“The Way You Enter a Church”: The Dialectics of Ken Burns’s Baseball

Early in “The First Inning” of Ken Burns and Novick’s Baseball (1994), Sports Illustrated’s Robert Creamer puts an obstacle in the path of anyone trying to read too much into the history of the game. “It’s fun,” he says, with an infectious smile:

That’s what it is, it’s fun . . . You can watch it and just love it and enjoy it. I don’t think that there’s anything tremendously philosophical about it. I don’t think there’s anything metaphysical. I just think it’s so much fun to watch.

Burns’ documentary, which spans nine episodes—or “innings,” 150 years of history, and over 18 hours of screen time is arguably one of the most influential sports documentaries ever made. At the time of its first airing, PBS (2010) claimed that its 45 million viewers made it the most-watched series in the network’s history, and it has spawned two sequels, The Tenth Inning (2010) and Jackie Robinson (2016). However, against Creamer’s insistence that baseball itself is “fun,” much of the scholarly and popular criticism leveled at Burns’ documentary about the game emphasized how decidedly void of fun Baseball is

Although some of the scholarly reviews of the documentary felt that Baseball was “documentary filmmaking and social history at its best” (Dabscheck, 2001), many of the other critical responses were less celebratory. “Romantic tedium” is the way rhetorical theorist and communications scholar Michael Butterworth (2010) dismisses Baseball, and he sees it as a capstone of a run of films like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams whose rhetorical aim is to link baseball to discourses of American exceptionalism and purity. “If these fictionalized accounts were insufficient fuel for the baseball nostalgia movement,” Butterworth claims referring to the run of 1980s and 1990s films, “then Baseball, the nine ‘inning’ documentary by Ken Burns, initiated a full-fledged flood of baseball memory.” Historian Jules Tygiel (2001) likewise condemns Baseball’s “blatant excess, rhetorical overkill, and obvious self-indulgence” and manages to link Burn’s “excessive idealization of the game” to the fact that the director was a baby boomer and a “veteran of the antiwar movement.”

The popular press response to Burns’ baseball films tends to echo the scholarly critique. On the whole, reaction—especially to the original series—was mixed. While many reviewers celebrated Burns and his Florentine Films team’s style and ambition, others lamented the length, monotony, and repetition of the 18½ hour broadcast. Typical of these critical responses is Ken Tucker’s (1994) review in Entertainment Weekly:

Baseball is rigorously, excruciatingly chronological, beginning with Garrison Keillor reading Walt Whitman on the subject (“The game is glorious”) and then slogging relentlessly through 150 years of baseball history. Former NBC newsman John Chancellor provides narration in a voice so warm and lulling that it took me three days to get through the endless episode on the 1919 Black Sox scandal without curling into a ball to nap.

While he does concede that “many times, Burns earns his bold dullness by offering remarkable profiles of great players,” Tucker proceeds to chide Burns and his team for having the temerity to claim events in baseball stand shoulder to shoulder with other important historical landmarks. “Every episode,” he claims, “commences with a ludicrously sententious list of what was going on in the world besides baseball (‘Between 1940 and 1950, penicillin was introduced and the atom was split’).”

The 2010 release of The Tenth Inning likewise saw its fair share of negative press. Made to update the history of the game and to acknowledge the impact of the 1994–1995 players’ strike, the influence of steroids, and the cathartic 2004 World Series triumph of the Boston Red Sox, The Tenth Inning came under fire precisely for missing what Creamer saw as the fun of the game. Tom Shales (2010) of The Washington Post delivered a fairly typical assessment: “Burns does at times risk lionizing the sport to death, making it out to be so terribly significant and rich with meaning that he threatens to stomp all the fun out of it.”

Perhaps most damning in the contemporary popular reviews was the overall impression that there was something reactionary to Baseball, that the documentary was over-steeped in nostalgia, and—like the game itself—was mired in conservatism. “Baseball is a slow game,” claims The New Yorker’s James Wolcott (1994), “but not as slow as Ken Burns’ Baseball, which is paced like a religious procession—or a ghost march.” But Wolcott also takes time to note one of the consistent criticisms of Baseball: the general absence of people of color and women as experts and commentators in the series. Of this “nearly all-male chorus of talking heads,” he says, “[t]he entire series sags under this mopey air of male menopause.”

The issue of Baseball’s lack of diversity is worth addressing, for although the questions surrounding baseball’s historical color line and the ongoing racism of the game are frequently and consistently covered, and despite the fact that people of color do appear in the documentary’s voice-over commentary, until the segment on the Negro Leagues in “The Fourth Inning,” only two people of color appear on camera with any regularity, historian Gerald Early and former Negro-Leaguer, Buck O’Neil. For women, the absence is even more stark with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin often serving as the only woman’s voice. That said, it is equally undeniable that two of the breakout “stars” of the original Baseball broadcasts were O’Neil and Goodwin. O’Neil especially benefited from his appearance, elevated on the basis of his charm, warmth, and graciousness to the status of unofficial “ambassador” of the game, a role solidified in the statue commemorating O’Neil and his contributions that greets visitors as they enter the Hall of Fame itself (Sandomir, 2008). Moreover, while it is absolutely the case that women are marginalized in the documentary, the questions of race and labor relations get exhaustively vetted in the original 1994 broadcast (coalescing in the story of Curt Flood’s challenge to the reserve clause) and further complicated in the two follow-up documentaries. In The Tenth Inning, African American actor Keith David takes over the narrator duties from John Chancellor, who died in 1996, and both the on-screen commentators and stories covered are more diverse than in the 1994 series. Finally, the issue of race is front and center in Burns and Lynn Novick’s complicated take on the legacy of Jackie Robinson in the 2016 documentary of the same name, but so too are questions of gender. Burns and Novick commendably refuse to allow the integration of baseball to represent anything like closure to the issue of race in baseball. Instead Jackie Robinson shifts the emphasis to the relationship between Robinson and his wife, Rachel, and contemplates the complicated role women play in the lives of public figures. “It’s a sign of his character,” Michelle Obama says in the documentary, in words that could apply to her own marriage to the former President, “that he chose a woman who was his equal. I don’t think you would’ve had Jackie Robinson without Rachel” (Burns et al., 2016).

All of this is to say that the general critical consensus regarding Baseball is that the documentaries formally reproduce their subject: like the game, Baseball is overlong and at times boring, but punctuated by moments of riveting drama. It is the province of wealthy, white men, but at certain moments, workers, women, and people of color are recognized, and a few are elevated to special status. I draw attention to the popular critical response and the fact that Baseball formally echoes the subject it strives to portray, because while it is appealing to simply consign baseball to the realm of “fun,” it is clear from the standpoint of both its form and its content that Baseball sees its subject as having world-historical significance. Accepting Creamer’s objection to the philosophical/metaphysical aspect of the game is disingenuous when one considers the overall formal shape of Baseball and the documentary techniques that have come to be associated with Burns and Florentine Films. Hence, I believe that what has been missing from the critical response to Baseball, which overwhelmingly tends to focus on the documentaries as “nostalgic,” is the complicated fashion in which the documentary reproduces what I will call its dialectical aesthetic where history is fundamentally paradoxical but also fundamentally forward-looking, and it is through a contemplation of the game’s paradoxes and contradictions that Baseball reveals its understanding of history not as an excuse for nostalgia but as an exhortation to idealism and faith in the “spirit” of the game.

Not many baseball fans know the name of Arthur Alexander Irwin. Irwin, who was born in Canada, was a shortstop, coach, and scout in the wild, early days of Major League baseball, when team names, team locations, and even the rules were still very much in flux. Although he ended his playing career in 1894 with the Philadelphia Phillies and managed for the Phillies, Washington Senators, and New York Giants, he also was associated with such teams as the Worcester Red Legs, the Providence Grays, and the Philadelphia Quakers, all of which played—and folded—in the 1880s and 1890s (Irwin, n.d.).

Irwin had a remarkable baseball career. He is widely credited with introducing the fielder’s glove to the game in 1883 after he sewed the ring and middle fingers of a buckskin horse driver’s glove together to protect his own two broken fingers and accommodate the bulky bandages (Jenemann, 2018). The glove caught on, and within a year Irwin, with an entrepreneurial zeal that would characterize much of his life, started marketing them under his own trademark. He also had a knack for finding himself in proximity to baseball’s miracles. Irwin was a teammate of Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourne during his astonishing 59-win season of 1884. He was also on the field for the first recorded perfect game, scoring the only run in a 1–0 contest. Never a great hitter, Irwin was nevertheless an excellent fielder and a crafty baserunner, and he earned the nickname “Foxy.”

