♪ ♪ ♪ (theme music playing) ♪ RUBENSTEIN: I'm pleased to be in conversation tonight with Ken Burns, one of the country's most distinguished documentary historians, most distinguished filmmakers, and the producer and director of hundreds of hours of PBS-sponsored documentaries about American history, among other subjects.

He's won numerous Emmy Awards among other distinctions, and is, I think, the most respected documentary filmmaker in probably our country's history.

So, uh, we're coming to you from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium at the New York Historical.

Ken, thank you very much for being here.

BURNS: Thank you, David.

RUBENSTEIN: So, we're gonna talk about baseball tonight.

Everybody knows that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown.

Is that right?

BURNS: No, it's not.

It's so interesting, Abner Doubleday was a Civil War general, and somehow something migrated in the mythology.

What's so interesting is that we quite correctly celebrate Jackie Robinson's arrival in baseball on April 15th, 1947, when a Black man, the grandson of a slave, ran out to play first base that day at Ebbets Field in, in Brooklyn.

But we forget that in the late, uh, 19th century, there were the equivalent of the National League, uh, in teams in Worcester and Troy and Utica and Binghamton and places like that.

But there was a kind of professional league, and in it were Black Americans who were playing.

Moses Fleetwood Walker, Bud Fowler, who is actually from the area just outside of Cooperstown.

And so, what happened is that Cap Anson, one of the great players of the 19th century, uh, not a great person, uh, established a gentleman's agreement.

He refused to play if there was a Black person on the field.

He didn't say Black person.

And so there wa, there developed in the, in baseball, a gentleman's agreement that excluded Blacks, and it would be until Jackie came in, in 1947, that that would change.

RUBENSTEIN: So, was baseball really a kind of a American version of cricket or rounders, or was it our own invention?

BURNS: It's, it's, it, it's a kind of synthesis of the two.

So, rounders was a schoolhouse game.

You might play at recess, or you might play during your lunch break, and it involved bases and coming home.

And cricket is, of course, this point-to-point sort of thing that has innings.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the game was invented sometime in the mid to late 1800s, you would say?

BURNS: It's, it's, it's in the 1840s.

RUBENSTEIN: 1840s.

BURNS: But it's... it... There are versions that go back to the 18th century, and they play a game that we would begin to recognize with nine innings, three outs to a half inning, and things like that.

RUBENSTEIN: But the players were not highly compensated compared to what we know today?

BURNS: No, nothing happens, uh, professionally until 1869.

You know, people saying, "Why aren't we getting paid?

People are paying to come in to watch us play."

There're big tensions and leagues are, are beginning to form and will form the Cincinnati Red Stockings pay their first players in '69.

But there's a guy named Pete O'Brien who said, "You know," and this is 1858, "You know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid."

And it is the perennial complaint about the game of baseball that it has somehow violated some nostalgic code.

But in fact, as much as it may represent to us these cherished verities and something that connects us as it does to almost every decade of our republic's history, nonetheless, is very forward.

It represents quite precisely exactly, for example, waves of immigration to the United States.

RUBENSTEIN: So, there was the National League and had, like, eight teams, or 10.

BURNS: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so then a man comes along named Ban Johnson... BURNS: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: ... and he says, "I wanna create another league," and eventually he creates the American League?

BURNS: That's right.

RUBENSTEIN: And the World Series became the games between the National League winner and the American League winner.

And that was in the early part of the 20th century?

BURNS: Yes, very, very early part.

And the first, uh, World Series, uh, is between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the team that will become the Boston Red Sox.

RUBENSTEIN: But it wasn't always seven games.

I think it was... BURNS: Nine in that particular time.

RUBENSTEIN: And when they were throwing the balls, did they put spit on it or any dirt, or everything was clean?

BURNS: We always have cheated in baseball.

The whole idea of it is that, I mean, there's so... This is the greatest game that's ever been invented.

There's nothing that comes close to it.

It is just a perfect game.

It's the only game in which the defense has the ball.

Uh, it's the only game in which you're allowed to steal, uh, right?

