Just starting on PBS. Hope it is as good as the first 9 innings.

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"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." ~ H.L. Mencken

John Chancellor was better as the announcer, but still a good show.

The White Sox still don't exist in Ken Burns' world.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

They don't exist in anybody's world. If Derek Jeter made 2 plays like Uribe did in the '05 WS to end the clinching game, they would likely be considered a couple of the greatest plays in WS history.

If the Red Sox had a Pods type guy hit a walkoff HR in the 2004 WS, it would likely be considered one of the best clutch hits in WS history.

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the best part was when they started talking about steroids and all of a sudden public enemy starts playing. if i'm not mistaken that's the only rap song played in the first two hours. stay classy, creepy looking smug dude.

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He seems to be attempting to make a sympathetic character out of Barry Bonds. I'd like his chances of curing cancer better.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

it was pretty interesting. Chris Rock brought the most levity to the discussion.
I'll be watching the 2nd half tonight.

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@audioidkid

But he's not wrong.

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"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." ~ H.L. Mencken

I have an hour left of the second episode. I understand the East Coast hate, but nobody can say it wasn't an important part of baseball the last decade. This has been a very solid piece.

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Would you mind clarifying, for the rest of the board, what the hell your point is exactly?

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Mark McGwire played for the Raiders? I'm just trying to help out.

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I will keep with my belief the Hank Aaron scoreboard video, after the Bonds record breaking home run, looked like Hank was captured by the Evil Dooers.

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I'm still watching but damn good so far. Can we get Soriano to wear 33, maybe that was it? What about Clemens striking out 20 in 2 different decades, naw he wasn't juicing right? Oh and Pedro was gooood!

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You never miss your wealth, till your well went dry
Seem like only yesterday, you were here smiling
Now you gone away, but I know you in a better place
No traces of you, what can I do?
Alone and confused

I don't feel they were hiding Clemens juicing at all. Even though Pedro was slight, I'm not sure he wasn't as well. I believe the 85% assessment of Canseco.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

far be it for me to interrupt your sideshow here, but here's what i was getting at:

out of the ~4 hours i ended up seeing roughly 3-3.5 hours of this fantastic ode to east coast baseball and the kind of topics joe buck can't wait to tell you what the correct opinion is about on his national broadcasts. if you read about ken burns and his love for the documentary, you find out that music and sound effects and everything has to be PITCH PERFECT. deadspin ran a story about some guy who interned for him during the original baseball epic and they specifically talked about how much music and sound/effects had to help "tell the story"

therefore, i found it genuinely amusing that in the first part of the 10th inning when they first broached the subject of steroids being a major factor in baseball all of a sudden late 80s / early 90s gangsta/sounding rap kicks in. i believe it was public enemy. out of the ~3+ hours of this i saw, it was the only rap song played in the background in any way shape or form. not even when they talked about barry bonds and his dad and racism and the media and whatnot... nope. just when introducing the topic of steroids.

this leads me to believe that like, the rap song is meant to convey the presence of a menace... something in your face and problematic. now since i believe it was public enemy playing maybe the song was topical about such, as this was the MO and message of public enemy... but to the target audience, stuffy middleaged white people who loved the original documentary so much they were like OOOH OOOH THERE'S A 10TH INNING COMING JIMMY THERE'S GONNA BE A 10TH INNING, the association of that late 80s/early90s in your face gangsta rap is primarily a negative one, which i believe was at the very least a definite undertone seeing as out of all the various musics you heard in the documentary, the one time you hear this format is when introducing the dark underbelly of baseball which ended up being one of the major plotlines throughout the whole thing.

that's the point i was making... it made me go "wow" when the introduction of steroids brought forth the only rap to be heard, very likely, in teh WHOLE GODDAMN BASEBALL DOCUMENTARY. what does that say about ken burns and his telling the story? that's what made me do a veritable spit-take and post a comment on teh board.

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Or that steroids, oversimply put, became Public Enemy (#1) to baseball? I don't really think that, of course, but it makes as much sense as your theory does.

Not everything has to be nefarious or have some secret meaning, despite what many on this board apparently think.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

People like Ken Burns, Rick Telander, and Bob Costas are always looking at sports as a barometer of society at large, always looking for some great moral or social significance within the realm of sports. It isn't really some great revelation that the lower classes and the ethnic groups that comprise them at a given time are likely to excel in sports.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

welcome to the world of sports writers, JORR.

Yeah, I guess.

This kind of pertains to the "race card" topic on LeBron. If you listen to Costas, this guy has nothing but contempt for Barry Bonds. Now, I'm not suggesting he's thrilled with Clemens or McGwire, but he clearly can't work up the kind of VITRIOL toward them that he has toward Bonds. I'm sure he might talk about Hank Aaron and sacred records as to why that is if he were called out, but is that really what it is? I remember Costas being one of the guys pimping the McGwire/Sosa homerun chase for all it was worth. Now he's this great moralizer. He sure can sit in judgment of a black man.

I remember Costas going after Dennis Rodman constantly. Why? What did Rodman ever do that was so, so awful? Wear a wedding dress at a photo shoot? Kick an ignorant camera man that refused to move out of the way and could have ruined Rodman's career just to get his shot? Costas thinks Rodman's tattoos are ridiculous? Are they really more ridiculous than that teenybopper hairstyle Costas wears at age 60? There's a definite racial angle.

Costas would probably tell you that's crazy. He'd talk about how he loves Michael Jordan and Hank Aaron- guys who do it the "right way". The "right way" is code for the way the middle class white guy wants to see it done. White America doesn't mind a black man when he's grinnin' and shuckin' and jivin' sellin' uncomfortable underwear. But a black man isn't allowed to show emotion. When he does he becomes dangerous. And White America won't stand for that. LeBron, Wade, and Bosh? And they're not humble? It's a fuckin' gang. Why can't they use the cliches that Jordan perfected? If they did, they'd sell more Nikes.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

hearing bob costas' opinion on anything ruined what could have been a pockless marked career in broadcasting. i think his voice for baseball fits perfectly. but once he gets on his soapbox...watch out.

just like joe buck's take on randy moss' "mooning" incident. that horse was 100 stories high to sit upon.

That's the point. The average guy doesn't think he's a racist. Joe Buck may not use the word "genius", and he'll have dinner with Joe Morgan, and he's never burned a cross. So he's obviously not a racist, right? It's his reaction to something as innocuous as what Moss did that shows that he clearly is. Just like every other white person in this entire country.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Pass.

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Still not as high as his forehead

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boring

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"It's not exactly a rocket surgery." D.J.