In July of 1921, Foxy Irwin boarded a steamer from New York to Boston. When the ship arrived, Irwin was not on it. All that remained was a rumpled suit of clothes. His body was never found. In the subsequent investigation into Irwin’s disappearance, a curious fact emerged. For more than 30 years, he had been maintaining two separate households with two different wives, children, and grandchildren, whose existences Irwin had kept secret from each other until his presumed death. Not surprisingly, his obituaries—and the months of sensational press that followed his mysterious end—uniformly neglect to mention his contributions to the game in favor of emphasizing his misdeeds.

Arthur “Foxy” Irwin does not feature into Ken Burns and Novick’s (1994) documentary Baseball or its 2010 sequel The Tenth Inning, but he probably should—not just because he had one of the most fascinating lives in the history of the game, but because he also symbolizes the paradoxical spirit that characterizes Baseball’s take on the “National Pastime”: an average player who nevertheless manages to be party to greatness, an entrepreneur and innovator who changes the course of the game so much that the game outpaces him, a baseball lifer who earns the respect of his peers, and a scoundrel, whose iniquities ultimately overshadow his accomplishments. Foxy Irwin embodies the conflicts at the heart of Baseball and stands, in microcosm, for the way Burns’ documentaries approach the game.

As a documentary, Baseball takes an ambivalent attitude toward the game: a desire to see baseball as better, more virtuous, more perfect, while acknowledging that its “fallen-ness” is what constitutes its historical interest. This approach is evident throughout the “First Inning” in the way that Burns and his fellow scriptwriter Geoffrey C. Ward introduce their competing cast of characters. “The game’s greatest figures,” Chancellor reminds the viewer, “have come from everywhere—coal mines and college campuses, city slums and country crossroads.” Baseball introduces us to the heroes and villains of the game’s history as though they were its dramatis personae. First, longtime New York Giants manager, pugnacious John McGraw gets paired with “the Christian Gentleman,” Christy Mathewson. Tragically fallen Joe Jackson of the infamous “Black Sox” scandal is contrasted with the stern, patriarchal commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The list proceeds through descriptions of Mickey Mantle and Branch Rickey and then, as if the fact that this narrative is a morality play was not already obvious, the introductions continue by juxtaposing the most reviled and respected players in the game’s history, the angry, racist, Ty Cobb and the saintly civil rights icon Jackie Robinson:

Two of baseball’s best began life in rural Georgia. A swift, savage competitor who may have been the greatest player of all-time, but whose uncontrollable rage in the end made him more enemies than friends. And another no-less-fierce competitor who, because he managed to control his temper, made baseball a truly national pastime more than a century after it was born.

Finally, inevitably, there is the figure who embodies all of these tensions and hence comes to represent the spirit of the game—Babe Ruth:

And then there was the Baltimore saloonkeeper’s turbulent son who became the best-known, and the best-loved athlete in American history.

Much of “The First Inning” can be read as framing the dialectical relationship between the forces competing for the “soul” of the game. As Chancellor explains in the film’s opening moments, at baseball’s heart,

lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time . . .

It is an American game, Baseball insists, that essentially mirrors the history of America itself. As such, the introductory narration continues, “It reflects a host of age-old American tensions.”

In his review of “The Tenth Inning,” Frank Ardolino (2011) astutely notes that this dialectical approach in which the game’s heroes and villains alternate throughout the narrative is an integral strategy of the documentaries. The moments of nobility, virtue, and excellence alternate with instances of venality, greed, and self-promotion. “Burns establishes,” Ardolino writes,

a dramatic pattern to his presentation by invariably following a positive aspect of the game, exemplified, for example, by Cal Ripken’s consecutive games record. Ripken’s record is cited as the means of restoring fan support after the hateful 1994 strike, with a return to the Bonds mythos of supreme talent and Faustian ambition.

Indeed, one marker of how influential Burns’s signature trope has become is how ubiquitous this dynamic tug-of-war between scandal and saintliness is in contemporary coverage of the game. In the wake of the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal that brought down three different managers, ESPN (O’Connor, 2020) chose to spin the election of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter to the Hall of Fame as somehow being the antidote to baseball’s contemporary woes, despite Jeter having retired five years prior. The story’s title, “Why baseball needs Derek Jeter today as much as ever,” is almost Burnsian in its evocation of a modern-day folk hero who will save the game from itself.

