It's sports week here at Beams and Struts and I have to admit to you that I am not really a big sports guys. To be sure, I can sit down and enjoy a good game of hockey like any red-blooded Canadian. But sports have never been something that captured me very strongly.

Undoubtedly, that has something to do with the fact that I've generally not been very good at them. I'm not a very athetically inclined person. I've always opted for the more intellectaul stream or something that is more conventionally "creative", like music.

But I remember some years ago running into the nine-part documentary series on baseball by Ken Burns. I had already gobbled up Burns' epic series on jazz and was wiling to give the baseball series a go based on the stregnth of Burns' storytelling.

If I'm not into sports, then of all the sports out there, I'm probably the least into baseball. And yet within minutes of sitting down to watch the series, I was utterly captivated. Burns has a way of presenting a topic to you that weaves it together with a fundamental understanding of the world in which we live. Even something as seemingly mundane (at least to me) as baseball.

Check out a video of Burns' demonstrating this skill as he talks about the series: