With Hot Stove League extended past Memorial Day because of the pandemic, my ability to maintain an interest in baseball has waned. With few exceptions, I have little interest in watching tired-ass games of the past or baseball players video gaming or repeats of baseball movie standards ad nauseum such “Bull Durham”, “A League of Their Own”, and “Sandlot”. Sports section stories about whether professional baseball will resume and what the games will be like under new rules barely gets my attention though I am expecting a partial refund for my MLB Network package when decisions about the season are resolved.
As reported in the past months, I’ve read two lengthy baseball books this off-season, Volume 1 of Norman Macht’s biography of Connie Mack and reread the 1966 classic The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter, but I goofed recently when picked up Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) by Mark Harris from my stockpile of baseball books.
I turned to my cache of baseball books and selected Mark Harris’s 1956 novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, which is often mentioned in best novels about baseball*. Set in the mid-1950s, a major league pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggin hides the terminal medical condition of his catcher Bruce Pearson, who hails from the small town of Bainbridge, Georgia. Throughout the season, Wiggin protects Pearson whose neither gifted physically or mentally and was often chastised by his New York teammates for being a rube. At first, I was hopeful that Harris would capture the baseball vernacular similar to Ring Lardner’s classic You Know Me Al (1916) or the language and cadences from old timer ballplayers in the Lawrence Ritter book, but Harris's prose didn’t resonate with me. (An audio version of the Lardner book is available in the public domain.)
I even tried watching the 1973 movie version of Bang the Drum Slowly starring a young Robert De Niro as Pearson and Michael Moriarty (who played the prosecutor in the original Law & Order television series) as Wiggin. There are many editing gaffes in the movie and the baseball action is limited because the main story is not about winning the pennant but how the polyester-clad Wiggin befriends his catcher throughout the season. It was interesting to see Vince Gardenia as the team manager and the late Danny Aiello play a slugging first baseman. Little did they know that they would appear together in a much better film – Moonstruck (1987).
Perhaps the biggest indictment of the quality of the movie is that not even appeared dozens of times on the MLB Network.
I usually refrain from writing about books I don’t like so much, but I wanted to share my melancholia of no baseball. It seems how the harder they try to force lesser forms of the sport, the more I miss it. But there is one saving grace of the book and the movie -- hearing “The Streets of Laredo.” The elegiac cowboy tune not only provides the title for the Harris novel, but captures the ambience of our times.
O bang the drum slowly and play the fife slowly,
Play the dead march as they carry me on,
Put branches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.
*Upon further review, I found out that Harris’s previous book, The Southpaw which was published in 1953 is considered the better book. Bang the Drum Slowly references The Southpaw as Henry Wiggin is the narrator of both books. Funny thing Michael Moriarty who plays Wiggin in the movie pitches right-handed.
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