The, the ball does not score.

The human being does.

There's no clock.

And if you talk about basketball, somebody will say, "I, I saw Michael Jordan hit a three pointer at the, at the buzzer, and we won."

Or, "Joe Montana threw a pass to Jerry Rice with just a few seconds left.

And we went ahead, and we won."

But a baseball story always goes, "My mom took me, or my dad took me, to this game.

And I remember walking out, and I just couldn't believe how green it was.

And oh, by the way, Willie Mays made a basket catch, or Sandy Koufax struck somebody out, or other, other things happen.

But it's who you're standing there, whose hand you're holding, who are you looking at it with?

And that it makes the game so emotionally important for so many people.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when was it first called the national pastime?

BURNS: Well, it, it fairly early on, it begins to be referred to that way in song, and in just the fact that that's what you did.

There was nothing else.

There was boxing, which was thought to be sort of low.

Uh, there was horse racing, same sort of thing.

There was college football that was beginning to develop, but that had its own elite sort of things.

And we know we, we don't have anything to do with elites, but this was the game that everybody went to.

You could ride the subway home and see advancing box scores in the various editions that were being put out in this city.

RUBENSTEIN: The players were professional at this point, early part of the 20th century.

BURNS: Oh, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: But did they make enough money so they didn't have to have jobs in the off-season?

BURNS: No, uh, it's, it's... It was common as late as the 1950s to have, you know, to be working, you know, at a car, uh, dealership or to be, you know, have your own grocery store.

You did something else that helped supplement your money.

It was... it wasn't poverty, but it... But, you know, it was not uncommon to see players riding to the ball game in, in the subway.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the stadiums were relatively small, built in downtown areas, but, uh, the stadium could hold then 20,000 people, 30,000.

They weren't that big, right, compared to today?

BURNS: Well, at the turn of the century and in, in the first couple of decades.

Uh, but then you got these new modern buildings made of steel.

Uh, the oldest is, of course, Fenway Park in Boston.

The second oldest is Wrigley Field.

And what do you think is the third-oldest stadium actively used in Major League Baseball?

It's Dodger Stadium that was built in... RUBENSTEIN: 1958?

BURNS: Eh, eh, eh, the late '50s, early '60s.

RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, okay.

BURNS: And that tells you the kind of revolution.

And the first of the new wave of stadiums is Camden Yards.

RUBENSTEIN: When World War I came along, did the players say, "We need to go over to Europe to fight the war," or they just say, "We're playing baseball, we can't be bothered?"

BURNS: Yeah, well, as in all cases, there was a little bit of both.

Baseball becomes, uh, somehow this avatar of American sort of uprightness.

So, there's patriotic stuff.

We begin about this time playing the anthem at every game.

Um, Second World War, though, they, they put on a pretty lousy, uh, game of baseball because so many of the greatest stars, particularly, uh, most notably, uh, Ted Williams are off fighting, and then he's... He loses more years in Korea and still has an extraordinary average.

RUBENSTEIN: Now in, uh, 1895, a person was born in my hometown of Baltimore, and he became the most famous baseball player ever, named Babe Ruth.

He started out as a pitcher, and then he converted later to a hitter.

BURNS: He was, he... The Boston Red Sox, he's responsible largely for them winning at least two of the four, uh, World Series Championships they had in the first two decades of the 20th century.

And it's his pitching skill.

He's not hitting a lot of home runs back then.

But then he is sold to the Yankees.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, when he's sold, it's called later "The Curse of the Bambino," because the Red Sox didn't win another World Series for, I think, 86 years or something like that?

BURNS: 86 years.

RUBENSTEIN: But why did the owner of the Red Sox sell Babe Ruth?

BURNS: Uh, to make some money.

I mean, to have, have money.

He knew that the owner of the Yankees would pay him $100,000.

And it changed the fortunes of the team that used to be called the New York Knickerbockers, um, who were, you know, perennial also rans, uh, into the powerhouse of the most dominant team in the history of baseball.

