Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Bang the Drum Slowly is Mark Harris' follow up to his first baseball novel, The Southpaw. In the second book we follow Harris's narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen, a star pitcher, through a baseball season with the New York Mammoths (a fictional team based on the New York Yankees). Like all great sports stories this book is more about life than sports. The Mammoths are having a good season but they have not come together as a team, they are bickering and playing just well enough to hold off an inferior Washington team in the penant chase. In the begining Wiggen is trying to conceal his friend, and catcher, Bruce Pearson's Hodgkin's Disease so he doesn't get kicked off the team. Ironically, as more and more people find out about his illness and iminant death, the team begins to rally aound Pearson and they finally come together as a team.

Bang the Drum Slowly is writen in the venacular of ball players in the 1950's, which makes it even richer. It also offers a great look into life as a baseball player in a more innocent time, when the star pitcher has an off season job as an insurance agent selling all his teammates annuities so they don't end up like the broken down players bumming a few bucks around the ball park. While it was written almost 50 years ago this book still holds up well.