Sitting mostly at home these days, I found myself wishing that there was baseball. Baseball is the perfect sport for when you have lots of time on your hands. The slow pace doesn’t matter. I remember a time when I was in graduate school and had a bad case of the flu that kept me in bed for more than a week. I looked forward each day to the radio broadcasts of the White Sox games. Win or lose, it brightened the day.
In the absence of real games, I decided to watch my favorite baseball movie, Bang the Drum Slowly. It doesn’t make most lists of favorite baseball movies, but I find it captures more of the essence of the game than films like Field of Dreams that romanticize the game. The movie was released in 1973, but it was based on a book written by Mark Harris in the 1950s and has the feel of an era before baseball became big business. The movie stars a young Robert de Niro who gives a terrific performance as a back-up catcher who has a terminal disease. The team’s star pitcher (Michael Moriarty) tries to help him hide the illness and stay on the team. Despite the serious theme, the movie is often quite funny. The pep talks given by the manager (Vincent Gardenia) are hilarious, as is much of the banter among the players.
In the end, the movie quenched my thirst for baseball, at least temporarily. It felt like baseball. The players faced real dilemmas that teams encounter during a pennant race. With, of course, one major difference, a teammate who was dying. The players responded with an awkwardness you would expect from young men and but also with sensitivity. Maybe it’s a movie for our times. Or at least to enjoy baseball for a couple of hours.
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