Burns’ nine-part documentary (each one an “inning”), which ran for more than 18 hours, examined most every conceivable aspect of how the game of baseball had evolved from its modest 19th century roots to the reign of Babe Ruth to the cusp of the Steroid Era. Indeed, Burns’ exploration, comprehensive as it was, left viewers wondering where baseball will go from there.

It’s this most recent period, from 1992 to 2009, that Burns drills down on in Baseball: The Tenth Inning, which premieres tonight on PBS. The first two-hour installment, “Top of the Tenth,” runs tonight and covers the timespan from 1992 to 1999, when sluggers like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa enthralled a nation still smarting from the ‘94 strike. “Bottom of the Tenth,” airing tomorrow, examines Barry Bonds’ steroid-fueled rise to stardom, the debut of Ichiro Suzuki to American audiences, how 9/11 affected the sport, and what measures MLB brass took to crack down on performance-enhancing drugs.

To say that the prevailing specter of steroids is a theme in both episodes would be understating the case. Steroids are, without a doubt, the principal character in Burns’ sweeping Baseball epilogue. Anyone who followed along in the summer of 1998, as McGwire and Sosa put on a home run chase that may never been seen again, was forever affected when it became known later that anabolic steroids were to blame for the prodigious output of many sluggers. The film makes the case that Barry Bonds, feeling slighted by the nation’s admiration of those players, decided he would look to less-than-natural ways to wedge himself into the public’s consciousness.

Still, there’s enough here that doesn’t focus on steroids to remind even casual baseball fans what’s so wonderful about the sport. That a player like Ichiro can come from Japan and transform the way people think about baseball in other countries. That the Yankees can help pull a city and a nation back together after 9/11. That Red Sox Nation can finally lift a 86-year-old monkey off its collective back in the most dramatic of ways.

Those are the segments worth savoring, since the rest of the time is spent in a reflective and honest look at how baseball players sold their soul to the steroids gurus not only for self-gain but to again popularize a sport that was, after the ‘94 strike, on the brink of not collapse but irrelevance. You can’t help but shake your head as Burns revisits that dark time in baseball history when everyone sort of knew what was happening but yet kept on moving forward toward (as we now know) an inevitable conclusion.

As comedian Chris Rock put it to Burns, “Who, in the whole country, wouldn’t take a pill to make more money at their job?” That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves for years. And baseball players, like anyone, have had to answer that for themselves.

Photo: Brad Mangin Photography

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Authors: Erik Malinowski

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