The blog for Mets fans
who like to read

ABOUT US

Greg Prince and Jason Fry
Faith and Fear in Flushing made its debut on Feb. 16, 2005, the brainchild of two longtime friends and lifelong Met fans.

Greg Prince discovered the Mets when he was 6, during the magical summer of 1969. He is a Long Island-based writer, editor and communications consultant. Contact him here.

Jason Fry is a Brooklyn writer whose first memories include his mom leaping up and down cheering for Rusty Staub. Check out his other writing here.

Got something to say? Leave a comment, or email us at faithandfear@gmail.com. (Sorry, but we have no interest in ads, sponsored content or guest posts.)

Need our RSS feed? It's here.

Visit our Facebook page, or drop by the personal pages for Greg and Jason.

Or follow us on Twitter: Here's Greg, and here's Jason.

The Offseason We Spent Watching Baseball

It hasn’t been the greatest offseason for following Mets’ news in our family — Joshua’s REYES jersey is gone, though I can’t bear to dismantle the diptych of Reyes and Wright above his bed — but the beat does go on. This winter, Joshua and I (often with Emily alongside) watched all of Ken Burns’s Baseball, starting with Cap Anson and King Kelly and John Thorn as guide and working our way through to Bill Lee and Carlton Fisk and Bob Costas discussing his quick retreat from the visiting clubhouse at Shea. And then we did The Tenth Inning, with Barry Bonds and Ichiro and Tom Verducci.

It was a lot — a lot of hours, a lot of John Chancellor, a lot of photographs zoomed in on — but we both loved it. And I loved that now Joshua has his baseball education, the sense of history I hope will cement him to the game beyond the doings at Citi Field, and cause him to appreciate those doings even more, seeing them as new threads in something far older and much larger.

Burns’s extravaganza gets its share of mockery — even sometimes from me — for its myth-making and relentless air of elegy, to say nothing of its sheer immensity. Sure, sometimes things get a little slow going, with Donald Hall drifting off into the soliloquous ether or the economics of the Federal League refusing to yield screen time. But watching it again, I sunk happily into it much as I did in September 1994, when tragically it was the only baseball available to us. It was immensely moving then and it was this time, too — and made more so because this time it was my kid’s introduction to Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson and Jackie Robinson. Besides, if I were going to poke fun at Burns, I’d also have to aim the needle at myself: At around the midpoint, Emily rightly took me to task for treating our viewing as if it were 22+ hours of church, with resident nine-year-olds expected to watch reverently without ever interrupting or wriggling. (“YOU WILL PAY ATTENTION WHILE JOHN CHANCELLOR SUMMARIZES THE BOYHOOD OF VIRGIL TRUCKS!”)

No, everything isn’t perfect in Baseball. I love Shelby Foote but was never quite sure what he was doing there (that goes double for Mario Cuomo), and letting the smarmy Billy Crystal weigh in on the pain of losing the Dodgers and Giants made me sputter with rage. But so much about it is perfect, or at least pretty close to it. The better commenters are marvelous in conjuring baseball’s timelessness and joy, and even better when you see their own childhoods returning to them in remembering their first beloved teams, players or games. Roger Angell is a terrific guide, as is Robert Creamer, and Tom Boswell and Bob Costas and Doris Kearns Goodwin and so many others. (The same goes for Keith Olbermann, Marcus Breton, Howard Bryant, Chris Rock and Mike Barnicle in The Tenth Inning — plus we get to see Goodwin finally enjoying a Red Sox title.)

The treatment of race and discrimination in Baseball is absolutely right and proper, whether it’s a young Branch Rickey confronting a wrong he will one day help put right, the unimaginable burden and indomitable will of Jackie Robinson, or hearing Curt Flood still raw with hurt and disbelief over his inhumane treatment in the minors. Smaller moments strike you down, too — Bobby Bragan explaining that he came to Rickey’s funeral because the Mahatma “made me a better man,” or the little detail that after John McGraw’s death, a list was found of all the black players he’d wanted to sign. At the same time, it isn’t all dour — Burns captures the barnstorming glee of the Negro Leagues in full flight, Count Basie’s strutting “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” feels like triumph, and Buck O’Neil is riveting and marvelous no matter what tale he’s telling.

