MLB Network Presents: Brett (2024) - Does it hold up?

The only Royal Hall of Famer got the documentary treatment for MLB Network at the beginning of the year. Did they handle their subject with grace?

Back in January 2024, MLB Network announced that the next MLB Network Presents would be about legendary Royals player George Brett. Unfortunately for many, including myself, it was announced as an MLB Network exclusive that would not be streamed anywhere but at the Network website, available only to those with cable or streaming TV subscriptions that included the channel. As a subscriber to YouTube TV, we were left out in the cold.

Then, good news! Toward the end of the season, MLB announced that anyone who paid for a subscription to the MLB.TV service - including many, like myself, who follow their teams from outside the market - would have access to MLB Network through the MLB app, including at least some of their MLB Presents collection, but especially including their Brett documentary.

I don’t know if you noticed, but things were pretty busy for the Royals and for Royals fans at the time of that announcement. But I am fortunate enough to have the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off, so I took advantage of the free time and a visit with my family to watch the documentary with my father. Spoilers, but we had a good time!

There is very little to complain about when discussing the nearly 90-minute documentary. In fact, my only real complaint was that the Closed Captioning provided was spotty at best, frequently misspelling words, putting the wrong words in, putting words in at the wrong time, or omitting whole sentences entirely.

But if you ignore the accessibility issues, the production was absolutely fantastic. They had lots of great footage and some really fun interviews. In those 90 minutes, they managed to hit every well-known George Brett topic either my dad or I knew. It turns out my dad was the only one of us who knew about Brett’s hemorrhoids in the 1980 World Series, but I was “fortunate” enough to be the one who had already heard the Bellagio story. Still, both of us learned a little something and had a good laugh along the way.

The throughline throughout the documentary, though, was George Brett’s fear, seemingly brought about by his father’s physical abuse as a child and verbal abuse as an adult. It gave us both a whole new perspective on Brett’s career and legacy. It made one of the last beats of the documentary - where George burns a tri-tip steak he was cooking for family dinner because he’s talking to his children.

He blames the documentary team for the error, saying they told him to talk to his kids, but it says something about the man that he took the directive and ran with it to the degree of forgetting about the steak until it had heated to nearly 20 degrees more than Brett had originally intended. He claims he was 5 - or maybe 8 - minutes late, but my experience with grilling large hunks of meat suggests it was probably quite a bit more than that.

One thing I truly appreciated about the documentary was that it did not completely avoid Brett’s foibles or character flaws. It didn’t harp on them and turn the thing into a hit piece, but they were mentioned with enough time that the viewing audience would be well aware that he was something of a womanizer in his youth and could be lazy at times, both of his own admission.

Honestly, the whole story reminded me of the arc Jamie Tartt goes through in the excellent Apple+ TV series, Ted Lasso. Tartt also starts his career as a womanizing over-talented, underworking player. As the story continues, you learn that a lot of his motivations come from having an abusive father. Tartt even struggles with his play when proving his father wrong stops being a motivating factor for him in the same way Brett did. It makes me think that if you want to get a really good idea of what it felt to know Brett, you could do worse than watch that show and focus on Tartt.

Ultimately, the documentary should be considered an excellent example of the medium. Celebrating a player in a fun and thoughtful way and helping ensure that he isn’t forgotten by a new generation of fans.

Bonus: Reviewing the 2014 AL Pennant Reunion documentary

After we finished MLB Network Presents: Brett, my dad and I decided to scroll around the app and see what else might catch our eye. We discovered that they also had the documentary about the Royals 2014 AL Pennant Reunion on there. It was produced by Eric Hosmer’s new company, MoonBall Media. It can also be viewed on YouTube for free.

Coming in at 17:38, the documentary is short and sweet and full of love for that team and its idiosyncracies in the way that you’d imagine a company owned and operated by former players who made their mark on the sport by playing for that team would. I watched it on YouTube when it came out a few months ago and enjoyed it immensely, and it was still quite good on a rewatch.

If, like me, you find yourself with some extra free time this holiday season, and you have an MLB.TV subscription, you could do a lot worse than to watch these two documentaries. For some, like my dad, it will be a fun trip down memory lane. For newer fans, it will be a great opportunity to learn about a player who, in many ways, defines how the Kansas City Royals are perceived even today.