Baseball.

It's an irony that has already been repeated to death, but it bears repetition one more time, because it isn't just an irony but, I think, a key moment in the underground, psychic, metaphorical life of the republic: In 1994, for the first time in ninety years, America didn't get a World Series; instead it got Ken Burns's massive documentary, "Baseball." No games on ABC or CBS or NBC; but, on PBS, a plangent history of the game itself that was, obviously, originally meant as a love letter and that - in the event - is most likely an elegy.

Some things need not be belabored: like, for instance, that the players and owners, in an orgy of selfishness right out of Neronian Rome, irretrievably polluted a century-old national myth - the myth that this game, of all games, was not just another raree-show, but was based on a contract of common passion for the game itself between the players and the spectators. Basketball and hockey, in the wake of the baseball strike, have made down-tools-and-walk noises, too. But, though it's venal, it just isn't the same: these guys we knew were secular.

And some things probably should not be belabored. Even the most enthusiastic preshowing reviews of Baseball" observed that it was all a tad overdone. Nine almost unbroken nights of prime-time; celebrity voices from Jason Robards to Studs Terkel to Carly Simon; and tight-close-up interviews with people like Thomas Boswell and George Will, who do understand the game, but also interviews with celebrities whose only reason for being included is that they are famous and that one time or another they went to a game. "Baseball" took up about as much time as the PBS broadcast of Wagner's Ring cycle. And although I, for one, would rather sit through a 3-to-2 game played by bush-leaguers than, ever again, through a complete Das Rheingold, nevertheless one detects - as Henry James would have said - a certain fatal lack of proportion, a failure to grasp the dimensions of the done thing.

In other words: it's a wonderful and maddeningly flawed work, and its most salient flaws are an uncannily precise index of what went wrong with baseball itself And in one word, what went wrong with baseball is what made "Baseball" possible: TV.

I was one of those few Americans who were not dazzled by Brother Burn's previous documentary, "The Civil War" (we're forming a support group with the folks who thought Dances with Wolves was boring and those who found The Bridges of Madison County tooth-softening saccharine - sue us). But it sure as hell was epic - whatever you may happen to think "epic" means (in Burbank I think it's something like, "Big, baby - Big! Emmys!"). At any rate, Burns, in interviews before "Baseball" ran, had read and trusted his own press releases, comparing his long hymn t(i the national pastime to the work of Homer - though Pindar's Olympian odes would have been an analogy more in the ball park.

The fellow has a D.W. Griffith complex. Griffith, the greatest of silent film directors, transformed forever the art of the movies, but was plagued by a Protestant/universalist compulsion to turn whatever he was filming into a Big Statement on Everything: these cosmic hungers are part, of course, of being gifted at all. But they are, in general, not to be trusted.

Thus, "Baseball" establishes eloquently what we had known all along, that the game is, along the hidden pathways of the national unconscious, not just a symbol but an icon of America itself (the green, diamond-shaped fields are, as Robert Coover says in his novel, The Universal Baseball Association, the true cathedrals of the country). So overweening is its moral urgency, though, to make baseball a template for the social history of the American century that Burns's documentary becomes - I don't know another way to say this - spiritually muscle bound. A salient, and a very delicate case in point is its treatment of the crucial figure, Jackie Robinson.

When Branch Rickey hired Robinson for the Brooklyn - the only real - Dodgers, the first African-American in the majors, it was a moment of real glory in our long national struggle with racism. And Robinson, in his first years with the team, bore disgusting racial slurs - and assaults - with a courage that demands the term, "heroic." The problem is that "Baseball" - with the best of intentions - concentrates on the racist terrorism to the near exclusion of two equally crucial facts: first, that Robinson was a splendid player by any standards (surely what he would have wanted emphasized); and second - and this matters - that, for all the ugliness, baseball abolished apartheid almost a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court even began to. Far from a template of our common life, the game at its best was more like a dream, a ritual enactment of what we could be. "Baseball," fine as it is, somehow manages to miss that. And it misses it, I think, because TV is exactly the wrong medium for the game altogether.

Look. It's a pastoral game: Shakespeare could have written a helluva romance about it. It's made up of languors punctuated by ice-needles of precise action, a game you can not, as the saying goes, play with clenched teeth. Even its time is metaphysical: not a set number of minutes on the stopwatch, but three men up and three men down twice in an inning nine times, however long that takes in "real" time, and I'm not even dealing with ties here. It's not only not telegenic, it's subtly anti-telegenic.

Our secular sports, basketball, football, hockey - for God's sake, volleyball - are. They are the stuff of soundbites and instant replays, electron-streams of uninterrupted busyness, leaving room for everything except reflection. (You can watch an 80-yard punt return over and over, like an MTV video; but how can you appreciate the replay of a game-winning single without watching the whole inning - or the whole game?) My science-fiction prediction is that, eventually, they'll be played in sportsdomes before ten cameras and no live spectators at all. It would ease the crowd-control problem, and not make much difference otherwise. With baseball - when it was a game - that would be as unthinkable as lights at Wrigley Field.

Burn's film is nowhere more acute than in its observation that the decline of the game - and let's all admit that the game is now, in any real sense, defunct - began in the fifties, with the coast-to-coast televising of major league play. Loyalties were subtly undermined; advertising megabucks began to affect and, Faustianly, corrupt the biz of the game; and (though Burns doesn't say this) TV-fixated America discovered, uncomfortably, that watching the game in the den with a Bud wasn't as much fun as schlepping out to the local minor-league diamond. Good news for the NFL, that.

Let me be clear. "Baseball" is a lovely piece of work. But its sadness is that it celebrates the myth of our essential game in and through the very medium that is the enemy of all those values - of leisure, of small-community solidarity, of unashamed trust in the love of sport for sport - that the game once incarnated.

Look at how many films we've had about the game: Bull Durham, The Natural, The Babe, A League of Their Own, Field of Dreams, etc. What they all have in common with Baseball," I think, is an unspoken consent that we now believe in the game - as the Middle Ages believed in Camelot - only as a metaphor for what we once might have been, but no longer are. Remember Field of Dreams? How grown men cried at the end? It was my wife, Celeste, who pointed out after we saw it what a mean film it is. "So they bring back all the great baseball legends," she said, "and the big damn triumph is that Kevin Costner will get rich charging admission to see the ghosts of the heroes."

Copy - with respect - to Ken Burns. Lou Gehrig wept.