Burns adding to baseball saga

Beverly Hills, Calif. — Ken Burns is going to give us four more hours of his "Baseball" documentary series. Because, well, apparently 18½ hours back in 1994 just wasn't enough.

Well, most of us believe that "The Tenth Inning" has a whole lot to do with the fact that Burns is a huge Red Sox fan. And he really, really wanted to make sure Boston's World Series wins in 2004 and 2007 were a part of his narrative.

It's a charge Burns doesn't entirely deny.

"I first thought about it when the Sox won the series. I'd had to edit, so painfully, so many terrible moments in Red Sox history — '46, '67, '75, '78, '86. And when you edit it, it's over and over again," he said. "But that wasn't enough really to do it."

One of the major storylines in "The Tenth Inning," which airs Sept. 28 and 29 on PBS, is baseball's biggest ongoing scandals.

"I think when the steroids fully became an issue and you realized how consequential, in retrospect, the last two decades have been ... that we felt compelled to come back and do it," Burns said. "So I think 2004 made me think about it. Steroids made us decide to do it."

However, Burns sounds like at least a bit of an apologist for the players who used steroids. He even referred to baseball fans (including himself) as "unindicted co-conspirators" for not wanting to hear about steroids. And wanting to ignore the evidence as it mounted.

And both Burns and his co-producer, Lynn Novick, espoused an everybody-does-it attitude to steroids, blaming American society in general.

"Baseball's this wonderful thing in which it is utterly modern and reflective of where we are," Burns said. "Our kids take pills to do better in school and we take pills to do better in the bedroom. Surprise, surprise, our players are taking pills to do better on the field, that it reflects exactly where we are."

OK ...

"We tried to make it a much more human and complicated story and not so much a sort of blame game, which is very much how our media culture can sometimes work," Novick said. "And we really wanted to get away from that and sort of have a little bit more lasting discussion. Make us all think a little bit about the society where we're all being bombarded with potential drugs that can help us do our jobs better. And athletes are no different than the rest of us."

I'm not sure that that's the way all sports fans look at it, but we'll see how it plays out.

GOOD IDEA: Burns, ever the baseball fan, came up with a great idea of how to deal with disgraced ex-player/ex-manager Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame.

"My solution was always — vote him in after he dies," Burns said. "Because he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, but he doesn't deserve to know that he's in the Hall of Fame."

e-mail: pierce@desnews.com