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The New Stats Explained
by Ryan T. Campbell
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Johanna quoted in the Chicago Tribune about Fan Safety.
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This Month
Michael Street reviews
Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly
Monday Sept. 15, 2007 12:30pm
Once upon a time, baseball was filled with two kinds of players: country kids and college boys. Mostly illiterate, or scarcely so, these country players came from the rural backwoods, armed only with tremendous talent and little else. Their innocence and gullibility would be often exploited by the savvier veterans, some of whom fell into the college boy category.
Of course, "college boy" was a moniker that spoke of relative education levels more than actual degrees, and thus could be bestowed upon anyone with a high-school diploma who sounded educated. Players with true degrees were called "Doc," "Professor," "Lawyer" or other more or less admiring or disparaging nicknames. Country kids were called "Rube," "Bubba" or, of course, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson.
The tension between these kinds of players exists even today, in the nicknames of players and the way we describe them. Adam Dunn, with his massive frame and placid blond-framed features, is often called "Country," "Big Donkey," or "country strong." Chris Hoiles was called "The Tractor Mechanic," and "Oil Can" Boyd was thus nicknamed for his beer-drinking days in Mississippi. On the other hand, the brilliant Greg Maddux is called "The Professor" or "Math-a-Maddux" for his cerebral play, and Yalie Ron Darling was called "Mr. P" for his Ivy League perfectionist tendencies.
And, of course, there's the universal nickname "Lefty," which brings me to Bang the Drum Slowly. One thing that's true of baseball fact and fiction-if not American culture in general-is that lefties are viewed as being slightly skewed, a little off in the brains department. The name "lefty" in baseball suggests an opposite approach to the game, a certain looniness. The most famous screwballs in pitching history have been lefties, from Bill "Spaceman" Lee to Rube Waddell (who often left the mound to chase fire trucks). Whether their relative rareness makes their oddness more tolerated, or because their handedness truly reflects a different outlook on the world, lefties are the clown princes of baseball.
This is true in baseball literature, too. Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al follows the trials and tribulations of Jack Keefe, a brash but talented left-hander for whom the moniker "lefty" seems superfluous, since he is so obviously a wingnut. "Nuke" LaLoosh, Tim Robbins' memorable weirdo pitcher in Bull Durham, was originally written as a lefty, but changed to a righty, probably because Robbins wasn't convincing hurling with his off arm.
The main character of Mark Harris' Henry Wiggen series (of which Bang the Drum Slowly is the second book) is a lefty, and his story begins in The Southpaw, a coming-of-age tale similar to, if not as patently silly as, Jack Keefe's. Coming up with the New York Mammoths, Wiggen learns about the pitfalls of baseball, on and off the field, relating the story in his simple, down-to-earth style that also approaches (without eclipsing) the sort of irony with which Lardner skewers his lefty Keefe.
The difference, however, is the deep affection that Harris clearly has for Wiggen, whose foibles are outweighed by his attempts to correct them, and whose assessments of his own talent are modest enough to be true. Lardner, on the other hand, skewers Keefe far more often than he lauds him-though there is affection between writer and subject, Lardner's lefty is far less intelligent than Wiggen, and far less sympathetic. And what ultimately makes Henry Wiggen transcend any pigeonholing as a flaky lefty is his compassion for his friend and battery-mate Pearson, who is far more of a country boy than Wiggen.
The book's main action follows Pearson, who has always been a second-tier catcher, and his battle with Hodgkin's disease during what will be his final season with the Mammoths. Revealed early on in the book, the illness becomes a secret between Pearson and Wiggen, lest the team release him. The sly pitcher manages to use his unsigned contract as leverage to ensure that Pearson remains with the team, by demanding that his fate be tied to his roommate's. It is, in fact, due to Higgins' reputation as a stubborn, oddball lefty (as well as his talent as a pitcher) that he is able to get this unusual clause accepted.
Running alongside the plotline of Pearson's illness is the Mammoth's pennant chase against Washington-you know it's fiction when a team from the nation's capital is in contention-as well as Wiggen's quest to reach fifteen-plus wins, and to finally teach Preston to play the game. Harris manages to braid these plot strands together without letting any one dominate, either allowing the book to become a baseball-action tale or a maudlin melodrama of a man in the last months of his life. Part of this is because the action is told through the mind of Wiggen, who has his own concerns on and off the field and is human enough not to want to think of his dying friend. He talks about it rarely and usually indirectly, the way all of us would, and thus achieves a wonderfully realistic treatment of a heavy subject.
There is further melancholy in the fact that Pearson makes great strides in his last season, learning how to "keep a book" on opposing pitchers in order to exploit his imposing power, as well as how to do more behind the plate than merely return the ball to the pitcher. Here, if anywhere, are the baseball nuts-and-bolts that hardcore fans might want. And, as ever, the lessons are metaphorical, the unstated tragedy that it has taken the threat of death to get Pearson to live, even though we all live under the same arbitrary deadline.
the Drum Slowly is best known for the 1973 film made from it, with Michael Moriarty as Wiggen and Robert DeNiro as his best friend, the catcher Bruce Pearson, a role for which DeNiro received an Oscar nomination. As is often the case, the very good movie is secondary to the outstanding book, where the voice of Wiggen and the other ballplayers is pitch-perfect and impossible to produce on-screen. We not only see the team and the game, we see them through the filter of Wiggen's voice and consciousness, a level of interplay that film always has a difficult time recreating.
This interplay ensures that we never feel the heavy weight of the book's deeper themes, partly because Wiggen (and Harris) never dwell on them, and partly because of the constant influx of lighter topics. We see the ballplayers in the locker room, playing their mysterious card game "Tegwar," carousing in hotel rooms and bars, and generally being ballplayers. The tension of Wiggen's contract holdout, his personal attempt to reap the rewards of his bonus clause, and the machinations of the Mammoth's greedy owner, are all familiar elements of baseball novels. They provide a kind of soft padding for the harder edges of Pearson's decline.
The wonderful contrast makes the book resonate more strongly, just as Wiggen's affectless tone lends greater depth to his narration. Readers will be surprised to see the 1956 copyright date, as only prices and other minor details reveal this book's age. Harris has created a baseball classic, one which achieves timelessness because of its focus on the universal moments in baseball and life. Baseball as a metaphor for life is an image often used, but never so deftly handled as Harris does in Bang the Drum Slowly, well worth reading by baseball fans of any age, and one of the lesser known great baseball novels.
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