They won 27 championships, and the next closest are the, the, the Cardinals.

RUBENSTEIN: He hit 60 home runs in one season, which was the all-time record, 1927.

BURNS: Every time he hit a home run after that, David, he added to his record.

I mean, he was hitting more home runs than an entire baseball team.

And when he retired, there... People didn't have half the number that, that he did.

RUBENSTEIN: So, to do all that, he was a clean liver, always working out?

Was that... BURNS: That's right.

Never smoked a cigarette, never went into a bar, never, you know, uh, dissipated with, uh, the other sex.

RUBENSTEIN: Babe Ruth had a teammate who also became quite famous.

BURNS: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Lou Gehrig.

How did he, uh, get along with Babe Ruth, and what happened to Gehrig ultimately?

BURNS: Lou Gehrig was just a monstrous hitter.

And he batted clean up behind Babe Ruth, who batted third, hence the numbers.

They started off as the batting order, and then he, um, he developed, uh, ALS and, which we now call Lou Gehrig's disease, and he famously had to retire.

He began to notice that he was shuffling a little bit, tripping, unable to get around, and seeing the ball.

And of course, he gave the, the amazing farewell speech with, you know, Babe Ruth draped around him about being the luckiest man in baseball.

RUBENSTEIN: So, baseball loves its statistics, maybe more so than any other sport.

So, we all know that Babe Ruth had 60 home runs in one season, total of .714, Lou Gehrig, 2,130 games, and so forth.

What is this obsession with statistics in baseball?

BURNS: Well, they matter.

It's so interesting that they still hold up.

Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.

Joe DiMaggio hit, had a consecutive hitting streak of 56 games.

It's never gonna be beaten.

There are things that we thought would never be beaten.

Babe Ruth's record, which Hank Aaron, uh, did.

Henry Aaron, as he would insist on being called.

And they're ways of measuring people because for all the distortions of new equipment, of, of new understanding, of even steroids, the records haven't been skewed that much.

And, it's very important to have something that has that comfort of continuity.

Hitting .300 is a big deal.

RUBENSTEIN: So how did, um, the Yankees get all these great players?

First, they have Babe Ruth, then they have Lou Gehrig, and then it's followed by Joe DiMaggio.

And what was Joe DiMaggio so famous for?

BURNS: He is so spectacular.

He is a, he's an Italian American from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, plays in the Pacific Coast League.

He's elegant.

Uh, once a teammate said, "Why," you know, this second half of the doubleheader in August, it's hot, "You know, why did you beat out that single and turn it into a double?"

He said, "Someone may not have seen me play before."

And he had that kind of elegance and stoicism.

It worked against him too, because he was very sort of shy and diffident and, and put up a, a, a, a pretty tough wall between him.

But it... There's nothing as beautiful to me as his stroke or his lope.

And I'm... You're talking to a Red Sox fan.

To say something nice about the Yankees takes a lot.

And he's followed by Mickey Mantle.

I mean, they're just... They have... It's the biggest market.

They have the biggest team.

They've had this storied franchise, and they have just been really good at this game.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when World War II comes along, the players feel more than in World War I they need to get into the service?

BURNS: Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's, it's pretty, uh, amazing and immediate.

Hank Greenberg goes off, it's... There's unbelievable newsreels of people going down to the recruiting station and raising their hands and, and, and signing up.

And it, it is a big patriotic stuff.

Of course, the Army is not gonna put many people in combat.

A lot of folks have fairly cushy things of going and improving morale, which is not a bad thing to do.

Um, but, but you know, Ted Williams is flying, flying fighter planes.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you mentioned Hank Greenberg.

Were there many Jewish players in Major League Baseball?

BURNS: Um, not really.

A few.

Mickey Cohen, who's famous for being both a spy and, uh, you know, uh, that.

But Hank Greenberg, uh, is probably one of the best hitters.

The... probably the best-known Jewish ballplayer is Sandy Koufax, who may be, the greatest pitcher of all time.

He has a short lifespan.

