As Spring Training is in full swing and Opening Day is less than a month away, I thought I'd watch Ken Burns's The Tenth Inning to try and feed my baseball fever. The Tenth Inning is a follow-up to Burns's masterful documentary Baseball, which followed the great game from its origins in the 1860s up until that program was aired in 1994. In the years since that documentary aired much has happened in the Baseball arena, and it is again wonderfully captured here by Burns. What makes this entry unique for me is that I have a memory of all the topics discussed in the four hour program, and being a native Clevelander and Tribe fan, most of those memories are not good. When presenting his documentary, Burns is above all else a storyteller, and again he tries to weave the last twenty years of baseball history as a good story. By taking negative storylines from recent times, such as steroids or the strike, he tries to balance it with positive things that were able to surpass the negatives, such as Cal Ripken's consecutive game streak, the Red Sox miraculous 2004 playoff run (if you can call that positive), the pure and incredible play of Japanese import Ichiro, and spiking fan attendance. While addressing these and other recent happenings in the game, while following the same format of his original installment, Ken Burns has again crafted a masterwork which captures the beauty of the game and presented as a first class work of art.
