Sixteen Summers

3-volume set (1951-67), Atlas Video .

This compilation of extracts from baseball newsreels of the 1950s and 1960s proceeds year by year in a seasonal cycle: spring training, with sunny warm-ups and jug-eared rookies chewing gum, followed by the mid-season All-Star game, and finally the World Series. In between these exuberant reports (“Lids Off on Spring Grind”) we see baseball miscellany—“warm applause for Mrs. Gehrig” at an Old Timers’ game at Yankee Stadium, the stoic hitter Ralph Kiner grinning anxiously before his wedding. The narration isn’t exactly fresh; each spring offers another chance to say of the Cleveland Indians, “The Tribe is on the warpath,” but after a while that becomes part of the charm. It is worth noting that in more than one hundred newsreels the only reference to money is to Mickey Mantle’s 1957 raise, which nobody questioned.