Uh, he throws out his arm, and he just does this incredible thing, uh, where he gives it up, he's getting shots in his arm, and he finally just says, "I can't do this," at the height of his prime.

RUBENSTEIN: He retired, I think, at 29 years old.

But today, given the surgery that we have, could he have been... Had an arm that was fixed, you think?

BURNS: You know, I imagine that it was something that he could have taken care of and might had a great lifespan.

The pitchers are so interesting.

It's, you know, you can always go throw the ball in basketball to Michael Jordan.

You can always throw to Jerry Rice.

You, you know, everybody, even Babe Ruth, only comes up once every nine times.

And so, you begin to rely on other characters.

And there is the person at the heart of the game, which is the pitcher, for each team that is deciding it.

And there is such great psychological complexity to it that it's really hard to identify who's the best pitcher.

There's, I mean, there's a great argument for Walter Johnson of the, of the Senators, of Lefty Grove, of, um, Greg Maddux more recently, who is built, as Daniel Okrent, the great baseball historian, said, like an accountant.

You know, Nolan Ryan with the fastball.

There's, uh, Pedro Martinez of the Red Sox, does what Lefty Grove does is he, he gets out, six straight outs in the All-Star game in '99, pitching to something equal to the Murderer's Row.

RUBENSTEIN: So, throughout the 1910s, '20s, '30s, '40s, baseball is segregated.

BURNS: It is indeed.

RUBENSTEIN: And then, then who decided to try to change that?

Who was he, and how did Jackie Robinson get recruited to do this?

BURNS: Yeah, so there is a lot of pressure, um, because Black Americans are serving heroically in the Second World War and segregated barracks, segregated units, segregated blood supplies, segregated bowling alleys, segregated everything, but they're giving up their lives, and there're pickets outside Yankee Stadium, "We can stop bullets.

Why not balls?"

Um, and there's lots of activity.

The Civil Rights Movement is nascent to be sure, but it's beginning to become a little bit more activist.

The Negro League Baseball has, has helped with that in some way.

One club out of all of the clubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, um, manager, Branch Rickey, decides that he wants to integrate.

He'd been a coach at a team from Michigan, and he'd been traveling into Indiana, and his star player was a catcher.

And, um, the clerk wouldn't let him sign into the motel.

And so, he said, "You go up to my room."

And he came up, and he found him, so the story goes, trying to pull his skin off, and he said, "Mr.

Rickey, if it was my skin, I just would change it."

And Rickey sort decided, I'm gonna fix this someday."

And he revolutionized baseball twice.

He invented the farm system, in St.

Louis.

Didn't have the money of the Eastern teams like the Yankees.

So, he developed his own talent.

And then he did the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of sports, which is he integrated.

And he identified somebody who actually had a pretty hot temper.

Jackie Robinson had refused as a kid to get up from the lunch counters in Pasadena, California.

He had refused to get and sit in the Black section of a bus, uh, at Fort Hood when he was in the military.

He was court martialed, and he was acquitted.

And he played after the Second World War in the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the better teams of the Negro National Leagues.

And Branch pulled him up and sent him up for a year with the, um, Montreal Royals, which was their Triple-A, uh, farm team.

And then heroically at opening day in April, as I said, 15th, 1947, he integrated baseball.

RUBENSTEIN: He, uh, he was a four-sports star at UCLA.

BURNS: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: Became the most valuable player in the National League when he played for the Dodgers.

BURNS: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And then they, um, they won the World Series, I think, with him?

BURNS: He, in '55, they did, that was not a MVP year for him.

Um, but he brought them to the pennant.

He won Rookie of the Year and Sportsman of the Year from the Sporting News.

Um, he put up with unbelievable... I mean, it's really hard to hit a baseball going 100 miles an hour with this, you know, piece of turned Northern ash.

And to have somebody spiking you, to throwing at your head, to threatening your wife and your baby son, and all of that sort of stuff.

The fact that he was able to do it and do it so well, I mean, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first, you know, nanosecond of, of eligibility.

