When It Was a Game (1991)

Baseball Fan

This is a collection of movies shot by the players themselves. It's a great look at baseball past....however, I'm not old enough to know who a lot of the players are and it would have more enoyable had the producers added the names of the players. September 19, 2008

Baseball history

This is the best of the thre series. It has great footage and insightful perspective on the early game. A must have! September 11, 2008

baseball very very good to me

It's a must. great piece of work. Home videos are the worlds best as for true americana August 10, 2008

What a marvelous way...

to make money off of 8mm home movie films!

You know, back in the day people used to laugh at how bad home movies were. And they really were pretty bad. Well, these home movies really aren't much better. And the total package is really raunchy.

It's sorta neat to see some of the old ballparks and players. For about five minutes. Then the narrator starts to become mega-annoying, and you're wondering just where the heck this stuff is happening and who these people dressed in uniforms are and just why am I being shown poorly-framed movies of a paunchy guy on a fishing boat?

It's a surreal experience. If you can accept its surreality and just go with the flow, you might manage to find some sort of enjoyment here. Otherwise... don't bother. September 16, 2007

Wow. Color film footage of Lou Gehrig and much, much more

"When It Was a Game" is composed entirely of 8mm and 16mm home movie footage that was taken by players and fans between 1934 and 1957. What this means for every baseball fan who has seen nothing but black & white newsreel footage of the good old days is the opportunity to see great players and the old ballparks where they played in living color. As soon as your see Lou Gehrig in color your heart just about skips a beat. Every spring right before Opening Day I watch the Ken Burns 9-inning documentary on "Baseball," and once it gets up to the Sixties and we start seeing things in color, the whole thing loses some of its charm for me because I am so used to seeing old footage and photographs in black & white. That makes the nostalgic images in "What It Was a Game" so astounding.

The only thing I can come up with to compare this documentary to wuld be the 1953 Bowman baseball cards. That was the year Bowman went to photographs, with 64 black & white 2 1/2" x 3 3/4" cards and 160 in color. These remain some of the most beautiful baseball cards ever made, particularly card #32 of the St. Louis Cardinals' Stan "The Man" Musial. When we see footage of Musial in this documentary, his uniform a beautiful combination of black and red, this is just something transcendent about that image. Even when these are just home movies taken before a game, seeing Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, Bill Dickey, Carl Hubbell, Robin Roberts, and Jackie Robinson in color is just so captivating. Even shadowy footage of Satchel Paige in the major leagues at last is memorable. Then there are the shots of some of the living Hall of Famers such as Honus Wagner and Cy Young, including film of the greatest outfielders of the first half century: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker. I have seen black & white photographs of their joint appearance, Ruth ill and not wearing a uniform, but this is in color and the pictures are in motion.

The producers have to come up with something for somebody to say while we watch these fascinating images, and there is a mixture of recollections from former players, poetic observations from sportswriters, and some actual commentary on what we are seeing (I have reason to suspect that some of this is leftover audio from Burns's "Baseball" since they are the same voices). But you will probably have to watch this 57-minute documentary a couple of times to catch everything that is being said because a real baseball fan is just going to lose themselves in these pictures. Players are often identified, which is good because since they are not in black & white some of them are actually hard to recognize. But in terms of the most shocking images that would have to be reserved for the section on the old ballparks where we see Chicago's Wrigley Field when the outfield wall was not covered with ivy and there were no bleachers for the fans. If that does not give you a sense they we have gone back into the distant past when baseball was a game, nothing will. May 16, 2003

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