My Love for Ken Burns

I'm watching the second half of the Ken Burns documentary Baseball: The Tenth Inning. I must say, having James Earl Jones narrating this is absolutely perfect. There is really nothing I would like to add to this presentation. Ken Burns knows so much about history and everything about filmmaking. I might go buy a ton of his documentaries just so I can watch all of them and learn all of the things that I missed and didn't catch through all of my years of education. I could learn about Jazz, the Brooklyn Bridge, The War, Baseball, the Civil War, Congress, Huey Long, The Shakers, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, the National Parks (Americas Best Idea) and all of the other things that I would like to waste time in front of my TV learning about. His next documentaries are on Prohibition, the Roosevelts, The Central Park fire, and the Dust Bowol which I can't wait to watch/learn about.

As I watch this, I find a couple of things funny. The first voice I hear is Michael Felger's and its when he was on WEEI. The next thing I see is the one face that every person in Boston around 1999 would recognize: Pedro Martinez. A tiny man, who scouts claimed would be too small to pitch in the big leagues, is pitching the best season that a pitcher has ever pitched. You can check on that, but I already know it. His 1999 season is considered the best season of a pitchers by any standard. His 2000 season is probably up there too. It segways into Roger Clemens, Ichiro, Barry Bonds, 9/11 and its effect on the game, and now its on to the World Series in which the Diamondbacks won over the Yankees. This would be the World Series that afterward, Buster Olney would write his book "The Last Night of the Yankee dynasty". I only remember Schilling and Johnson winning a co-MVP award during this series.

This is an interesting point in the film. Bill Costas says the phrase "The ball may be juiced and the players may be juiced" and as that happens the Tigers reliever Todd Jones throws a ball over the head of the catcher as if Todd Jones heard him. It's not hard to see that someone called out players for juicing. Chris Rock once said to Ken Burns himself, "If you could take a pill that made you get paid like Steven Speilberg, you'd take that pill." He's right, and the people that wouldn't take that pill to make more money aren't thinking of their family, but thinking of the 'integrity' of the game. The game of baseball isn't the most honest game by any means. The game of baseball will live on past a players years. A player only lives so long that he has to make every effort to get recognized, get that contract, get his 10 year tenure so he can retire with a baseball players pension, and maybe make a hitting instruction video or hold a camp for up and coming kids.

I'm not exactly defending players taking steroids, but I understand why they did it. Money. If you can get any advantage in doing something that everybody can get access to, then there is no reason why you wouldn't do it. I'm sure someone said that if you're not juicing, you're not competing.

There has to be something said about people like this. Ken Burns works for PBS and has been for 25 years, making some of the best documentaries that can be seen. Why hasn't he been glorified more? Maybe its the fact he's on somewhere between This Old House and Sesame Street. I just think that people don't give him enough credit for putting American History into perspective and also for putting it on film. I'm sure by the time he is done working he will have cataloged every major era or story in our history. God Bless Ken Burns.