RUBENSTEIN: So, in the 19, uh, '50s and '60s, there were two players that were widely considered to be the best baseball players, one was Mickey Mantle, the other was Willie Mays.

BURNS: That's right.

RUBENSTEIN: So, who was better?

BURNS: Um, a, without a doubt, Willie Mays.

And a lot of it has to do with Mickey Mantle's series of injuries, uh, that he was the fastest person, uh, in baseball, which is really surprising.

And he had unbelievable power.

We still think, perhaps, the longest home run was hit by Mickey Mantle.

Uh, he was a carouser.

He didn't take care of his body.

And so, the consistency of both Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, I think dwarf Mickey Mantle.

But you... As, as people will tell you who are diehard Yankee fans, you didn't see him in his prime.

And in his prime, there was nothing more beautiful a baseball machine than Mickey Mantle.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, that era you had, uh, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, but there was a third player that some people thought was actually better than either of the two of them, and that's Henry Aaron.

BURNS: Hen, Henry Aaron.

And, and you've got a legitimate argument about that.

The most important baseball player is Babe Ruth with regard to the game.

The most important moment in baseball is Jackie Robinson arriving.

But then you're down to a pretty complicated argument between, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, who obviously broke, um, in, in '74, he broke Babe Ruth's home run record ended up with 755, and he was getting 3,000 pieces of hate mail a day in the most racist language you could ever imagine in 1974 for having the utter temerity, the uppity-ness that they accused Jackie Robinson of having, of breaking, uh, the record of Babe Ruth that everyone thought would last forever.

Same, it happened to Roger Maris when he had 61 home runs in '61 with an expanded schedule.

But I would also suggest, and I've had a lot of baseball players tell me this, that they think Barry Bonds, before the steroids, was the greatest player of all times.

RUBENSTEIN: And then ultimately, I guess in the latter part of the 20th century, early part of the 21st century, uh, you begin to see people being bulked up a bit.

BURNS: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: When did people begin to think that bulking up using some kind of human growth hormone was helpful?

And did people know what was going on, and they didn't wanna talk about it, or they didn't really know?

BURNS: Everybody knew.

It started in National Football League and probably started in other places like boxing.

But National Football League, uh, happened, and people were bulking up and understanding the value of, of the steroidal, uh, additives that would give you extra muscle and more duration, quicker repair, and things like that.

Um, you know, baseball being the national pastime didn't have, didn't have any drug rules.

So, until well after a lot of people got caught, or, you know, after records fell like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire's, Barry Bonds shattering those records, there were still no rules in baseball.

They finally did it, and it became, um, clear what had happened.

It's interesting, though, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron talked about the greenies and the reddies, uh, reddies that were in bowls in the 1950s.

Speed, uh, in the '60s to get you going.

So, there was a kind of culture of you just don't talk about it.

You didn't do it.

Everybody denied it.

And I'm, I'm just so pleased that nobody stole many more bases.

Suddenly, there weren't a whole spate of 31-game winners.

Um, what you had were exaggerated home runs, because the difference of 15 feet is sometimes the difference between the warning track out and a home run.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, so players were bulked up, and they were hitting enormous amounts of home runs and, and maybe pitchers were pitching faster.

There was an investigation by former Con, uh, Senator Mitchell.

BURNS: Yes.

RUBENSTEIN: And appointed by the commissioner to investigate.

There were investigations, allegations, but, and there were congressional hearings, but no baseball player ever went to jail for this.

Is that correct?

BURNS: That's correct.

I think.

RUBENSTEIN: But baseball players, uh, some other people went to jail, but not baseball players.

BURNS: Yes, some of the purveyors of it... RUBENSTEIN: But baseball players, um, who were thought to be using these drugs have not been invited into the Hall of Fame.

Is that right?

BURNS: Yeah.

There, there are two glaring examples.

I'll set aside Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.

But the, the two greatest and most difficult for us to reconcile are Roger Clemens as a pitcher, um, seven Cy Young Awards, I believe.

And Barry Bonds, who has the record for home runs, they're not being voted in, uh, and many of the other players known to be, uh, users, yet.

