{"id":342,"date":"2014-03-21T14:33:49","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T18:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=342"},"modified":"2015-10-17T23:25:28","modified_gmt":"2015-10-18T03:25:28","slug":"scd-a-day-in-the-bleachers-the-willie-mays-catch","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/?page_id=342","title":{"rendered":"Sports Collectors Digest: A Day in the Bleachers — The Willie Mays catch"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel<\/span><\/p>\n

No further explanation is really needed, is it? Any baseball fan who can talk about the great plays in history knows about that over the shoulder, back-to-the-plate catch Willie made in Game One of the 1954 World Series (not to mention the throw that followed), and knows it was one for the ages.<\/p>\n

But to the people who sat in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds that day, it was a great feat to witness, but then attention moved on to the rest of the game, eventually won by the Giants on a Dusty Rhodes home run. The Cleveland Indians, winners of 111 regular season games, had the wind kicked out of them and never recovered, losing four straight.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we left the ballpark that afternoon, the talk was of Rhodes, not of Mays,\u201d recalls Arnold Hano, 83 this year, who sat in the left field bleachers that day, out of camera range. (How unfortunate: imagine if he\u2019d been in the photo of the Mays catch!) Hano had gone to the ballpark, just as a fan, hoping to snare a bleacher ticket to see a World Series game. He hadn\u2019t been to a Series game since \u201936, when he sat in the Yankee Stadium bleachers behind a rookie named DiMaggio.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not think at all of writing about the game,\u201d he said, during a recent telephone chat. \u201cI had recently left a job as editor in chief at Lion Books when they had cut our salaries 10% during an Eisenhower era recession. {Editor\u2019s note: Lion was the publisher of the early editions of \u201cBaseball Stars of 1953\u201d etc}. \u201cDuring pre-game activities, I watched Bob Feller doing lousy pushups in the outfield, and I made a little note about it in my scorecard. As the game progressed, I continued to take notes in the scorecard and in the margins of my New York Times. I was watching pretty much everything that was going on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved the bleachers, loved the people there. I went to an Angels game last year, sat in some executive box, everyone was watching the game on the TV screens and talking about everything but baseball. The bleachers are still where I belong.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyway, I got home and told my wife that I was going to try to turn my observations into a magazine piece. I wrote 10,000 words and trekked off to \u201cThe New Yorker\u201d, thinking it was for them. I arrived unannounced, someone took it upstairs, and an hour later came down and rejected it. \u2018It\u2019s not right for us,\u2019 he said, but that was fine, it was great to get such an on-the-spot reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not to be deterred, Hano and his agent Sterling Lord decided to try to sell it as a book. A full book on a single game. Hano redid it in three weeks, and after a rejection by Crown, sold it to Thomas Y. Crowell for a $500 advance. It was published in the summer of \u201955, as the Hanos were driving west to Laguna Beach, California, relocating on the west coast three years ahead of the Giants.<\/p>\n

The book, \u201cA Day in the Bleachers,\u201d was an immediate hit \u2013 with reviewers. It received 65 reviews, 64 of them glowing, with a full page in the New York Herald-Tribune, and an important review in the New York Times by James (\u201cStuds Lonegan\u201d) Farrell. But it didn\u2019t score with the public \u2013 barely 3500 sold in a year, and it went out of print a few years later, only to reemerge in 1982 as a reissue by DeCapo Press, and again, by DeCapo, a year ago in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the game. And this year, of course, marks the 50th anniversary of the book.<\/p>\n

Roger Kahn did an introduction to the 1982 edition, while Ray Robinson did a new foreword last year, with Hano contributing a new afterword. One could easily call this a cult classic, and first editions are obviously hard to find. (A recent search revealed one, at $220). To do a full book on a single game required the utmost of observation powers, and the fact that he didn\u2019t intend to write the book when he went makes it all the more remarkable.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had turned so quickly, and run so fast and truly that he made this impossible catch look \u2013 to us in the bleachers \u2013 quite ordinary,\u201d wrote Hano of \u201cthe catch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo those reporters in the press box, nearly six hundred feet from the bleacher wall, it must have appeared far more astonishing, watching Mays run and run until he had become the size of a pigmy and then he had run some more, while the ball diminished to a mote of white dust and finally disappeared in the dark blob that was Mays\u2019 mitt.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026.But the throw! What an astonishing throw, to make all other throws ever before it, even those four Mays himself had made during batting practice, appear the flings of teen-age girls. This was the throw of a giant, the throw of a howitzer made human\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hano, who still lives in Laguna Beach and has been married for 53 years, was a long-time contributor to SPORT Magazine, writing over 100 features for editors Ed Fitzgerald and Al Silverman, while also developing biographies of Mays, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Muhammad Ali. His debut in SPORT came with an excerpt from \u201cA Day in the Bleachers,\u201d a book that Fitzgerald took an immediate liking to. He also wrote western novels and \u201cnovelizations\u201d of motion pictures (stories based on screenplays), like \u201cMarriage Italian Style,\u201d a Sophia Loren film. He wrote some early novels for Lion under \u201cMatthew Gant,\u201d because, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be publishing myself while I was editor-in-chief!\u201d<\/p>\n

Hano had graduated from Long Island University at 19 and went to work as a copy boy for the Daily News that year (1941). He fought in the Pacific in World War II, and then put in a stint as managing editor at Bantam Books in the late \u201840s. But his future was in freelance writing, and he moved easily in different worlds, also writing more than 100 stories for TV Guide.<\/p>\n

Hano remains a Giants fan today, but admits it\u2019s hard, with all the player movement and roster upheavals. \u201cYou\u2019re really rooting for logos,\u201d he sighs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to get down to the new San Diego stadium this season,\u201d he says. \u201cDo they have bleachers there? That\u2019s where I\u2019d like to sit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Marty Appel No further explanation is really needed, is it? Any baseball fan who can talk about the great plays in history knows about that over the shoulder, back-to-the-plate catch Willie made in Game One of the 1954 World… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":2277,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-template-full.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-342","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P4s5bl-5w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2461,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/342\/revisions\/2461"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.appelpr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}