Counter to Creamer’s emphasis on the “fun” of baseball and the absence of metaphysical preoccupations, we can understand the series of contradictions Baseball presents in terms of both Hegel’s philosophy of the historical dialectic and of the Kierkegaardian understanding of the dialectic of faith. In both cases, evil deeds, persons, and events are necessary for the movement of world Spirit toward its ideal. From this perspective, as Hegel (1980) writes in the Philosophy of History, “Ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil.” Importantly for Hegel, history is teleological. Hence, the dialectic of good and evil is the motive force of a history that presupposes an end but not a beginning. “On one hand,” Hegel continues, “the ultimate design of the World must be perceived; and, on the other hand, the fact that this design has been actually realized in it, and that evil has not been able permanently to assert a competing position.” For Hegel, history works itself toward its teleological end through the actions of subjects—“World-Historical Individuals”—and their confrontation with the material contingencies of their historical moment. “This principle is an essential phase in the development of the creating Idea, of Truth striving and urging towards (consciousness of) itself. Historical men—World-Historical Individuals—are those in whose aims such a general principle lies.”

For his part, Kierkegaard’s thinking subject requires the dialectic to countenance the positive and negative aspects of being and the relationship of the finite to the eternal. In the absence of an origin story that would orient the subject and outline its proper role, the Kierkegaardian subject is left with a debate between its debased historical character and its place in the infinite movement of history. As Sylvia Walsh (2005) claims in her study of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, “this positive-negative dialectic is conceived even more broadly as informing the very structure of human existence.” For Kierkegaard, Walsh claims, this form of dialectic constitutes the existence of the thinking subject. Indeed, it is the essence of human thought and action. “Existential dialectic comes to expression,” she explains, “both in terms of the qualitative contradiction between one’s present condition and one’s ethical or ethical-religious telos, and in terms of potential qualities, capacities, or conditions that may be realized in human existence.”

For Kierkegaard, as with Hegel, history is a process of striving toward what the subject always already was, but which material realities complicate. “If I were to describe Christian perfection,” Kierkegaard famously writes in an 1851 journal entry, “I should not say that it is a perfection of striving but specifically that it is the deep recognition of the imperfection of one’s striving” (Söderquist, 2016). It is essential to note that for Kierkegaard, the dialectic between freedom and necessity happens within and against the backdrop of history. That is to say, it is conditioned and transformed by real historical events. One of Kierkegaard’s most noteworthy interlocutors, Theodor Adorno (1989), claims that Kierkegaard’s dialectic is moving toward a metaphysical absolute dependent on the notion of our worldly fallen-ness. This would seem to present a paradox. However, Adorno writes, “Kierkegaard is a philosopher of becoming,” and this “becoming” necessarily takes place against the backdrop of human history. “In Kierkegaard’s doctrine of hereditary sin,” Adorno explains, “history is nothing else than the formal schema according to which the intrasubjective dialectic is to reverse into the dialectic of the absolute.” This ontological movement from original sin toward perfection—Kierkegaard’s “striving”—happens within the context of material history. Hence, the subject’s dialectical development is simultaneously intra- and extra-historical. “On the other hand,” Adorno explains, “real history prevails in his philosophy. Even the objectless ‘I’ and its immanent history are bound to historical objectivity.”

This detour into the philosophical dialectic ultimately highlights three interrelated aspects of Baseball’s take on the game and Burns’s dialectical approach to documenting that history: (a) For Baseball, here is no definitive historical origin of the game, only a series of contradictions and competing stories. (b) In the absence of an origin, baseball’s history is teleological, moving toward the game’s perfection. (c) As a historical phenomenon, baseball’s history is a series of ritual performances enacted by everyday fans, players, and managers, and disruptions produced by “baseball-historic-individuals.” As we shall see, these aspects constitute Baseball’s dialectical aesthetic and offer the opportunity for the viewer to assess Burns’s formal strategies as a documentarian and his vision of baseball as part of a national narrative.

