Depending on where your loyalty lies within major-league baseball, your opinion of the best player, play, or World Series can vary wildly. It should come as no surprise then that in A&E’s attempt to address the multitude of opinions they’re releasing Baseball’s Greatest Games, an entire series of DVDs devoted to highlighting the best moments of MLB history. So far, the series focuses on moments as recent as Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit in the Yankees’ game against the Tampa Bay Rays, the triumphant return of the Boston Red Sox to the ALCS spotlight in 2004, or Mookie Wilson’s game-winning play for the Mets against the Red Sox in 1986. The series has the potential to mine MLB history for little golden moments until the end of time – but should they?
Even if you’re not a huge baseball fan, the Baseball’s Greatest Games series holds a fair amount of merit. Too often a baseball game can go nowhere with little to nothing exciting happening for a three-hour span; if you’re looking to turn people away from a sport, that’s a surefire way to do it. By contrast, the games in this series are genuine nail-biters or at the very least manage to capture the excitement that surrounded them. Unlike A&E's box-set releases of complete World Series runs, this series is much more digestible, with each being one game that runs somewhere in the 3-hour range (although the Yankees and Red Sox 2004 game is 4-hours), and the first wave of releases has a solid selection to boot.
For the sake of disclosure, the four Baseball’s Greatest Games DVDs this review is based off of include the 1991 World Series: Game 7 between the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins, the 1986 World Series: Game 6 between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Mets, Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit for the New York Yankees against the Tampa Bay Rays, and the 2004 ALCS: Game 4 between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
DVD Bonus Features
Only the Derek Jeter DVD has extras and those include a post-game interview with Jeter and a reel of his career milestones.
"Baseball's Greatest Games DVD Series" is on sale September 6, 2011 and is not rated. Sports, Television.
