As the days drag slowly toward a new season, baseball fans can cling to three things — the return of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary, the promise of a new Ken Burns baseball documentary, and, should it be necessary in the winter of their cynicism, a Ken Burns pep talk.

Burns’ nine-part documentary on baseball’s history, produced in 1994, is airing at 7 p.m. Tuesdays during January and on Tuesdays and Thursdays in February as part of the opening month’s lineup for MLB Network, which airs in Houston on Comcast channel 108.

Burns, meanwhile, is working on an update to the series titled, appropriately, The Tenth Inning, that will air in the spring of 2010 on PBS.

Burns said Baseball is the only one of his documentary subjects, which range from the Civil War and World War II to jazz and the American West, that he would consider revisiting.

“It (baseball) means that much to this country,” he said.

In the release announcing plans for The Tenth Inning, Burns spoke of the sense of “celebration and introspection” that baseball continues to inspire even as he discussed plans to examine the game’s steroid era and the labor unrest that resulted in the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.

Some fans have trouble reconciling the two, especially in a town (Houston) and at a time where every offseason move by the Astros seems to be countered by another multimillion dollar blockbuster signing by the Yankees or yet another development reminding them that Houston is at ground zero of what could become the grand show trial of the steroid era: the he-said/he-said battle of accusations between Roger Clemens and former trainer Brian McNamee.

"There was a guy named Pete O'Brien who said in 1858, 'You know, they don't play baseball the way they used to,' " Burns said. "Every 10 years, somebody is saying the same thing — that it's all over."

Burns clearly does not subscribe to that theory.

"Think of it. Since the end of (the original Baseball documentary), we have seen Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine and John Smoltz and the Braves," he said. "We have seen the Yankees finally coalesce under one of the game's most gifted managers (Joe Torre), throwing off the buy-buy mentality of George Steinbrenner to give him time to develop Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera.

"Sure, we had steroids, but, man, look at what else we have to offer. The Red Sox. We have Ichiro. We have Cal Ripken. Think of the Willie Mays catch (in the 1954 World Series). Now we have a caliber of play and athleticism that produces similar (catches) all the time. The Marlins won the World Series, twice. The Rays made it to the World Series.

"We are in the middle of a baseball renaissance, as (commissioner) Bud Selig says, and, working on this, I have to agree."

As Burns contemplates the steroid era, he looks at it through the filter of American life at large.

“We live in the age of Viagra,” he said. “People take (medications) to make things better. Why would players be any different?”

The Tenth Inning will begin with the 1992 National League Championship Series, which would account for his comments about the 1990s Braves pitching staff. Burns has yet to determine the end point or whether the episode will last two to four hours (episodes of Baseball lasted from 107 to 151 minutes).

“We were planning for it to be one episode, but we have such a wealth of material,” he said. “Think about it: Baseball had nine episodes and 18.5 hours, and the last action it documented in the major league world was the 1992 World Series.

“I still don’t know how it will end or where we will put the stopper. But God willing, maybe in 10 or 16 years we’ll do an 11th inning.”