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Harris wrote four novels from the persona of Henry Wiggen, a pitcher with the New York Mammoths, a team modeled — explicitly in the movies — on the Yankees. To the end, Harris was best known for the 1973 film, Bang the Drum Slowly, for which he also wrote the script, but the reason it made a good and lasting movie (aside from the cast, which included Michael Moriarty, Robert De Niro, and Vincent Gardenia) is also the reason it’s not his best book. Bang the Drum Slowly is slightly sentimental as it concerns the dying catcher Bruce Pearson, a simpleton who calls Wiggen “Arthur” when everyone else calls him “Author” in recognition of his having written a book.
Lardner knew players from writing the “In the Wake of the News” sports column in the Tribune. Harris, by contrast, was an academic, with a doctorate in American studies. Still, Harris, like Lardner, got the feel of the clubhouse right. Baseball is an odd game because it’s such an individual sport — it always comes down to pitcher versus hitter — and yet the players spend day after day in intimate circumstances. In both The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly, Harris nails the intangible sense of chemistry that results as few writers have, perhaps best in the Bang the Drum Slowly line, “Winning makes winning like money makes money.” Even today, a reader will see much of Lou Piniella in Harris’s Dutch Schnell (perfectly played by Gardenia in the film). When a player insists he is very careful, Schnell replies, “That is what everybody says, yet the hospitals are full of babies.”
That would be The Southpaw, on all three counts.