If one of the predominant critiques of Baseball—and Ken Burns’ films in general—is that the documentaries trade excessively in nostalgia, then the repeated return to the dialectic of the game obviates any easy dismissal of Burns’ version of the national pastime as simply and unequivocally nostalgic. Indeed, immediately after the opening title card, “First Inning: Our Game” Burns and his team complicate any convenient myth of origin for baseball. In a recreated sequence set in the failing light of a misty, pastoral setting, men in silhouette wearing 19th-century garb play a game similar to—but not quite exactly the same as—baseball. The audience is told via a subtitle that this is “Cooperstown.” On the soundtrack, crickets chirp, birds whistle, and the narrator tells us that “one summer day in 1839,” in the midst of a game of this rule-less, chaotic Town-Ball, a local Academy boy named Abner Doubleday—who would go on to become a general and a hero of the battle of Gettysburg—sat down and drew up rules for the game of “Base Ball” in their entirety. This is the story of the game’s origin myth many Americans still hold and cherish.

“Or so the legend has it . . .” Immediately, Baseball tells us the myth has no foundation. Doubleday likely had nothing to do with the invention or development of the game—and may well have never played. Instead of the pastoral pastime springing fully formed from the American soil in agrarian Cooperstown—home not only to the National Baseball Hall of Fame but also to the Farmer’s Museum—baseball evolved over decades from Town-Ball, Danish Rounders, Base, and even Cricket. Moreover, the game first appeared in its own right in urban settings and not the country, played recognizably for the first time at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. And instead of being the sole brainchild of the American Civil War hero Doubleday, its rules were first codified by an Englishman, Henry Chadwick, and have undergone a constant series of revisions over the following century and a half. In the end, Baseball acknowledges, many of the historical notions regarding the origin of “our game” are fallacies.

Hence, contrary to the arguments of Baseball’s critics, it is not strictly true that the documentary is nostalgic except insofar as it is nostalgic for an imagined future. Baseball displaces the desire for an ur-text onto a desire for an ideal game. This leads to the second attribute linking Burns’ documentary to the philosophical dialectic: In the absence of origin, Baseball sees the historical development of the game as teleological. In the place of a heroic moment of invention, Baseball instead shifts its narrative emphasis to creating an ideal of virtue and promoting the “perfection” of the game, a perfection always threatened by the material conditions of the game itself. “Baseball was mighty glamorous and exciting to me,” famed Philadelphia A’s manager Connie Mack is quoted as saying in “The Second Inning,”

but there’s no use in blinking at the fact that at that time the game was thought by solid, respectable people to be only one degree above grand larceny, arson, and mayhem, and those who engaged in it were beneath the notice of decent society.

Mack’s statement is indicative of the ongoing tension of Baseball. Throughout the run of its 10 innings, the documentary assumes an attitude toward notions of virtue and vice that is decidedly ideological: Religious fidelity and adherence to tradition are inherently admirable. The nuclear family is the central unit of civil society. Use and abuse of alcohol and drugs constitutes a failure of character and so on. At the same time, this belief in virtue as transcendent is problematized by the history of the game in which men of questionable, often irredeemable character are frequently the most successful players and managers on the field. That the positive attributes of the game—its sportsmanship, symmetry, nobility—are known through and opposed to its negative elements—its cheating, squalor, and “ungentlemanliness”—is at heart an existential problematic for baseball. Baseball is beautiful, the documentary argues, not because it is inherently perfect, but because it embodies a movement toward perfection as fought historically between its opposing poles. “Once more, abandon the bat, boys, if you cannot keep the game pure,” Henry Chadwick, admonishes in the “Second Inning.” This movement amplifies the contradiction between the game’s reliance on history and tradition and its freedom to evolve. As such, the questions Baseball rhetorically asks about the authenticity of the game can be understood within the context of the philosophical dialectic in which “striving” toward perfection (Kierkegaard) or self-consciousness (Hegel) is the role of contingent individuals within the unfolding history of the game. “The self is composed of infinity and finiteness,” Kierkegaard et al. (2013) claims in The Sickness Unto Death:

But the synthesis is a relationship, and it is a relationship which, though it is derived, relates itself to itself, which means freedom. The self is freedom. But freedom is the dialectical element in the terms of possibility and necessity.

Hence, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s poetic assessment of the game in Baseball’s “First Inning” is essentially Kierkegaardian in the way it orients the viewer to the problematic of perfectibility and spins it as the game’s fundamental pull:

There’s so much about the game that appeals to the intellectual and to the psyche; the symmetry of it, the orderliness of it, the justice of it . . . the fact that it throws off other controls. It’s greater than time strictures. In the other sports you have time—you have to play against the clock, and when the clock runs out your chance is over. No clock in baseball. You play until you lose, and if you can keep that rally alive, if you can keep going, if you can keep getting hits you can play until a week from now. Nothing stops you. There is no parameter that makes it impossible for you to perform still more excellently.

