The Narrative Crisis of Modern Baseball

JT Brubaker of the San Francisco Giants pitches against the New York Yankees during the seventh inning of the Netflix-livestreamed Opening Day game at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on March 25, 2026. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images) FOR MOST OF MY LIFE, Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary miniseries Baseball has functioned less as a television program and more as a secular breviary—a companion through seasons of both fervor and personal quiet.

Of course, I remember the players featured: Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle. But it was the rhythmic dignity of Negro League veteran Buck O’Neil and the moral clarity of outfielder Curt Flood that helped me learn that baseball involved matters of justice, not just athletic accomplishment. I have also lived with the voices of Burns’s non-player commentators for decades: the erudition of George F.

Will, the sinewy prose of George Plimpton and Roger Angell, the granite precision of Donald Hall’s poetry, the presidential gravitas of Doris Kearns Goodwin. Even the inclusion of Shelby Foote, whom I refuse to forswear despite the contemporary urge to sanitize our historiography, felt like a vital part of the tapestry. These were voices that understood baseball not as a product to be consumed but as a myth to be inhabited.

However, with a recent shift in careers from campaign consulting to teaching and writing, redirecting my professional gaze from the mechanics of political science to the architecture of literature, still another character from Burns’s cast has come to captivate me: that of Dan Okrent. Consider his description of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series: “It had character development. It had history behind it.