Cable Is Where Joe DiMaggio Has Gone

It’s ever harder to celebrate a sport at once swollen by television money and eroded by greed.

One where even klutzy journeymen are millionaires. Where mindless fans taunt players, who then mindlessly charge like frothing pit bulls after their tormentors. Where players are apt to switch teams like toothpaste.

It’s ever harder to applaud.

Yet Ross Greenburg’s “When It Was a Game” does just that on the eve of Tuesday’s All-Star Game. Of course, it’s not baseball of today but that of 1934-57 that this 57-minute ode lovingly recalls at 10 tonight on HBO. Back then, someone observes, there was still “a comfortable rhythm to the season.”

This joyously sentimental film has a comfortable rhythm. Consider it a sort of down payment on a longer and more comprehensive baseball documentary being prepared for PBS by another filmmaker, Ken Burns of “The Civil War” fame.

Filling the screen with surprisingly high-quality 8- and 16-millimeter color home-movie footage, “When It Was a Game” has the fine lines of a graceful antique. And museum piece it is, in both the pictures and attitudes it presents. Right before your eyes, these are The Good Old Days.

There are great old players and great old parks, each its own universe. There are players playing and players cutting up. There are memorable shots of the St. Louis Cardinals’ grimy Gashouse Gang and those superlative New York Yankees teams of the late 1930s, including the one that destroyed the Chicago Cubs in the 1938 World Series. And there are the 1938 Cubbies themselves, riding in open black limousines during a ticker-tape parade, a club soon to be demolished in four games.

Although you’re as apt these days to see girls playing sandlot ball as you are boys, it’s the nation’s males who historically have been bonded, and sometimes even defined, by their association with baseball.

As this former sandlot player watched this program--hearing the sounds of the ball popping against the leather mitts of players warming up before a game--his personal memories took over: The euphoria of the player, aged 8, receiving his first baggy flannel uniform from the coach and trying it on at home in front of a mirror. Then the utter despair of the same sandlot player getting cut from a team in another year.

“When It Was a Game” could stand on its home movies alone. Just watching these pictures is an education and great fun. Yet it’s the voice-overs from such former ballplayers as that splendid line-drive hitter from the Cardinals, Enos Slaughter, that give the footage context:

“They gave me my cap, top and bottoms and red socks. You bought your own sweat socks. You bought your own jockey straps. You had to see that they got laundered. You even had to pay for your own sandwich between double-headers.”

While penny-pinching the players, owners could afford caviar and champagne for themselves during double-headers. Further testimony to the slave/massuh relationship between players and clubs of that era comes tonight from a former pitcher: “They could trade you. They could do anything to you until you were in the majors 10 years. You were just like an automobile.”

In a way, today’s players are automobiles too: Porsches. Just as yesterday’s players were often underpaid and exploited, many contemporary major leaguers seem ungrateful and demanding, wanting to renegotiate contracts that are already obscenely fat, but rejecting pay cuts when they perform badly.

How far removed this seems from, say, Yankee great Joe DiMaggio who, in addition to being shown tonight, is also the subject of a July 16 “Biography” program on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network. The “Biography” on Joe is hardly joltin’, failing to explore anything in depth beyond his career on the field.

Yet in one interesting sequence, a youthful, toothy DiMaggio explains to a newsreel camera in 1938 why he is rejecting his $25,000 contract and becoming a holdout. Even though $25,000 was a tidy sum then, the episode seems almost quaint by the standards of today’s multimillion-dollar contract disputes between athletes and owners. And indeed, DiMaggio ultimately capitulated, taking the $25,000 while worrying that he had antagonized fans by holding out.

In those days, he has since noted, angry fans merely called players bums. Today, their viciousness is boundless, ranging from racial insults to personal attacks on a player’s character.

“When It Was a Game” shows DiMaggio leading the Yanks in their grand rivalry with the Ted Williams-led Boston Red Sox. There is also a small section near the end of the program noting the breaking of major league baseball’s color barrier and the contributions of Jackie Robinson and other early black players.

Because it stops in 1957, “When It Was a Game” refers essentially to a white pastime, something obvious from the screen’s near absence of black faces. Thus, more than anything, this is a freeze frame on a period when blacks were mostly excluded from mainstream America--a commentary on a sport that threads the culture, reflecting both its greatness and its inequities. That’s why, even more than a game, baseball is a social history.