Most of all, though, what I love about Baseball is the way it brings long-gone players to life, in all their majesty or ignominy. When I was a kid, I steeped myself in baseball history by reading Roger Angell’s collections and poring over the Baseball Encyclopedia, all of which I hope Joshua will do as well. But Burns let him also see the players: the death-in-the-eyes glare of Cobb, an impossibly young Mickey Mantle, an impossibly old Grover Cleveland Alexander, Christy Mathewson looking carved from marble, Robinson and Ted Williams seeking refuge in the dugout, Lou Gehrig’s bemusement in the background of photo after photo of Babe Ruth hamming it up, and Satchel Paige looking like he knows the secrets of the universe. (One suspects he did.)

The portrait of Cobb is wonderful, appreciating his feral talent while capturing him as a damaged, ultimately pitiable figure. Ruth explodes off the screen in all his beautiful brawling glory. Williams comes to life not just through footage but also in interviews, his arrogance obvious, infuriating and somehow utterly justifiable. Bill Lee is hilarious, smart and fascinating. (“… so then you go to a cross-seam fastball, which I don’t have.”) The Tenth Inning also has its star turns — Pedro Martinez flashes the Williams arrogance and charm discussing baseball as psychological war, while Joe Torre gets what even I must admit is his due — but no figure comes to life like Barry Bonds, compelling and horrifying and finally as pitiable, in his own way, as Cobb. The first episode ends by setting up Bonds’s fall, furious at finding himself forgotten and overshadowed by the ludicrously inflated Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and in the second episode Burns captures Bonds’s deeply weird, joyless pursuit of Hank Aaron before the quietly devastating coda of Bonds breaking the record, finishing with 28 homers (and a .480 OBP) and never playing again.

Joshua now has his grounding: He knows Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and Bob Gibson. He understands that the pain of being a Mets fan in a Yankees town pales in comparison with the annual horror our Brooklyn forebears went through — and that one triumph can erase all of that. He knows Casey Stengel isn’t just a name from the ancient Mets past, but the embodiment of New York baseball. He gets that Barry Bonds isn’t a hero or a villain, but a lot of things at the same time.

And I think he understands — to the extent that a nine-year-old can — that the triumph and joy of baseball wouldn’t exist without failure and loss. The best batters make outs most of the time. Every year begins with the near-certainty that your team’s season will end not in champagne, but with an agonizing loss or sad irrelevance. Today’s giddy young star is fated to become ordinary or get hurt or be traded or go somewhere else, and even if he avoids all that, he will not escape getting old and vanishing, because nobody does. Ken Burns didn’t inject an elemental sadness into baseball with white letters on black screens or sepia photos or quiet piano accompaniment — it’s woven into the game itself, and no one who loves baseball deeply can avoid it.

But the joy is there too. Baseball’s fun, of course — fun to talk about and worry over and watch intently and also just keep a friendly eye on. Burns brings that to life as well, in so many ways. But a tiny one stands out to me.

After a home run, my favorite shot is the one from the first- or third-base side, when you see the batter connect and then watch the flight of the ball, and in the background the fans get out of their seats, in ones and twos and then groups until even the casual fans or those not paying attention know the ball is gone and can exult.

In the early 1990s I lived outside D.C., in a group house where we watched the Mets or the Braves most every night, and when we saw that shot my friend Allan and I made a ritual of yelling, “Get UP, you damn fans! GET UP!” In Baseball, there’s a shot from that angle of Ruth connecting, probably sometime in the 1930s. The fans in the background are men in suits and hats, and the grandstand is held up by steel beams. But the reaction is exactly the same. In 1994, seeing that shot, Allan and I exchanged a glance and then were both yelling at the TV: “Get UP, you damn fans! GET UP!” Watching with us was a friend of ours, a woman who tolerated baseball more than she liked it. When Allan and I went into our ritual, she let out a kind of nervous, stunned laugh — because that little moment had just shown that baseball really was as timeless and enduring as we claimed it was.

Joshua is familiar with this ritual, too. When Ruth hit his shot, 80 years ago, I was ready. “Get UP, you damn fans!” I yelped. “GET UP!” And he turned and looked at me in surprise, then looked back at the screen, and laughed. And so on we go.

12 comments to The Offseason We Spent Watching Baseball

  • InsidePitcher

    I remember showing Baseball to the kids on a family road trip in 2002. We logged a lot of miles on that trip, and went through a lot of history.

    Good times!

  • open the gates

    Now I gotta watch that again. And I never saw The Tenth Inning!

  • Dak442

    When I was a kid in the mid-70s I found a baseball history book in the nearby public library. Even then it was a dated volume; I’m pretty sure it only went through the 50s, because I don’t remember a mention of the Mets. It had a chapter for every season, with detailed accounts of different teams and the World Series, and I absolutely devoured it. I took it out so often the librarian jokingly offered to just let me have it (Oh, please!!).