Here, Cuomo effectively reframes the allure of baseball in terms of the dialectic of the striving subject attempting to perform “still more excellently” within the infinite unfolding of history (“No clock . . .” “Greater than time strictures . . .”).

This emphasis on the striving toward perfection of the game’s history casts a light on a third aspect of Burns’ take on the game: Baseball’s history is a series of ritual performances enacted by its “faithful”—everyday fans, players, and managers—yet the game is transformed by disruptions produced by “baseball-historic-individuals.” With its predictable seasons, its cyclical return to age-old rivalries, and its persistent challenges surrounding race, labor, and cheating, baseball is a highly ritualized game with a likewise ritualized set of performances, practices, and superstitions. “You should enter a ballpark the way you enter a church,” claims former Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee in the “Eighth Inning,” and indeed from its universal gestures like players not stepping on the foul line as they make their way on and off the field to the individual genuflections embodied by each batter’s pre-swing routines, one could argue that there is no professional sport more deeply invested in superstition and ritual performance divorced from the play of the game itself. Washington Post journalist Thomas Boswell extends the element of ritual practice to the entirety of the game in the “Second Inning.” In its insistence on repetition, Baseball permits us a reflective respite from the chaotic disorder of everyday life:

My mother always said that she loved to go to church but not to hear the preacher. She could read her bible at home, but she could only be in church in church. And baseball has some of that same sense of peace that has nothing to do with ideology but simply with ritual, familiarity, small truths—sort of lessons of the day that were familiar before but may get a little more light on them that day.

In the face of ritual, repetition, and superstition, which would otherwise render the game static, Baseball proposes that the game develops historically as a consequence of the actions of certain heroic individuals who move game toward realizing its ideal. The majority of these figures, not surprisingly, are players who transform and disrupt our understanding of the parameters of the game: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jackie Robinson. But Baseball also highlights the actions of figures whose contributions outside the lines transform baseball’s history like rules innovator Henry Chadwick, executive Branch Rickey, or labor attorney Marvin Miller. Inevitably—and at the same time significantly—we are introduced to these figures as part of the documentaries’ own rituals: elliptical title cards, slow pans over still photographs, and a set of stock phrases that cue the viewer to the significance of the chosen subjects: “He was born . . .” “He would become . . .” Collectively, these figures from baseball’s past function like Hegel’s World-Historic Individuals, emerging from the material background noise of history and realizing something like the spirit of baseball through their actions.

To assess Baseball as a sports documentary, one must understand that its formal construction is inextricable from its belief that “baseball” exists simultaneously as an ideal and as real, material, history. These two things would seemingly be at odds with one another, and yet Baseball’s insistence on the dialectic allows the contingent and the universal to exist simultaneously—and, significantly, gestures toward the larger aim of Baseball, which is to argue that the game stands as a metaphor for the ongoing narrative of American democracy. “Nothing in our daily life,” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (PBS, 2003) opine in their description of the film,

offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time’s constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

As communications scholar Gary Edgerton (1997) claims, Ken Burns’ films exhort the viewer to see themselves as witness to “morality tales, drawing upon epic events, landmarks, and institutions of historical significance, populated by heroes and villains who allegorically personify certain virtues and vices in the national character as understood through the popular mythology of our cultural memory.”

Burns’ signature ability as a documentarian is to take vast amounts of historical raw material and to use individual archival details not only to distill a narrative but also to render history, to use a term from the psychologist Jerome Bruner (1991), “hermeneutically composable.” Narratives, Bruner claims,

do not exist, as it were, in some real world, waiting there patiently and eternally to be veridically mirrored in a text. The act of constructing a narrative [. . .] is considerably more than selecting events either from real life, from memory, or from fantasy and then placing them in an appropriate order.

