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Ken Burns' latest documentary includes a few whiffs: Bill Livingston

Ken Burns' PBS documentary "The 10th Inning" skims over the Indians' rise and virtually ignores the subsequent fall of small- and middle-market teams due to the absence of a salary cap. The film also omits apathy as the game's biggest problem.

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Ken Burns waves to the crowd at Fenway Park last month. His follow-up to his 1994 baseball documentary gives short shrift to the Indians.

A generation ago, after a spring training game, Bobby Bonds usually commandeered a bar stool in a saloon called the Tainted Rose in the Indians' hotel in Tucson, Ariz. The former hitting coach would talk hitting with anyone who joined him, even a rookie columnist like me.

Sometimes, he told reporters about the son he had over at Arizona State. He said Barry could flat out play.

For years, it seemed like either the bottle or the glass in front of Bobby had tainted a career that could have been that of a Hall of Famer. Now Bobby has been dead for seven years, and Barry has been exiled for three years despite a record-setting career that was marred by suspicions of performance-enhancing drug use.

The relationship between the Bondses is a critical part of "The 10th Inning," the sequel on PBS to Ken Burns' epic "Baseball" documentary. Barry resented the way the game discarded his father. Once it was in his system, the same poison led him to begrudge the attention Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa got for their season-long home run derby in 1998. It is highly probable that Barry Bonds became a massive steroid cheat after that, putting up numbers that dwarfed all the records.

Yet Burns is a baseball romantic for all of his poking around under its rocks. Even in the steroid era, his cameras fixate on the swift, wicked violence of Barry Bonds' swing, the cannon crack of bat on ball, and the white streak of home runs that resembled rocket tracers.

The shot Burns should have taken would have been from the fifth level of Toronto's SkyDome. It was there that I climbed with the Washington Post's Tom Boswell in the 1989 playoffs, to interview fans who had dodged the ludicrously Bunyanesque home run ball Oakland's Jose Canseco had lashed into their midst.

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Jose Canseco's prodigious blast in the 1989 playoffs in Toronto was later devalued when it came out Canseco, who hit the homer with Oakland, was using performance-enhancing drugs. Here Canseco homers in 1999 for Tampa Bay.

If you held your thumb in front of your face, the nail obscured the batter standing near the plate so far below. At the time, I read the Canseco homer as a measure of might. Canseco, we would learn later, was sort of the Johnny Appleseed of steroid growth in baseball. The scale was wrong. It was not about the magnitude of the shot. It was about the miniaturization of the players' accomplishments.

Burns' film makes Cal Ripken Jr. the savior of baseball through the ironman record he set in 1995 on the heels of the 1994 strike. It is a feel-good choice, but it really was the behemoths in the batter's box who set the turnstiles to spinning. The infatuation with the long ball, and the willful blindness to steroid abuse by managers, general managers and owners, led to cynical personnel decisions. Teams fretted over signing suspected drug abusers, not on moral grounds, but because they feared the muscle pulls that come with steroid abuse.

Burns' film consistently gives the Indians short shrift, skimming over the resurrection of baseball's sad sacks in the 1990s in favor of the never-as-bedraggled Atlanta Braves. In some ways, the snub makes a powerful statement about the place of markets like Cleveland in baseball's pecking order.

Perhaps the truth is too jarring to a summer game dreamer like Burns. But the truth is, we don't matter much anymore.

The Summer Olympics come around in a more timely fashion than rebuilding programs come to fruition with small- and medium-market teams. Even when the window opens, it is soon closing, due to free agency and the impending loss of team leaders.

This is the great failing of Burns' film. "The 10th Inning" celebrates the absence of a work stoppage in this decade and the first steps toward a program of drug testing. But the owners, who had won nothing meaningful from the 1994 strike, did not have the stomach for the convulsive effects on attendance of another shutdown. They chose to live with an economic model, the only one in mainstream pro sports without a salary cap, which does not work.

The film's narrative thread ties together such iconic (that is, moneyed) teams as the Yankees and Red Sox. There is little in it about the Twins' dynasty on a shoestring, or the Indians of 2007, or Tampa Bay. There is a lot about the plucky big-market underachievers from Boston.

To better capture the elegiac feeling of baseball in this town, there should have been cameras panning the vacant seats in the section of Progressive Field once known as Pronkville. The taint on this sport isn't personal resentments or the out-of-whack perspective of epic homers by inflated sluggers.

The taint is abandonment of hope. The disease is apathy.

 


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