A DAY IN THE BLEACHERS
Reviewed by Michele Schiavone, Department of English, Marshall University
AUGUST 31, 2004 archive
Most people who pick up Arnold Hano’s reprinted 1955 classic, A Day in the Bleachers, will do so because the book is now subtitled “The 50th Anniversary of ‘THE CATCH.’” This is entirely appropriate, since Willie Mays’s great defensive play that occurred in the first game of the 1954 Giants-Indians World Series is indeed worthy of being remembered for a half century. Note that no other baseball play is referred to so simply and recognized so universally; no other play, famous as it may be, is called “The Hit,” “The Home Run,” or “The Steal,” for example. And Hano’s marvelous recounting of “The Catch” -it takes up all of Chapter 10-must silence any doubters who say, “It got that much attention only because it happened in New York during a World Series.”
Hano’s Chapter 10, which can stand up to close literary scrutiny, is by itself worth the price of the book. It reads like epic poetry: the author, calling Willie “the inimitable Mays, most skilled of outfielders” (118), remembers other hits, other catches, to convey the awe-inspiring sight before him, a sight that just can’t be conveyed on television (as Roger Kahn explains in the introduction). The author also mixes the nuances of the unfolding play with his reactions of confidence, terror, and amazement, as in the following passage, when he realizes he has underestimated the “length of [Vic] Wertz’s blow”: “I wrenched my eyes from Mays and took another look at the ball, winging its way along, undipping, unbreaking, forty feet higher than Mays’ head, rushing along like a locomotive, nearing Mays, and I thought then: it will beat him to the wall” (118). Though we all know the outcome of this play, Hano achieves suspense, and the rhythm of his sentences and the chapter as a whole make for compelling reading.
As great as Chapter 10 is, however, it is not the sole enjoyment of the book. Hano’s narrative voice and persona, established on page 1 and maintained throughout, make A Day in the Bleachers a joy to read and reread. Achieving a skillful balance of game detail, background on the players, and memories of games he had attended since childhood, Hano brilliantly intersperses asides about his wife and the fans surrounding him, as well as a detailed account of all the minutiae involved in going to a game at the Polo Grounds.
The book includes a new foreword by Ray Robinson, an introduction written by Roger Kahn in 1981, and a new afterword by the author, in which he details the subsequent lives of these 1954 players.
Arnold Hano. A Day in the Bleachers. Da Capo Press, 2004. Xii+169 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-306-81322- X.