But the film’s most consistent—and surprising—stylistic tic lies outside the lines. An assortment of nattily dressed baseball writers, general intellectuals, executives, and athletes—mostly men—populate the film, interviewed by Burns and his codirector, Lynn Novick, in their homes and offices. (There’s an old saw about sportswriters who dress poorly; Burns might have heard it and picked the ones who didn’t.) They discuss the sport at length, mostly in single outfits the whole 18 hours, creating images that stick. Burns conducted the interviews a couple years before the film’s 1994 release, and the mid-career professionals he talked to dress of their era and class, in mostly traditional office style. Nearly every writer seems to wear an oxford shirt: under a tie and houndstooth jacket for The New Yorker’s Roger Angell, striped with a red one for The Washington Post’s Thom Boswell. Tieless with a gold-button blazer for Boswell’s colleague George Will, who tells me the oxford was either Brooks Brothers or J. Press. Studs Terkel, Will’s spiritual opposite on all things but player compensation, has on a red checkered one, and a jacket. Shelby Foote, held over from Burns’s Civil War doc, goes without, as does John Thorn, the sport’s historian. Dan Okrent, an editor and author who invented both fantasy baseball and an advanced stat, is enough of a presence in the film to get two outfits, neither oxfords, though his main kit caused enough of a stir that Tony Kornheiser called it out in a column: “Memo: Somebody tell Okrent to change that sweater already.” Okrent told me the sweater was Land’s End and cotton, though he doesn’t remember what brand of glasses he wore, or Burns’s outfit. (Will remembers Burns wearing jeans.)

New York Giants’ Willie Mays (the sprezzatura!) and Don Mueller arrive at Penn Station in 1954. Getty Images

Not everything from the film holds up as well: Billy Crystal is present throughout, and later innings are clumsy on labor, assigning a false equivalence between players and ownership. Mostly, though, it covers what’s important very well and, in the process of shoring up a century of sport, makes a case for dressing nicely, or at least with intent. Nearly everyone Burns sits with and covers, whether or not they can hit a curveball, has on a shirt and tie, or a collared shirt; the more casual wardrobes in the film are just as slick. The outfits here are workaday, and effortful, the dress code of yore—a little extra, even though you don’t have to—hinted at in this New Year’s resolution. It’s a way of dressing that, over time, jumps off the screen as much as that bright Navajo sweater. We can’t wear finery to the ballpark, but a stay-at-home oxford seems like a happy compromise.

Mustache icon Rollie Fingers circa 1970. Getty Images

After the bottom of the ninth come extra innings; there Burns reflects, and the sport gets its capstone. Donald Hall, the poet, helps set it apart. Over “the space of America and the time of America,” he says, baseball continues, allowing memory to gather. Right now that’s a half truth, with opening day up in the air. (“No one knows; anyone who tells you they know is lying,” a baseball person tells The Athletic about the 2020 season’s start.) Hall’s baseball, though, is a place we can return to, a thing we can “imagine existing in the future.” Right now it’s only that. Luckily, we can also look to the past.