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Old 05-17-2005, 06:36 PM
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Default Ken Burn's Baseball documentary

Posted By: Peter_Spaeth

On a purely baseball level I agree Jackie Robinson while of course great is not as great as DiMaggio and Gehrig and Aaron, but I think the documentary was as much social history as it was baseball. Sitting here in 2005 we probably can never fully appreciate the magnitude of Jackie Robinson's contribution, the unbelievable pressure he must have been under, and the way he responded both in terms of athletic performance and restraint. From the distance of years one can take the point of view that the integration of baseball, and the breaking down of racial barriers in other contexts, was "inevitable," and that Jackie was just the instrument of that inevitable progress of history, but at the time Jackie first stepped onto a field it was anything but. Hindsight always gives a false perspective because we know how things turned out and we tend to view events in light of subsequent events, forgetting that at the time, there were no subsequent events.

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