Um, Barry Bonds, if he had not taken a single steroid, would've been inducted into the Hall of Fame on his first... RUBENSTEIN: He had three MVPs before he ever thought they'd be... BURNS: Before he even noticed.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

BURNS: And he was getting pissed off because he was seeing, he was doing all the work.

He was skinny and live.

And, you know, Willie Mays was his uncle and his mentor, and his dad was his role model and had a complicated life.

And, um, Barry was just pissed off that people were getting all this recognition like Sosa and McGwire, and I think he finally just said, "Okay, I'm gonna do it."

And then he just did it spectacularly until those rules were in place.

RUBENSTEIN: So, we didn't talk about one thing I should add in.

Baseball stadiums evolved.

They were, uh, little things in, uh, urban areas.

Then they became these androgynous kind of things that could be football or, or, or foot, or baseball.

And then what happened at Camden Yards in Baltimore in 1992?

BURNS: What happened is that you had a sport that was beginning to understand that it was invested in the country's history and nostalgia and memory, and it began to build ballparks, modern ballparks, that harken back to an earlier time.

Camden Yards was the first and still one of the most... It is a beautiful ballpark.

But now there's 20 of them that are like that too, that are just spectacular things.

And they're a little bit smaller than the big sort of stadium places.

There's an intimacy to them.

They're riffing off what Fenway and, and Wrigley were doing, but they were adding new things and amenities, and they were essentially coaxing a new generation of fans.

I mean, football's clearly the dominant sport in the United States.

It commands our attention.

It commands the ratings.

It, it has all that, but it, it doesn't have, as I said before, this accompaniment through most of the decades of our national narrative, but also the intimacy of the human family dynamics.

I mean, I, I was taking a daughter on a college interview at NYU, and, um, somebody came up to me very agitated and said, uh, "My brother's daughter died.

My brother's daughter died."

And I said, "Oh, I'm sorry.

I have daughters, too."

And he said, "I didn't know what to do, my brother and I are so close.

And then I remembered your series and so I went back to our house, and I got our mitts, and I went in the back door of my brother's house, and I handed him the mitt, and we went out and played catch."

And it... You begin to realize that this sport has a deep, ingrained part of our national psyche and our individual psyche.

And I, I can tell you that there is not a week that goes by, David, that somebody doesn't come up and say, "My dad just passed away, every January we'd watch your baseball series since 1994."

"But now my son is old enough, and I just watched with him."

And you see this passing of the torch.

The same with women and mothers and, not daughters, but sons and daughters.

And it is an amazing connection to who we are.

Baseball has because of the consistency and the durability of those statistics, even in the face of scandal.

I mean, there are no asterisks in baseball.

If you look up who won the World Series in 1919, it says the Cincinnati Red Stockings, we know that the Chicago White Stockings, the Black Sox, threw that game, but there's no asterisk.

Cincinnati won.

And so, what, what it tells you, and what the statistics, unlike any other sport, tells you is that you have to accompany them with story.

And story is what connects human beings.

Not argument, but story.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's end on this... how many people here actually know the, the, the song that is often played the seventh inning stretch?

BURNS: Oh, yeah, and, and it's... We only sing the chorus.

"Katie blew.

Then one Saturday, her young beau.

Asked, "You'd like to go to the show?"

No, I'll tell you what you can do."

♪ ALL: Take me out with the ball game.

♪ ♪ Take me out to the crowd.

♪ ♪ Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

♪ ♪ I don't care if I ever get back.

♪ ♪ So, it's root, root, root for the home team.

♪ ♪ It's a shame... ♪ ♪ Win it's a shame.

♪ ♪ For it's one, two, three strikes, ♪ ♪ you're out at the old ball game.

♪♪ Okay.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

BURNS: So, what do you sing besides the National Anthem at basketball or, or football games?

You don't, is the answer.

RUBENSTEIN: Ken, thank you very much for a great conversation.

BURNS: Thank you.

♪ (music plays through the credits) ♪