The United States Steel Hour

A fine live early TV version of Mark Harris' novel. Given the limitations of a television studio,and doing a show "live",this is a bona fide homerun! Newman is great as Henry "author" Wiggen's,star lefthanded pitcher for the NY Mammoths,who takes the teams dying 3rd string catcher under his wing. Newman does a great adlib at the programs opening when he tosses a scrap of paper towards a wastebasket and misses,saying: "Hell of a pitcher I am,I can't even hit the trash can!"

That scrap of paper is the ONLY miss in this fine dramatization of one of the great baseball novels ever written. Too bad nobody has ever filmed the other two novels in Harris' trilogy about Henry Wiggens!And Newman i