New York Baseball starring droolers who pat themselves on its nostalgiac shoulder with file footage of the polo grounds.

Watching Burns’ Jazz epic was basically seeing the history of Times Square billboards while minimizing heroin addiction and squalor as if they were spilled milk.

Except it seemed to dwell too much on the drug use. Mention it once and then move on.

And I thought it was really cool to see those old films of those players

if you’re a true baseball fan, how can you not love the series?

… was when I watched the ‘70s episode, in Budapest, just floored by all the heroes of my youth with their crazy haircuts and awesome awesometasticness and it was literally the best thing ever in the history of great things and then …… one of the dudes I was watching it with, who’d I’d known vaguely for many years in many countries, confessed that A) he was actually a Gulf War veteran (imagine a dude even less likely than the character in “Generation Kill”), and that B) he was the head tank commander in one of that war’s most deadly friendly fire incidents.

Needless to say, my fumigated mind wasn’t ready for all that input, and so, like Ringo, I don’t smoke it no mo’. Though I’d love to see that episode again.

But I somewhat share the Rev’s sentiment.

And thanks to yeswecan for calling out Billy Crystal, the lamest self-proclaimed baseball expert and all-time queen of the Yankee fanboys. It makes my blood boil to hear that guy talk about baseball.

I don’t know what it says to my character but I very much enjoy listening to a bunch of old farts reminisce about baseball.

I love the novelty of Bill Plympton, an englishman with a very proper accent, talking about childhood baseball memories.

I enjoy quotations such as the one Gerald Early offered: “I believe that two thousand years from now when they study this culture there will be only three things America will be known for – the constitution, jazz music, and baseball. Those are the three most perfectly designed things this country has created.”

I like the articulate and stat-loaded analysis of George Will.

Hell, I even like the contributions of that walking thesaurus Bob Costas.

And I don’t believe that anyone can’t enjoy Buck O’Neil’s stories about his days playing with Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson, et al.

Yeah, the series all in all spends a big honking amount of time on the Yankees and Dodgers, and the Angels are only referenced twice: once when the narrator says “… the team then moved to Anaheim and became the California Angels.” And then later during the section on free agency there’s a picture of Ryan with an Angels cap. And that’s it.

But all that dead-ball era stuff makes up for it to me, particularly when it creates portraits of characters like Rube Wadell.

Maybe I won’t need it as much now that there’s the MLB network, but that series sure makes getting through the winter a lot easier.

Very informative, lots of good stories. And for those who criticize the East Coast bias – there wasn’t major league baseball out west until the ’50’s. And the Yankees/Giants/Dodgers were a HUGE part of baseball for the first half of the 20th century. That’s just the way it was.

haven’t seen it.

With his faults, Burns at least makes learning about history entertaining for people who have no interest otherwise. A baseball fan watching this film will also get some general background history of the country along with the baseball history. Talking to young people these days, it seems they have stopped teaching history in school all together.