Arnold Hano's A Day in the Bleachers is one of the three greatest nonfiction baseball books ever written - along with Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer and Elliot Asinof's Eight Men Out. Inning by inning, it chronicles the opening game of the 1954 World Series, which the underdog New York Giants eventually won in four games over the Cleveland Indians. Hano takes readers into the stands in order to view the game from the perspective of the ordinary fans. He describes the most famous catch in baseball history -- Willie Mays' over-the-shoulder steal of Vic Wertz's fly ball to the Polo Grounds' deep center field that, had Mays not caught up to it, would have certainly been a triple (or even an inside-the-park homer). Hano also describes bleacher fans' thrill when Dusty Rhodes hit the game-winning pinch-hit home run in the 10th inning.
A Day in the Bleachers is a baseball book but also a book about American culture at mid-century. We not only learn what occurred on the field but also about the observations and comments of the bleacher bums.
Although A Day in the Bleachers is Hano's best-known work, he was for five decades one of America's preeminent sportswriters and one of our most under-appreciated chroniclers of the social and political events of the second half of the 20th century. Hano, now 93 years old, is a world-class writer, with 27 books (including biographies of Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, Muhammad Ali, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar and a number of novels, several of them pulp fiction written under pseudonyms) and over 500 magazine articles, many of them for SPORT, Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide.
He's also been a champion for social justice. He successfully battled racism in Orange County in the early 1960s and land developers in Laguna Beach and the Sequoia National Forest, and also helped stop dam building in parts of the Grand Canyon. In 1963, his peers voted him magazine sportswriter of the year and he also won the prestigious Sidney Hillman journalism prize for his article on the plight of California farm workers.
Jon Leonoudakis, a brilliant documentary filmmaker, is making a film entitled Hano! A Century in the Bleachers that will debut this fall with screenings in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles and a promotional event in New York City. The DVD will be released on November. He just launched a crowdfunding campaign for the film and you can learn all about it and share your support at this link.
The original cover of the classic book. Leonoudakis and Hano. A more recent cover emphasizes Willie Mays' catch.
Leonoudakis' subject is a gregarious, witty, colorful character with a remarkable memory for details and a lifetime of fascinating stories about his personal journey from a Depression-era boyhood to his encounters with Hall of Fame athletes, politicians, movie stars, writers, and everyday Americans.
Hano was born in New York in 1922. His older brother taught him to read when he was three years old. He was briefly a Yankees fan, at age four, but when the Yankees lost the 1926 World Series he switched his allegiance to the New York Giants. His grandfather was a New York City cop and had free passes to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, which accounts for Hano's regular attendance at both ballparks. He began his writing career in 1930 on a mimeographed newspaper that he and his brother published