Bang the Drum Slowly

Tragedy and baseball seem to go hand in hand, over the decades there have been some very influential people that have been struck down with some very disabling diseases. Here we're given a fictional story that could have been any number of players on any one of a dozen teams, and from beginning to end it tears at your heart strings. With Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty in the lead roles the rest of the cast follow along in a high emotional state that draws everyone into performing at their best.
When a catcher for the New York Mammoths discovers he has Hodgkin's disease, he and his pitching buddy work against the odds to keep the information from the team and the owners. For an early De Niro role you can see his stardom just waiting to burst out on to the screen, throwing himself into the role of this sick ball player you truly believe that he is dying. The friendship that builds between De Niro and Moriarty's characters is so strong that when the end finally comes its not surprising that Moriarty's character is the only one to acknowledge the passing of his friend.
The only drawback to this film is that it comes across as a made for TV movie, there's so much sharing of feelings that you'd think that you were watching the Lifetime Channel. Yet in today's air of openness about cancer, Hodgkin's, and other serious diseases its hard to think back to a time when things weren't so accommodating for athletes. Other than the style it was shot in, and the fact that the death scene has a huge build up with no pay off, it's a decent film it shows the true life of ball players in the early 70s and how hard they had to fight for their jobs, whether they sick or healthy.