Passion + Baseball = Ken Burns : Television: The epic 18 1/2-hour study of the sport, has its debut tonight on PBS.

There is passion in filmmaker Ken Burns’ voice when he talks about baseball. It is intense, almost as intense as his anger over the strike that shut down the sport this summer.

“I think these guys have forgotten that they are the custodians of more than the bottom line,” Burns said. “They just don’t get it.”

“Baseball,” Burns’ epic 18 1/2-hour study of the sport, debuts tonight on PBS, which showcased his monumental film of the Civil War two years ago. For him, the order of projects was logical.

“I knew for the 5 1/2 years I was making ‘The Civil War’ that this was the sequel,” Burns said. “If you wish to know the country the Civil War made us, study baseball. If the Civil War was the American Iliad, I think baseball is the American Odyssey.”

Burns’ affection for the game began in his childhood. Born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he grew up in Newark, Del., and Ann Arbor, Mich., loving baseball and rooting first for the Dodgers, then for the Orioles and finally the Tigers.

“It was a great time of my childhood, the one refuge I had,” he said. “My mother was sick with cancer much of the time and died when I was 11. It was a hard childhood for me, except for baseball.”

Then, like so many fans, Burns abruptly dismissed the game. “It was not relevant for me for a time,” he said. “There were other things going on--Vietnam, civil rights.”

By 1975, Burns found himself in New England and rediscovered baseball, just in time for the great Boston-Cincinnati World Series. “The fact that I left baseball was outrageous,” he said. “When I came back to it, it was like I lifted my head out of the sand.”

The film project represented a daunting task. “The Civil War was the story of four years that had a start a middle and an end,” he said. “Baseball is 200 years, the story of America with powerful characters, a story that takes in race, the labor struggle, immigration, the rise and decay of great cities. It is a story that still isn’t finished.”

The ratio of footage shot to footage used for this project was 30-to-1. “It runs 18 1/2 hours and we had to cut a lot to get there,” Burns said. “The Civil War was 11 1/2 hours. I could do 11 1/2 hours just on the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Although much of the film is nostalgic, Burns is not a sentimental sort. “We have the mistaken idea that history is just a political-civic narrative,” he said. “History is normally dry dates, facts and events. Emotion is what makes it stick in the mind and heart. This film stirs powerful emotions. I am an emotional archeologist.”

Burns has this little test that he uses to compare the relevance and impact of baseball against other sports. “Tell me,” he said, “how many points did Wilt Chamberlain score? How many yards did Walter Payton gain?

“People don’t know those numbers. But they know 56 and .406 and 61 and 714 and 755. Those numbers mean something over time.

“Baseball is unique in a number of ways. There is no clock. You play against yourself and your own excellence. The defense has the ball. No other sport does that.

“It is a sport with rigid rules played on fields with different dimensions. It is the only game you can win or lose on a play in foul territory. It begins in spring and ends in fall, just like life.”

Then there is the matter of success at the task. In basketball or football, you can find a successful play and run it over and over and over again. How often did the ball go to Michael Jordan when he played for the Bulls? How frequently did San Francisco use passes from Joe Montana to Jerry Rice?

“In baseball, Babe Ruth came up only once every nine times,” Burns said.

“The greatest baseball players fail seven in 10 times and they’re still in Cooperstown. Things like that make baseball unique.”