Baseball. - television program reviews

Our secular sports, basketball, football, hockey - for God's sake, volleyball - are. They are the stuff of soundbites and instant replays, electron-streams of uninterrupted busyness, leaving room for everything except reflection. (You can watch an 80-yard punt return over and over, like an MTV video; but how can you appreciate the replay of a game-winning single without watching the whole inning - or the whole game?) My science-fiction prediction is that, eventually, they'll be played in sportsdomes before ten cameras and no live spectators at all. It would ease the crowd-control problem, and not make much difference otherwise. With baseball - when it was a game - that would be as unthinkable as lights at Wrigley Field.

Burn's film is nowhere more acute than in its observation that the decline of the game - and let's all admit that the game is now, in any real sense, defunct - began in the fifties, with the coast-to-coast televising of major league play. Loyalties were subtly undermined; advertising megabucks began to affect and, Faustianly, corrupt the biz of the game; and (though Burns doesn't say this) TV-fixated America discovered, uncomfortably, that watching the game in the den with a Bud wasn't as much fun as schlepping out to the local minor-league diamond. Good news for the NFL, that.

Let me be clear. "Baseball" is a lovely piece of work. But its sadness is that it celebrates the myth of our essential game in and through the very medium that is the enemy of all those values - of leisure, of small-community solidarity, of unashamed trust in the love of sport for sport - that the game once incarnated.

Look at how many films we've had about the game: Bull Durham, The Natural, The Babe, A League of Their Own, Field of Dreams, etc. What they all have in common with Baseball," I think, is an unspoken consent that we now believe in the game - as the Middle Ages believed in Camelot - only as a metaphor for what we once might have been, but no longer are. Remember Field of Dreams? How grown men cried at the end? It was my wife, Celeste, who pointed out after we saw it what a mean film it is. "So they bring back all the great baseball legends," she said, "and the big damn triumph is that Kevin Costner will get rich charging admission to see the ghosts of the heroes."

Copy - with respect - to Ken Burns. Lou Gehrig wept.

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