Haven’t seen any of the new Ken Burns series yet, but I’m looking forward to it. His epic 9-part series “Baseball” (1994) was a remarkable accomplishment, telling the stories that helped make baseball the national pastime. The Tenth Inning serves as an update to all that has happened since.
I played a very small role in the DVD release of the original series, helping to create some of the “extras” that were added to the box set. But when I was an editor of Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, I had an opportunity to meet and get to know many of the people who appeared prominently in the film. Among them were Negro Leagues star Buck O’Neill, whose brother lived in the same neighborhood as me, and author/historian John Thorn, who invited me to join his publishing company in 1998.
O’Neill died in 2006, but Thorn makes a return appearance in the Tenth Inning. Here he is in an excerpt from the two-part series, which airs in most PBS markets this week (check your local listings).
