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Batter Up
- Abstract
To the Editor:
I applaud George Weigel [“Politically-Correct Baseball,” November 1994] for brilliantly skewering the political correctness that undermines Ken Burns’s television documentary Baseball, although it is amusing to note that Burns’s musical score contributes some remarkably crude ethnic stereotyping of its own: John McGraw makes his appearance to the subtle strains of “Danny Boy”; Connie Mack is accompanied by “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”; the arrival of a Negro Leaguer is inevitably signaled by a Mississippi Delta slide guitar; and Roberto Clemente gets”Oye Como. “I am surprised that Hank Greenberg wasn’t introduced by “Hava Nagila.”
But what finally causes this long-awaited epic by America’s preeminent documentarian to self-destruct is the inevitable corollary to Baseball’s “central flaw” of political correctness: its astonishing lack of factual correctness.
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