Fred's Book Club: Southpaw.

Welcome back to our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers, which falls of course on Hump Day. While the writers themselves may actually have no humps, or even backs, they managed to produce something bound as a book, and as you know, we have a very low bar for qualification in this feature. 

Today we have a book that was made into a well-known film. It's from my baseball library, because I love books and I love -- or loved -- watching baseball, as we will note later. It may be the most famous baseball novel written so far.

Mark Harris, who died in 2007, wrote a number of novels in his day, four of them starring pitcher and narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen. Wiggen is a left-handed starter for the New York Mammoths, a successful club modeled on the Giants, called Author by his teammates because he wrote a book. The first three books in the series were written in the fifties -- The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), and A Ticket for Seamstitch (1957). The fourth, It Looked Like For Ever, came much later, in 1979. Bang is the only one I have read.  

The title comes from the famous song "Streets of Laredo": 

Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Sing the Death March as you carry me along
Take me to the valley, there lay the sod o'er me
I'm a young cowboy, I know I've done wrong

So you might imagine it has something to do with mourning. 

The book opens in a dramatic moment of the off-season, when Wiggen gets a collect call long distance from catcher Bruce Pearson.

"You have got to come and see me," he said. "I am in the hospital."
      "With what?" I said.
      "You have got to come and see me," he said.
      "I cannot afford it," I said. "I am up to my ass in tax arrears." This was the statement of a true rat, and you can imagine how it must of sounded to him. But I knew nothing of the circumstances at the time. If he had hung up on me then and there he would of had a right to do so. Yet who could he of called besides me? There was a silence, and I personally cannot stand silence on long distance, especially if I am not sure how deductible it will be, and I said, "Say something! Do not just stand there!"
      "You have got to come and see me," he said.
      "All he says is I have got to go and see him," I said.
      "What did he do?" she said.
      "He is in the hospital," I said.
      "Then you will have to go," she said.
      "I will come," I said.

Pearson is in Rochester, Minnesota, and he has Hodgkin's disease. The prognosis is very bad. Pearson begs Wiggen to keep his illness a secret so he can play in the upcoming season. 

There's a definite Ring Lardner touch to Harris's style with the book as told by Wiggen, which is not too obtrusive. Wiggen's not a learned character, but is no dummy, either, and can be funny. He is also not particularly lovable. He is often abrasive, combative, selfish, petulant, egotistical, and very, very tired of having Pearson under his wing, defending him to players and coaches. 

Pearson continues to catch for the Mammoths, although he is getting sicker. His real disability to me is that he is as dumb as a sack of hammers. He calls Wiggen Arthur instead of Author, and yet has somehow stayed on a good big-league team without ever knowing how to play the opposition.

He begun thinking about baseball a lot, which he never done before, always treating it before like it was football or golf, not a thing to think about but only play. He said to me, "Arthur, if you was on one club and me on another, what kind of a book would you keep on me?"

     "If I was to keep a book on you," said I, "I would say to myself, 'No need to keep a book on Pearson, for Pearson keeps no book on me.' Because if I was to strike you out on fast balls letter high you would not go back to the bench thinking, 'That son of a bitch Wiggen struck me out on fast balls letter high, so I will be on the lookout for the same thing next time.' No, you would go back to the bench thinking, 'I would like a frank,' or 'I see pretty legs in the stands,' and by the next time you face me again you have forgot all about the time before...."

Wiggen can't help but abuse Pearson, but he truly wants to make the dumbbell a better player and keep his secret from the other Mammoth players and management. 

I guess at the time catchers were still thought to be morons -- decades earlier Bill Dickey (or maybe Muddy Ruel) called the catcher's equipment "the tools of ignorance," and Yogi Berra's quotes in the papers (real or not) didn't help -- but catchers have to be the field generals of the game, especially in Berra's day, when managers didn't usually send pitch signals from the dugout. How could Pearson call a game when he has no idea what batters like to hit? 

Regardless, the relationship between the men during the team's pennant chase is what makes the book, and I couldn't help getting involved in it. I give Harris high marks for a sad story well told, and not a trace of maudlin sentiment anywhere.

I lost interest in Harris when I found out that It Looked Like For Ever featured Wiggen attacking a general during Vietnam for coming to a baseball game while boys were dying overseas. I was already sick of politics invading everything and I had no interest in dealing with lefty politics in my baseball. Maybe Harris was sincere about his own pacifism, maybe not, but we know from the amazing change that American leftists underwent from pacifism after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to war hawks after Operation Barbarossa that pacifism was often the sheep's clothing worn by America-hating wolves.

Bang the Drum Slowly was first performed as a TV drama in 1956 starring Paul Newman as Wiggen and Albert Salmi as Pearson. Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro, two once-respected actors, starred in the 1973 film. I've never seen it, but the bits I've seen made the team look a lot more like the Miracle Mets of '69 than the Giants of Thomson, Mays, and Durocher. I've heard it's good. I might watch it if it comes on TCM. Moriarty was fantastic in The Glass Menagerie and through his years on Law & Order. Not sure what happened to that DeNiro guy.

But I'm not watching any actual baseball this year. Why? Leftism has invaded it; Marxism in the sheep's clothing of concern about police violence while their lupine brethren wreck the cities. Leftism ruins everything. Leftism never lets you find a place where politics will leave you alone. Leftism says that if you want peace, if you want a place of comfort, you have to obey. To hell with that. And to hell with professional sports for playing ball with them.