them.
As such, baseball did not turn to Latin America to obtain cheap talent to replace higher priced U.S. born talent. They turned to Latin America to obtain talent. If American athletes played as much baseball day-in and day-out as Dominicans and Venezuelans play, then there would be fewer Latins in the majors, draft or no draft, free agency or no free agency. But Americans don't. Our best poor athletes generally are playing more football and basketball. And most of our best middle-income and above athletes are divided among dozens of popular sports, baseball falling somewhere above skateboarding and below soccer.
*Well, I did learn one thing -- that a lot of Dominican players who wash out of the minors end up in New York City playing baseball.
When I worked as a deck-hand on a salmon seiner in Alaska in the late '80s, I became friends with a fellow deck-hand, Carlos, who was a Dominican. He told me he played pro baseball "in the States" until he was 20 and injured his elbow. He told me that in Hartford, CT, where he lived when he was not in Alaska, that Hartford was full of ex-ballplayers who did not want to go home to Santo Domingo, because they didn't want to go back as losers. So they stuck it out as losers in Hartford. But I don't recall Carlos saying that the ex-players in Hartford were still playing ball.
The losers who blow out their elbows go to Hartford; the healthy clutch losers go to New York.
Wasn't George Will also pro-union in the original Baseball?
I recall him saying something like "in this case I'm a Marxist, they're generating all the wealth, they should get it"
Well-remembered. I also liked Will's "Cranepool flies to right, Agnew resigns" line. Basically, I feel like a lot of his content would go down better if you didn't have to listen to him saying it.
It seems cheaper to harvest talent from the Dominican Republic - the biggest investment is probably maintaining competent facilities that can compete with other teams doing the same thing in the Dominican Republic.
Oddly enough as a kid I only knew George Will through "Baseball", "Men at Work" and the reference in Seinfeld. So I've had implanted in my mind a fairly positive opinion of him. It's only in the past five years or so that I've picked up on his political opinions and general punditry, but I'm pretty stubborn in my first impressions, so I don't hold that agaisnt him.
Through my gritted teeth :) I agree.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed hearing Torre -- I was predisposed to dislike him but he came across as a genuine guy.
As someone who didn't watch baseball until 1994 (good timing!), I really enjoyed the Barry Bonds opener. The way Burns brought it full circle with the cliffhanger was an intriguing touch.
Surprisingly, I thought the 1996 World Series was the most well-done portion, thanks in large part to Torre's contributions.
Got home late from work and watched about a half-hour of the second airing, and the whole section on Latino ballplayers was the most engaging of what I saw. I knew most of the story (though not the thing about the washouts staying in America), but the whole section seemed artfully done. It seemed like they knew they had an opportunity to put something nice together once freed from the constraints of working with mostly junky-looking SD video (like in the Yankees dynasty section).
39 - I also thought Torre added a lot to the part on the Yankees dynasty. Saved it from being "this happened, then this happened, then this happened," which was what I assumed it was going to be.
The most tendentious moment, I think, was the insistence that fans were embittered against players after the '94-'95 strike. Fans lashed out against Tom Glavine, the film suggests ... then a few months later they're ecstatic when Glavine helps the Braves win the Series. I do remember some hard feelings, but they were pretty ephemeral – or directed more at owners than players. That could be my own bias talking, of course; Burns is trying to be "balanced," and that's OK.
I do know fans, pretty serious ones, whose interest in baseball evaporated after 1995 and never returned, to this day. It hasn't hurt baseball in the long run, but there was some permanent disaffection.
For the record, I saw the 1st 2 hours, not the 2nd. But as to east coast bias, c'mon, the Yankees and Red Sox have been the big stories of the past 15 years. That's just the way it is. Other than that, as has been said, Barry Bonds was a focus, labor was a focus, Atlanta was a focus. It would be bias to have given any less attention to the Yankees, as much as I hated and hate their dominance. And, actually, I will say that the stuff about Joe Torre, a lot of that I didn't know. And I agree that the anger of fans toward the game is over-stated.
It wasn't ground-breaking by any means. How could it have the impact of seeing Honus Wagner et al? But it was a fun trip down memory lane.