Professional sports are inherently narrative affairs since at heart they are staged conflicts. Teams are assembled casts of characters with strengths and weaknesses, back stories, and moments of dramatic crisis. In the most memorable sporting events, these elements coalesce on the field or in the arena, and we get to be there to watch them. After the fact, we tell stories to one another about their significance—and believe in the fundamental force of the narrative as a constructed reality. The term “sports documentary” is therefore always potentially redundant, as a documentary about sporting events narratively reconstructs events that already come heavily freighted with narrative discourse. But documentary’s strength lies in its ability to do that “something more” Bruner claims is the province of narrative and what Jacques Rancière (2013, 2019) calls “the aestheticization of daily life” the radical gesture of conflating the commonplace and inconsequential with the elevated stakes of aesthetics and politics. As documentary theorist Michael Renov reminds us, documentary engenders,

the ability to evoke emotional response or induce pleasure in the spectator by formal means, to generate lyric power through shadings of sound and image in a manner exclusive of verbalization, or to engage with the musical or poetic qualities of language itself must not be seen as mere distractions from the main event.

Instead of criticizing a documentary for the way it aestheticizes life, Renov insists, we should instead celebrate documentary’s aestheticization of historical events as part of the way the medium can communicate to us something about how we live in the world. “In the end, the aesthetic function can never be wholly divorced from the didactic one insofar as the aim remains ‘pleasurable learning’” (Renov, 1993, p. 35).

In a documentary like Baseball whose subject, its producers insist, reveals “the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family” it is clear that the “pleasurable learning” of Baseball involves coupling the “fun” of the game with building the “more perfect union” of the American Democratic experiment. Daniel Nathan (2014), in an essay that covers some of the same ground as I am doing here, but with a more complicated agenda of thinking through the rhetorical pull of an ideology of a “national pastime,” likewise uses Bruner to argue that the discursive linkage between the game of baseball and America “is a cultural fiction, in this instance [. . .] a compelling, well-wrought, oft-repeated and widely accepted narrative that does real work in the world.”

In the narrower context of the documentary, Baseball uses its formal aesthetics of the dialectic to engage in the aestheticization of the everyday. It juxtaposes a child’s game with the overall movement of world history, and in so doing, it teaches its audience about the nature of participation in civil society. Baseball is not subtle in making these claims on our civic sense. Throughout its running time, there is a near constant evocation of baseball as America’s game, the national pastime, a symbol of democracy, and so on. In just the “First Inning,” we see repeated exhortations to the link between the game and the national character. From the triumphant playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” over the title card and the documentary’s reliance on Walt Whitman’s claim (Traubel, 1906) that “It’s our game—the American game . . . a blessing to us . . .” to the contemporary pronouncements of commentators like Charley McDowell who judges that “baseball has nearly all the qualities and the narrative that the country has . . . and it’ll do for a figure for the American system.” And as though to drive home the point that baseball, despite its racist past, embodies the ethos of a diverse American future, the African American scholar Gerald Early insists, “There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball.”

Ken Tucker is absolutely right to claim that Baseball is pretentious when it sets events in the game’s history up against the discovery of the polio vaccine. And yet, Baseball argues that the game is a place for its fans—and detractors—to work through questions fundamental to civil society—the relationship between self and other, ideals of virtue and the realities of self-preservation, questions of class and commerce, the role of history and tradition in contemporary public life, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative knowledge. The fact that these discussions are focused on the game of baseball where they essentially “mean” nothing does not change the fact that this type of discourse is essential civil society—but it also does not undermine one’s pleasure in the game. The narrative tension in Baseball involves dialectically working out these issues and derives from a series of battles for the soul of the game between its righteous “Christian Gentlemen” like Mathewson and Mack and its riotous sinners like Cobb and Barry Bonds. Furthermore, the documentary emphasizes thematic contrasts that come to define its history: between black and white baseball, between labor and management, and between tacit acceptance of cheating and an absolute adherence to the rules. This rhetoric evolves formally through the analysis by the commentators, the voices from the past used to signpost different events and draw attention to disputes, and—especially—the use of photographic evidence and the way the camera lingers on those photographs—the so-called “Ken Burns-effect”—Baseball’s most noteworthy formal technique (Tibbetts, 1996).

