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What: “When It Was a Game III”

Where: HBO, tonight, 10

When the first installment of “When It Was a Game” was shown on HBO in 1991, it amazed those who saw it. Players and ballparks from the pre-expansion era were seen as never before, taken from color, home-movie footage rather than grainy, black-and-while newsreels.

The second installment came out a year later, and was equally stunning.

Now, finally, comes “When It Was a Game III,” and this production lives up to the standard set by the first two. All were co-produced by HBO and Black Canyon Productions, who have teamed up on other award-winning documentaries, such as last year’s “Fists of Freedom” about the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

HBO’s David Harmon is the senior producer of “When It Was a Game III,” and George Roy and Steve Stern, the founders of Black Canyon, are the co-producers. Stern wrote the narration, aptly done by Liev Schreiber.

The show looks at baseball in the 1960s. Airings begin tonight and run through Aug. 4.

Viewers will readily see just how much the game has changed.

Of the ‘60s, Hall of Famer Al Kaline says, “Fathers could take their kids to the ballpark and they really connected with the players. The fans knew who [they] were gonna have on the field from year [to year].”

Says broadcaster Bob Costas: “Because guys stayed with the same teams, you identified them with those teams and with their uniforms. . . . Relatively few games were on television, so you couldn’t say that we actually saw more baseball in the ‘60s. But maybe what we saw made a deeper impression.”

It was an era when players took off-season jobs to make ends meet, when the minimum salary hovered around $5,000 and when teams insisted players get married and have children so they would set down roots and not look to move to another club.

Kaline says, “Ray Boone, when I first joined the ball club, said, ‘Al, if you can leave this game by owning your own home, you’ve had a good career.’ You started saving money and getting [an off-season] job. I got a job every year I played baseball.”

The pictures are riveting and Stern’s words poignant. So are the voice-over interviews with a slew of Hall of Famers, historians, and celebrities such as Billy Crystal.