Seeing baseball's colorful history

Back when you could fill your gas tank for about $5 and life was a lot simpler, baseball was the national pastime. The big-name players almost always stayed with one team throughout their careers and were regarded as heroes.

Oh what memories.

A 13-part series, "Baseball's Golden Age," will bring back some of those memories for old-timers and fascinate younger fans by showing legends such as Babe Ruth in living color.

The series makes its debut with two showings on FSN regional networks Sunday. Show times on FSN West are 5 and 8 p.m. On most Sundays during the 13-week run, the first airing will follow Angels baseball, but this Sunday the Angels' game against Toronto is on Channel 13.

The series is an offshoot of the award-winning HBO documentary, "When It Was a Game," first shown in the summer of 1991. A subsequent episode was shown the following year and the third of a trilogy in 2000.

The company that created and produced those shows was Black Canyon Productions, founded by Steve Stern and George Roy. That company was sold five years ago, but Stern and Roy retained rights to the vast library of baseball home movies shot by players and fans.

Roy still does documentaries for HBO, and Stern now has his own company, Flagstaff Films, which produced the new FSN series.

In Sunday's debut episode, one topic is the rivalry between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Larry King talks about how much he hated the Giants. Joe Torre, a Giants fan who was 11 when the Giants' Bobby Thomson hit the "shot heard 'round the world" against the Dodgers in 1951, says, "That was the highlight of my childhood, basically."

Another segment deals with the old debate, who was better, Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio?

Bob Feller offers this: "Trying to sneak a fastball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster in the morning. You couldn't."

Bob Costas tells viewers that DiMaggio himself believed he was the better all-around player "but Williams was the greater hitter."

The interviews add a nice touch, but as with "When It Was A Game," it is the old footage that makes this series can't-miss television.

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