    This book contributed as much to my love of the game as did the Mets. I was enthralled by guys my friends had never heard of: Ott, Mathewson, Connie Mack, Honus Wagner. I thought Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang were the coolest guys ever. Wow, the guy who talks about the Mets during games was a really good hitter! Hell, I could even appreciate the ’27 Yankees.

    It’s great that your son can gain the same kind of appreciation through Burns’ series. (I couldn’t get my daughter to sit through five minutes of it – for her, it’s the Mets, primarily in person, or nothing.) I wonder what our grandkids will get their baseball grounding with… an app? Cortex implant?

  • Will in Central NJ

    We could do a lot worse than Ken Burns’ “Baseball” as the game’s video history of record. For all the hours stretching into ten innings, it’s still unabridged: a lot more could go into it, such as the subcultures of scorecard keeping, literature, collectibles. But it’s terrific as it stands.

    @Dak442: As a kid, I was smaller than almost all of my peers; it’s still true today. My childhood Wiffle Ball buddies would exhort me to come out and play touch football with them in the fall and winter. “Come on, Will,” they’d yell. “It’s just touch. Not tackle.”

    Well, upon my first reception of the green Nerf, I was “touched” and was sent flying one way, my glasses another.

    “Forget it,” I sputtered. I went home after the game, and would spend the rest of my youthful autumns and winters buried in baseball history books, especially those of the Metropolitans. Chuckle.

  • Joe D.

    It’s a great box set and those who only saw it on television miss many of the great interviews that are extras on the discs.

    Great looking box to display as well.

  • Lenny65

    “…letting the smarmy Billy Crystal weigh in on the pain of losing the Dodgers and Giants made me sputter with rage.”

    I thought I was the only one. I remember when Mr. Crystal was a guest in the Mets broadcast booth (the infamous “f*cking chicken” line); I guess Billy is more of a “fair weather” fan. The way he suddenly became “Joe Yankee” around 1996 or so only reinforces this theory.

    • nestornajwa

      Billy Crystal has to be the only celebrity who ever sported a Mets cap pretentiously, the way he did in those insufferable whiny City Slickers movies. But when the Yankees started winning somehow he had always been a devoted fan. On the exact other end of the celebrity spectrum, there is the moment late in the Eighth Inning where Pearl Bailey is clearly paying close enough attention to discern the meaning behind the shoe polish incident. How many celebrities sitting in the Metropolitan Caesar Apple Platinum seats (let alone, um, girl celebrities) would look up from their cellphones long enough to do that today? Pearl Bailey, the Anti-Crystal.

      • We live in a world plagued by habitual exaggeration, vituperation and absolutes, so let me avoid all those things and say something simple and inarguably true: Billy Crystal is the worst person on Earth.

        • Flip

          My cell mates, er I mean office mates, were subjected to good, out-loud, belly laugh at that last remark. It is further salt in this wound that we call winter that this blog becomes so much less frequently posted to.

          Vis a vis Ken Burns: I only mildly enjoyed the Baseball series. I felt there were obvious distortions/biases in the last installments, or Eighth and Ninth Innings, maybe because the lens of history is focused proportionally better with the passing of time. The now universally recognized “burnsian” style can wear a bit thin on me at times, but my absolute favorites, the ones that I watch over and over, are the Brooklyn Bridge documentary and, of course, the Civil War series. This latter one, I think, is his crowning achievement and its subject lends itself best to Burns’ talents. Baseball was too vast, has too many characters, covers so many decades. But I suppose for someone like your 9-year-old, Jason, it’s the best way to prime them on the basics. I really think that books are the best medium for the history of baseball, even if they’re ebooks, but there are only a handful of 9-year-olds out there (in whose number I could not count myself) that would have the patience. As it is, even the Burns series is already too long and fidget-inducing for them. Thank god for the patient few that will inevitably carry the torch for us and it looks like you may be bringing up a little torch bearer, yourself, Jason.

  • […] Greg Prince on 4 February 2012 8:35 am Since it seems to come up every couple of years (as it did here), Billy Crystal wore the Mets cap in the 1991 film City Slickers not because he was an unprincipled […]

  • […] or failures on the field into judgments of them as people. This is something that started while watching Ken Burns’s Baseball, with discussions of how most people were neither heroes nor villains: Ty Cobb said and did […]

  • […] of an averted gaze. But Cooperstown sure as heck feels like where baseball — or at least the Ken Burnsian ideal of it we exalt in our heads — could have been invented. The day after our Hall of Fame visit, […]