Baseball has an ugly face, that’s the business part.
—Pedro Martinez
'The Tenth Inning': Just a Beautiful Thing
By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
“There’s something that happens on the field that’s like poetry, like ballet,” says Gerald Early. “The remarkable thing about the game,” he goes on, “is how beautiful it is, despite all the ugliness that might be around it at times. It’s just a beautiful thing.”
Speaking near the beginning of The Tenth Inning‘s second half, premiering on PBS 29 September, Early describes his love for baseball is deeply personal, based on his childhood experiences and particular plays etched into memory, a concept illustrated as he speaks by still photos of bodies in mid-air, strained and contorted, and for that instant of a play, perfect. For Early, who so appreciates such individual acts of grace, the “ugliness” is around the game, as opposed to inherent in it. It’s a view that helps him to love the game still, even knowing about the Steroid Era, recurrent labor disputes, costly stadiums, underpaid facility crews, and exploitative farm systems.
Early’s dilemma is at the center of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s four-hour follow-up to 1994’s Baseball. And it remains unresolved, in part because baseball is, as Keith Olbermann noted at the start of the first part of The Tenth Inning, a game immersed in its own history. This makes for at least two sorts of fans, those who remember and can rhapsodize over plays, like Early, and those who know stats. The documentary makes use of fans who are also players, reporters, and historians, an assembly of men—and Selena Roberts and Doris Kearns Goodwin (note to Burns: girls like baseball too)—who set about here pondering their devotion to a sport that has disappointed them repeatedly.
Recent disappointments loom large in The Tenth Inning, which means to look at what’s happened in baseball since Baseball. By turns treacly and rapturous, pedestrian and insightful, the documentary submits that, as Howard Bryant observes, “Most people have found a way to make their peace with the sport they love.” Still, the history rankles. And here, too much of it is noted only briefly.
Read the Full Essay @ Popmatters
By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
“There’s something that happens on the field that’s like poetry, like ballet,” says Gerald Early. “The remarkable thing about the game,” he goes on, “is how beautiful it is, despite all the ugliness that might be around it at times. It’s just a beautiful thing.”
Speaking near the beginning of The Tenth Inning‘s second half, premiering on PBS 29 September, Early describes his love for baseball is deeply personal, based on his childhood experiences and particular plays etched into memory, a concept illustrated as he speaks by still photos of bodies in mid-air, strained and contorted, and for that instant of a play, perfect. For Early, who so appreciates such individual acts of grace, the “ugliness” is around the game, as opposed to inherent in it. It’s a view that helps him to love the game still, even knowing about the Steroid Era, recurrent labor disputes, costly stadiums, underpaid facility crews, and exploitative farm systems.
Early’s dilemma is at the center of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s four-hour follow-up to 1994’s Baseball. And it remains unresolved, in part because baseball is, as Keith Olbermann noted at the start of the first part of The Tenth Inning, a game immersed in its own history. This makes for at least two sorts of fans, those who remember and can rhapsodize over plays, like Early, and those who know stats. The documentary makes use of fans who are also players, reporters, and historians, an assembly of men—and Selena Roberts and Doris Kearns Goodwin (note to Burns: girls like baseball too)—who set about here pondering their devotion to a sport that has disappointed them repeatedly.
Recent disappointments loom large in The Tenth Inning, which means to look at what’s happened in baseball since Baseball. By turns treacly and rapturous, pedestrian and insightful, the documentary submits that, as Howard Bryant observes, “Most people have found a way to make their peace with the sport they love.” Still, the history rankles. And here, too much of it is noted only briefly.
Read the Full Essay @ Popmatters
***
Cynthia Fuchs is director of Film & Media Studies and Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, Sport & American Culture, and Film & Video Studies, at George Mason University.
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