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Arts & Culture

Baseball: The Capital Of Baseball

Mickey Mantle at bat
Florentine Films/ WETA Washington, DC
Mickey Mantle at bat

Airs Wednesday, July 14, 2010 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV

This summer, PBS will re-broadcast three episodes of Ken Burns’s landmark 1994 series "Baseball." Join Burns for the classic baseball stories from the Great Depression through the 1950s, from Joe DiMaggio and Satchel Paige to Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson, to Willie Mays and Don Larsen.

In the seventh "inning" rare newsreel film and interviews celebrate the glorious heyday of New York City baseball with some of its most memorable moments: manager Casey Stengel rebuilds the Yankee dynasty with switch-hitting slugger Mickey Mantle and the imperturbable talents of Yogi Berra; the "shot heard round the world," Bobby Thomson's home run off Ralph Branca in 1951; Willie Mays' incredible catch in the 1954 World Series; and Don Larsen's perfect game.

The highlight of the episode is 1955, when the Brooklyn Dodgers, sparked by Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, finally win their first World Series, only to be moved by their owner to a new city 3,000 miles away: Los Angeles.

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This episode airs as part of the lead-up to the September 2010 premiere of Burns and co-director Lynn Novick’s "The Tenth Inning," a new two-part, four-hour documentary series that takes "Baseball" from the 1990s up to the present and explores the sport’s new Golden Age — an era of unprecedented home-run totals, popularity and prosperity — as well as some of baseball’s darkest hours — the steroid era.

Think you know a lot about the history of the game? Take the baseball quiz and find out.

Preview: The Capital Of Baseball