A Day in the Bleachers

A Day in the Bleachers by Arnold Hano is a baseball book. It is about the first game of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians, in which Willie Mays made his legendary over-the-shoulder catch deep in center field, known ever after as “The Catch”. The Giants won in ten innings and went on to win four-straight games and thus the best-of-seven-games series.

Arnold Hano was a thirty-two year-old author and editor in September 1954, when he decided, on the night before the opening game, to try to get into the bleachers. His wife scoffed at his chances. Despite our knowing that Hano did get a ticket, the reader is held in suspense until he has found a seat. And, despite our knowing the results of the game and of its effect on the series, we are held in suspense as to its outcome until the final chapter.

A Day in the Bleachers was written with seeming ease in a few short weeks after the game and was published in 1955 by Thomas Y. Crowell. This account of one of the most famous games in the history of the sport, told from the perspective of a fan in the stands, soon came to be recognized as a classic of the genre. It has been in print almost continuously over the past fifty years. The book is full of humor, wisdom, and information for those who know a little or a lot about ballparks, plays, players, and statistics. It is welcoming to first-time readers and rewarding to re-readers.

This is a baseball book, but more than that it is a marvelous piece of literature, worthy of a fine edition. The Arion Press offers an entirely new presentation of the book, honoring the words typographically, adding graphic devices (line and box scores) that document the course of the contest, and recreating key incidents of the “Day” in paintings by a leading artist of the present. Hano tells his own life story in a self-conducted interview. He has updated the afterword, where he tells us what has happened to the men on the field and how baseball has changed in the intervening fifty-plus years. The publisher Andrew Hoyem, a season ticket-holder at the San Francisco Giants stadium, has written the foreword.

Arnold Hano is one of the most distinguished sports writers of our times. As the author of twenty-six books, including biographies of Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Roberto Clemente, and hundreds of articles, Hano followed the careers of the great figures in American baseball.

Over the last decades, San Francisco artist and illustrator Mark Ulriksen has won an enthusiastic following with his images of the American scene. He is the creator of witty covers for the New Yorker, where he is a contributing artist.

For the Arion Press edition of A Day in the Bleachers, Mark Ulriksen has created fourteen paintings in egg tempera on board illustrating incidents in the book. All but one were painted in shades of white to blue-grey to black, and that one is in full color. There are eight single pages, four double spreads, one triple spread, and one quadruple spread, which is the crescendo in color of “The Catch.”