Burns use of still photographs and the movement of the camera from individual details to the entirety of the image is so stylistically distinctive as to have been parodied on Saturday Night Live and have its own function on the editing software, Final Cut Pro. Nevertheless, the technique is significant in the context of the overall aesthetic of Baseball for the way it reproduces its own form of the dialectic: The smallest part is always in dialogue with the whole. Consider just one example from the “Fourth Inning”: an astonishing group photo from the era of the Negro Leagues. Not only does the picture show Kansas City Monarch ballplayers, but also beauty contestants in bathing suits who competed during the game, men in suits, women in conservative dresses, crowd members in straw hats, and a lone police officer, all of whom are standing on the field in front of a full grandstand. However, instead of giving us the picture in its entirety, Burns and his cinematographers consume each face one-by-one, more than 40 in all, building, as the camera pans, an image of black American cultural life in the early 20th century as a collection of individuals, occupations, and identities, an entire society operating in parallel with the white baseball world whose dominant narrative is that of the National Pastime. In the individual detail, however, Baseball reveals a multiplicity of stories that cannot simply be subsumed under a convenient heading.

What then are we to make of the meaning of Baseball? Let us not forget that baseball is a game, an entertainment, a pastime—fun. It functions in the arena of leisure, and even insofar as leisure has an ideological role in maintaining society’s status quo, baseball itself is generally at a remove from realpolitik. “I think about the cosmic snowball theory,” pitcher Bill Lee famously once told a reporter:

A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The Earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won’t matter if I get this guy out.” (Baseball Almanac, 2019)

To be sure, at certain times in the game’s history it could be argued that baseball figures have achieved world-historical status (Babe Ruth in the 1920s, for example), but the outcomes of a contest—even a World Series game—have no world-historical significance. But in the messiness of the game’s history, the way that Baseball continually returns to an insoluble dialectic in its pursuit of a more perfect game, the documentary does make the case that baseball’s “fun” is inextricable from the broader historical currents of which it is a part.

In keeping with the dialectical spirit that enlivens the series when Burns and his team revisit Baseball for The Tenth Inning, they effectively conclude not with a resolution—but with a paradox. Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell, who had featured as a commentator in the 1994 series, returns in 2010 to opine about baseball’s steroid scandal, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and the rest of the player’s caught up in the “juiced” early years of the 21st century. In the face of the difficult fact that the best players of the game are also its worst citizens, the appropriate response to baseball, Boswell claims, is to embrace the ambivalence the game engenders:

The moralist wants to decide what’s right and wrong; . . . John Keats wrote in a letter . . . [that] the feature that distinguished Shakespeare the most and made him the greatest of all writers, was what Keats called “negative capability,” which he described as the ability to remain in tension, undecided, between opposing poles. And he said that Shakespeare had that negative capability—the ability to see everything and not jump to one side of the question—to a greater degree than any other artist. Now we live in a sports age and a baseball age, where nothing is more valuable than negative capability. Because if we are just in a rush, if we can’t wait to see Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds or whoever it is, as right or wrong, then we are missing the complexity of these people and the difficulty of the age that they are living in.

Boswell need not have had to evoke Shakespeare; however, he could have turned closer to home to valorize the ability to maintain ambivalence in the face of the contradictions at the heart of America’s National pastime. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in his essay “The Crack-Up,”

is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

I believe it is this hopefulness that redeems Baseball. At its heart Baseball is the morality tale Edgerton describes using the narrative techniques Renov and Bruner celebrate and embracing many of the contradictions of American civil society. It deploys a dialectical aesthetic which permits viewers to think about not only virtue and vice, and the relationship of the whole to its parts, but also their role in the relationship between narrative and reality. Baseball is ideological, but it embraces an ideology of hopefulness. At the end of the day, the game is inconsequential, and yet, in its aspiration to historical significance, it reveals a fundamental truth about the American story: the collective action of inconsequential actors in the service of the myth of significance does, in the end, transform history and give citizens hope for the future. Baseball needs figures like Arthur Irwin, Babe Ruth, and Bill Lee, figures who embody the myriad contradictions of the game’s dialectic in a narrative of teleological becoming. The myth of Baseball is important because it promotes adherence to an illusion of progress, excellence, and the notion that one participates, as a player or a fan, in the life of those myths. “You have the illusion,” John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian claims in the “First Inning.” “Baseball fosters illusions. Baseball fosters hopes. Baseball inflates us. Baseball lies to us seductively. And we know we’re being seduced and we don’t complain.” One could easily replace Thorn’s “baseball” with such equally freighted terms as “religion” or “democracy” or “home.” Yes, the seduction is ideological—but as an embodiment of ideals, we could do worse.