PBS at TCA: Ken Burns on Steroids, the Red Sox and Other Reasons Why "Baseball" Needed a "Tenth Inning" - Ed Martin - MediaBizBloggers

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns remains one of the most eloquent recurring guests at Television Critics Association tours He is also one of the most popular He told me on Wednesday that he made his first appearance at a TCA event way back in 1985 making his visit at the Summer 2010 gathering to promote the upcoming twonight presentation of PBS39 The Tenth Inning his 25th anniversary tourInterestingly it was twenty years ago this summer that Burns came to TCA with the multipart documentary series that would make him a household name The Civil War Four years later he presented another landmark Baseball to date the mostwatched series in PBS history Tenth Inning which debuts next month picks up where Baseball left off covering the sport from 19942009Burns was perhaps a bit more passionate than usual during his panel given his love of baseball and the fact that he threw a quotperfect strikequot at the DodgersPadres game at Dodger Stadium the night before as an impressed Joe Torre looked on Burns this summer has been throwing the ceremonial opening pitch at baseball games across the country to help promote Tenth Inning Burns told me he hadn39t fallen asleep until after 1 am not because of any caffeine or sugar consumption but because he was so excited about his pitchBurns told TCA members that he never intended to make a sequel to Baseball or any of his films but that he began to think about it after his beloved Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 quotI39d had to edit so painfully so many terrible moments in Red Sox history 3946 3967 3975 3978 3986quot he recalled of making Baseball quotWhen you edit it it39s over and over again It39s not like you can avert your eyes and walk out of the room and turn off the TV set in disgust The 2003 season was another horrific defeat and the fact that they came back made for some pretty great drama the greatest comeback in the history of our sportquotThere were other reasons why Burns saw value in a sequel quotWhen we realized how consequential in retrospect the last two decades have been dealing with the 1994 strike and all the attendant money issues and obviously the gigantic shadow of the steroid scandal and all the other amazing stories that make baseball so attractive and appealing we felt compelled to come back and do itquotOne critic lamented that a lot has changed about Major League Baseball during the last decade and that for economic reasons among others it is no longer a sport that the average working class American family can afford to enjoy Might it ever return to its rootsTenth Inning39s coproducer and codirector Lynn Novick who was also on the panel and proved every bit as eloquent as Burns replied quotI don39t know what baseball really could go back to because it39s been a pretty successful business since the 1860s It has traded on our belief that it is a simple game that anyone could play That39s part of the allure and they certainly are very good at helping us to continue to perpetuate that at the same time they39re charging us a lot of money to enjoy it Globalization the Internet the 247 news cycle the way we deal with celebrities baseball is intertwined with all of that That39s one of the reasons why we were so fascinated to go back and take a look at itquotTackling the wideranging steroid scandal that continues to haunt the sport proved especially challenging Burns said quotIt is in some ways the most complicated narrative that we39ve had to construct How do you talk about the 1998 season when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire filled stadiums across the country If you do it from the convenient perspective of hindsight then it has no meaning How do you recapture some of that joy and at the same time be mindful that you39re setting the traps for a tragedy of which we are all unindicted coconspiratorsquotAnd then of course we had to verify who was actually using if we were going to say they were using how much was innuendo how much was leaked material Remember a lot of these players when the taking of steroids was not illegal in Major League Baseball submitted voluntarily to a test to determine the degree and level of future testingquotAnother reporter asked about all the records that were set during that era and all the players caught up in the scandal that would otherwise be eligible for the Hall of FamequotYou know it39s been a huge terrible timequot Burns continued quotI sort of feel optimistically we39re on the backside of it and it39s looking into the rearview mirror It did inflate one set of statistics home runs But you can be comforted that there weren39t lots more 300 hitters Nobody hit 406 as Ted Williams did in 1941 No one had a 56game hitting streak as DiMaggio did also in 3941 It really affected one area it seemed and now we seem to be out of it This is a sport in which statistics matter but it always requires a story to accompany it And that39s the great beauty of baseball That39s what tricks us into this sense that it39s this timeless thing that we39ll get backquotOne critic who had screened Tenth Inning thought it implied that Barry Bonds a central figure in the steroid scandal quotdidn39t really juice a lot or juice at all until he saw McGwire and SosaquotquotThat39s what39s been documentedquot replied sports journalist Marcos Breton who was also on the panel and appears in Tenth Inning quotWe all saw him in the spring of 1999 when all of a sudden a slender player showed up as the Michelin Man over the course of a winter All of us were like 39Well that39s odd39 No one really picked up on it at that time The whisper sort of grew as time went on and then in 2001 when he hit 73 home runs that was kind of a dead giveaway for all of usquotBonds really had statistically been the best player in baseball from the early 3990s but he wasn39t really viewed that way because of his own personalityquot Breton continued quotHe39s easily the most disagreeable person you could ever meet When McGwire and Sosa whom he saw as being lesser players were getting all of this attention he reactedquotExploring these recent issues surrounding the sport quothas rearranged our perceptions of baseball in one wayquot Burns admitted quotBut in some ways the ultimate theme of the film is the resiliency of the gamequot

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PBS at TCA: Ken Burns on Steroids, the Red Sox and Other Reasons Why "Baseball" Needed a "Tenth Inning" - Ed Martin - MediaBizBloggers

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