Bang the Drum Slowly is a 1973 baseball drama directed by John Hancock and starring Robert De Niro, Michael Moriarty, and Vincent Gardenia.
Plot[]
Henry Wiggen is a star pitcher for the New York Mammoths, a fictional Major League Baseball team. He is a valuable player to his manager Dutch, but is in a dispute with the team's ownership, holding out for a new contract and more money. Henry has a side job as an insurance salesman working for the Arcturus Corporation, with ballplayers as his clients. Henry's friend Bruce Pearson, the team's catcher, is a player of limited skill and intellect. Teammates call Henry by the nickname "Author" because the brainy pitcher once wrote a book, although Bruce misunderstands and, with his thick Southern drawl, often calls him "Arthur" instead.
Henry and Bruce leave the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where Bruce has been told that he is terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease. They drive to Bruce's hometown in Georgia because Bruce has always wanted his only friend to see it. On their first night there, Bruce burns his old baseball memorabilia to acknowledge the inevitable end of his life.
The team knows nothing about Bruce's fate. At spring training, Dutch is preparing to release Bruce in favor of a hot young prospect, country boy Piney Woods. So management is amazed and confused when Henry ends his holdout for a high salary and agrees to a new contract, the only condition being that he and Bruce come as a package. If one is on the team, so is the other. If one is traded or sent down to the minor leagues, the other goes, too.
Dutch tries to make Henry reveal why he insists that Bruce catch for him. In the meantime, the Mammoths are losing games and have a low morale, with teammates quarreling among themselves. Knowing that he is dying, Bruce wants Henry to change the beneficiary on his life insurance policy from his parents to his girlfriend Katie. Henry knows that she is interested only in Bruce's money and is taking advantage of his circumstances, so Henry pretends to change it.
One day, when a player teases Bruce, a frustrated Henry blurts out the fact that Bruce is dying. He asks that it remain confidential, but teammates and Dutch all quickly learn the news. They begin to treat Bruce differently and each other as well, and both the team's play and mood both improve. Near the end of the season, Bruce becomes too ill to continue playing.
The team eventually wins the World Series, but Bruce returns home to spend his final days with his parents. As they part ways at the airport, Bruce asks Henry to send him a scorecard from the Series, which Henry laments that he never did.
After the season is over, Bruce dies, and Henry is the only member of the team to attend his funeral, serving as a pallbearer. While visiting Bruce's grave, Henry vows, "From here on in, I rag nobody".