I wish I could say I sailed through it, but that's impossible since "The Captain" is broken up into seven...yes, seven hours. Compare that to Nolan's 90 minutes.
So, let's do a comparison. Both are Hall of Famers. Ryan's career lasted 27 years. Derek Jeter played for 20 years. How come the shortstop's documentary is...gasp...five and a half hours longer?
Well, you can start with the fact that ESPN knows how to drag out a story for ratings. Plus "The Captain" is produced by a clown car of sycophants...from that idiot Spike Lee to Jeter's agent Casey Close...the guy that just botched up Freddie Freeman's negotiations with the Atlanta Braves. The end result is a vanity plate of baseball memories that will never do anything but put Derek Jeter in the most glowing of klieg lights.
Not to say that he doesn't deserve it. Because the one thing you learn from the laborious "Captain" is that Jeter is a nice guy and avoids confrontations. And that adds up to an informative but incredibly dull...gasp...seven hours.
Of course, all the advance hype was that one of the talking heads in "The Captain" was Alex Rodriguez and we would learn all about the friction between him and Derek.
Um, no. Even that comes off with a lot of carefully chosen words...and nothing else.
Indeed, for me, the baseball exploits are well documented. But the most compelling of the seven hours was the last one where we watch how Derek transforms from a baseball player to a baseball executive while his wife has some life-threatening health problems. That was worth the previous sit of...gasp...six hours.
So, in a comparison of baseball documentaries, I have to say that Nolan Ryan squeaks by for the win. And that's because, largely, Jeter's most interesting story was off the diamond.
LEN'S RATING: Three stars.
Dinner last night: Leftover SPO.
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