Lewes club to host ‘Baseball’ episode screening March 4
The Lewes Base Ball Club will partner with the Rehoboth Beach Film Society to offer a free screening of “Inning One – Our Game,” part of the critically acclaimed series "Baseball" by noted documentary filmmaker and Delawarean Ken Burns.
The screening will take place at 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 4, at the Cinema Art Theater, 17701 Dartmouth Drive, Lewes. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. The free screening is made possible by the Lewes Base Ball Club. Seats are limited, so attendees must sign up by emailing lewesbaseball@gmail.com.
“Inning One” covers the earliest days of baseball and reflects the period the Lewes Base Ball Club interprets and plays by, namely the rules of 1864. According to PBS, in New York City in the 1840s, people needed a diversion from the "railroad pace" at which they worked and lived. They found it in a game of questionable origins. The Inning One – Our Game episode looks at the origins of baseball in the 1840s and takes the story up to 1900. Burns refutes the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown and traces its roots instead to the earliest days of the nation.
"Baseball" is a nine-part series that examines nearly 200 years of American history through the prism of its national pastime. Americans have played baseball in one form or another since the early 19th century, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and debated the meaning of freedom. At the game’s heart lie mythic contradictions: It is a pastoral game that was actually born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating – and has excluded as many as it has included, a profoundly conservative game that has sometimes managed to be years ahead of its time.
The series celebrates the achievements of dozens of memorable Americans who, through baseball, became national icons – including Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Sandy Koufax, Satchel Paige, Joe DiMaggio, Christy Mathewson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Hank Greenberg, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Jackie Robinson – and follows the fortunes of two of the most beloved teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. Still, the series is much more than an accounting of games won and lost, teams rising and falling, rookies arriving and veterans saying farewell.
It also celebrates the extraordinary stars of the Negro Leagues, the pioneers who paved the way for integration of baseball, and ultimately, America at large. The story of baseball is therefore fundamentally the story of race in America. But it is also the story of the transformation of millions of immigrants from everywhere into new generations of Americans; of the rise and fall of great American cities; of fathers and sons and of mothers and daughters; and of the people’s insatiable need for heroes. It is an integral and compelling manifestation of the American experience itself.
Learn more about RBFS at rehobothfilm.com. For further information about the Lewes Base Ball Club, go to lewesbaseball.org.