Exactly - that's the point. A 4 hour overview of baseball in the last 15-20 years isn't designed to teach new things, especially not to hardcore baseball fans. It's meant to be a well-crafted highlight reel, which is what it was.
Also: that was a lot of fun when they discussed the Albert Belle bat-gate incident. Kudos for using the Mission Impossible theme.
FWIW, the second hour last night - Ripken, Hispanic players, '96 Yankees, McGwire-Sosa - almost looked like it was specifically made for my 9 year old son. He had read about all those things in books, but obviously wasn't around when it happened.
Just riffing on the "son-of-a" trope Burns rode hard all night.
I mentioned this on the other thread, but where was anything significant on public funding of stadia?
Nothing significant so far--just a mention of a bunch of new ballparks, many of them cozy and nice, sold as a way to attempt to revitalize downtowns, often using taxpayer money. Just a sentence or two, really, with no opposition/outrage.
Yeah, exactly. I mentioned not enjoying the '98 homer chase all that much because of how tainted it feels. But there's no anger directed toward the players involved, if for no other reason than they've become outcasts for reasons connected to what made them heroes.
I moved to Europe in 1993, and stayed there until I went to college in 2003, so while I was obviously following baseball closely I didn't actually get to see most of the things in the show. So for me at least, it was a little more than a trip down memory lane...
Well, yeah, that's what I mean. It wasn't there, and it should have been. Just the Seattle story, a team that nearly moved out of town but then rallied their way into the playoffs as an impending vote on the construction of a new stadium got closer and closer, would have been illustrative. The measure was defeated in the closest election in municipal history, but the funding was approved anyway. And the same kind of story could (and should) be told about most of the other cities in MLB.
I'm obliged to mention Jim Bouton's Foul Ball yet again at this point.
Agree, but it appears that the remainder of the Yankee resurgence is limited to the 30-second voice over that followed. Given the significance and difficulty of winning multiple World Series, the 1998-2000 teams would seem to deserve a bit more attention.
Matt's description of the narrative is correct. However, the visual was also there, showing new park after new park. They mentioned the taxpayer funding and how the more blue-collar fans were replaced by white-collars in high price seats and luxury boxes, which were shown, too. They also, in the lead up to the '98 home run chase, noted how the new parks were smaller and that played some role in the rising home run totals.
The exorbitant bonuses for Latin teens is a very recent development. You are very wrong; throughout the 80s and most of the 90s, Latin America was a very cheap source of talent. The documentary was quite accurate on this subject, since that was the era it referred to.
As an Atlantan, I can assure you that plenty of people hated Glavine for years over this fact.
Was interleague play discussed in any meaningful way?
Glad somebody brought up the '99 NLCS which for whatever reason hasn't been lionized enough. I suspect it is a victim of the creation of the DS. I guess I could run off the results of the CS' w/o fail from birth to '93 with ease, and have trouble sorting out the series played during the WC era.
His goal was clearly to sum up the *story* of the last 20 years. There are details that are important, there are players and games and season that are important, that aren't *necessary* to the story. That's what he skipped.
The salient point is that if we had more talented players in the U.S., there would be fewer Dominicans and Venezuelans in pro baseball today. The reason there are so many Latins is because they have so much talent.
As to the cost of the academies and the payments made for signing players to them, what are the numbers you are so sure of? How much does a team running an academy in Latin America spend developing a player ready to play A-ball compared with how much that same team pays to get a player they draft out of a U.S. high school or college who is ready for A-ball?
I'm willing to be proved wrong if you have some actual numbers. I don't understand your supercilious rhetoric if you don't. But on the face of things, the idea that it is cheaper to develop an A-ball player from Latin American than one from the U.S. makes no sense to me, given that the U.S.-born player pays for his own training up to the time he signs a pro contract.
The only difference would be how much each is paid for his signing bonus. I realize that many years ago the buscones were stealing the bonuses from the Latin players. But that does not mean those signing bonuses were not being paid. Today, of course, the bonuses for the most talented Latins are much higher. But so are the bonuses for the highest draft picks, now.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main