A Mammoth DVD Set Brings You Decades Of Baseball, Minus The Distortion

The same sense of perspective that can give a historical account depth and context can sometimes deprive it of honesty. Example #1: Bill Buckner.

Anyone making a documentary today about the 1986 World Series between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox would, very likely, place great emphasis on the Game 6 moment when the ball went through the legs of first-baseman Bill Buckner, which allowed the winning run to score, sending the series to a seventh game, which the Mets won, denying the Red Sox the title that they had previously been within one out — one strike — of taking. (This would, of course, have been both a blessing and a — sorry — curse, because as Boston fans would learn in 2004, it's fun to win, but it means you have to stop complaining and remove your hands from your garments, which is an adjustment if you have them perforated for easier rending.)

But Buckner's not guilty; not really, and a smashing new DVD set provides killer evidence.

A feast for your baseball-loving soul, after the jump.

 

Lost in the "Bill Buckner ate my hopes and dreams" account is the fact that, by the time that happened, the game was already tied. They were not within one out of the championship when Buckner made that error. They were not within one strike of the championship. That chance was already gone, after the pitching staff managed to cough up three straight hits and a wild pitch. A wild pitch that scored the tying run, for heaven's sake. If you're going to get into the dangerous business of assigning blame, there is at least as good an argument that Bob Stanley (who threw the wild pitch) threw away that World Series as there is that Buckner did.

If Stanley gets Mookie Wilson out instead of throwing a wild pitch, the series is over. If Buckner makes the play at first a few minutes later, however, all that happens is that the game goes on and the Red Sox get to see whether they can come up with enough offense to win it. Everybody knows how it ends if Stanley gets Wilson out; nobody knows how it ends if Buckner makes the play at first.

But it is Buckner who is the iconic image of that series, who was harassed for years, who got to be the symbol of the entire moaning, wailing misery of being a Red Sox fan at that time. Buckner's the guy who got — literally, according to his own account — run out of town.

It's madness. It's completely, utterly unfair. And one of the best pieces of evidence to that effect comes from the 1986 entry from The Official World Series Films Collection, a mammoth new DVD set compiling the hour-long videos that Major League Baseball has been creating to wrap up the series every year since 1943.

They are presented in the set as they were originally produced, which means that 1986 looks just like you remember video looked like in 1986 — cheesy graphics, music with all the edge you would expect in your local roller rink, and a look that really resembles a long highlight film with breathless narration.

By the later years — take the eventual Red Sox victory in 2004, for instance — they look much more like documentaries. That one is narrated by Denis Leary, and as he explains about "the Curse" of the Red Sox (broken that year), the emphasis when he discusses the 1986 Series — of course — is on Buckner. Buckner, Buckner, don't get him started about Buckner. By then, the legend has overtaken what even this same series of films knew was the real story originally.

In the 1986 film, made at the time and not through the incredibly long and wildly unreliable zoom lens of sports-fan history, what Buckner did is just the cherry on the sundae of misery. It is a short footnote. It is how Game 6 ended, but it is not what went wrong for the Red Sox. It is one of a cascading series of disasters. He is obviously not to blame in any distinguishable way.

This is all a rather long way of explaining that this DVD series, imperfect as the audio and video are given the production values available at the time, is tremendously satisfying, precisely because it's raw material. This is what you would have seen at the time. This is how they understood things then. This is not the historical World Series; this is the contemporaneous World Series. This is the snapshot World Series; the time capsule World Series. Shots of the fans will remind you about mullets, about how many more people used to wear glasses, about how kids at baseball games always look the same.

Baseball's unique and maddening charm lies in its slow build and bursts of activity — in any documentary about a World Series, you see how that plays out over the entire course of a series; how momentum can swing back and forth over the course of days, not plays (as it would in football). Watching a bunch of them back to back, you get to see those rhythms, how hitting comes in waves, how a pitcher tries to calculate how long he can hold it together.

It's a pricey set — $171.99 at Amazon at the moment — but it's not one of those pricey sets where five good discs have been padded with 40 you'll never watch. They're all World Series films, one per year. You could easily sit down and watch any, or every, one. The video is grainy and the music — in case I haven't mentioned it — is almost unspeakably corny. But for anyone who loves baseball, or has loved baseball, this might be the superstar of holiday gifts.