“Bread Alone” from a sabremetric perspective
The 1939 short story “Bread Alone” by John O’Hara, one of
his most insightful and most moving, is a great favorite of mine, not least
because it is largely set at a major league baseball game, specifically in Yankee
Stadium. If I have spent months of my
life reading O’Hara’s work, and writing about it (and I have), then I estimate
my time mulling over baseball statistics to be measurable in years—how many, I
do not care to estimate. But it’s a lot of years.
In reconsidering the story recently, I realized that I had
the tools, thanks to baseballreference.com, a website responsible for enabling baseball
freaks like me to fritter away their lives, to answer a question about this
story, and indirectly about the writing habits of John O’Hara: I could tell
whether the baseball game O’Hara describes actually took place or if it is a
purely fictional creation of his.
O’Hara enjoyed baseball, though he only rarely wrote about
it, and his writing career was built on the no-nonsense training he absorbed as
a young reporter, so it seemed entirely possible that O’Hara based the story on
an actual game, possibly one that he had seen himself at Yankee Stadium. All I
had to do to verify this would be to review every single game the Yankees ever
played, and see if one conformed to O’Hara’s description of the game in his
story.
Or that’s what I would have had to do without the
baseballreference.com website, anyway, which is why I never thought of
researching this question. (I may be baseball-crazy, and O’Hara-crazy, but I’m
not crazy-crazy.) In the game O’Hara
describes, Joe Dimaggio hits a late-inning home run into the grandstand near
his protagonist’s seat, and the story’s climax concerns the search for the
souvenir baseball. Furthermore, O’Hara gives other specific details about the
game: the Yankees won it easily, they scored five runs in the fifth inning,
Dimaggio’s home run came in the eighth inning, and the unnamed opposing team
went down quickly in the top of the ninth inning. Since the game took place at
Yankee Stadium, I can naturally disregard all their away games, and O’Hara
specifies that this game took place late in the season. Perhaps the biggest
help is the publication date: it
appeared in the September 23, 1939 issue of The New Yorker. For O’Hara to have described an actual
historical game, it must have taken place no later than Labor Day of that year,
give or take a week. Joe Dimaggio first
played in Yankee Stadium in 1936, leaving me a little fewer than four seasons
of home games to peruse in search of “Bread Alone”’s setting.
This is where the website came in very handy: it has
catalogued every home run Dimaggio (and thousands of other players) ever hit,
and it provides details about the opposing team and pitcher, the score at the
time, the box score of the game, and about thirty other bits of data. So I searched for all the home runs Dimaggio
hit at Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the eighth inning in games the Yankees
won after scoring five runs in the bottom of the fifth from 1936 through 1939.
My conclusion? John O’Hara wrote fiction.
But there were a few games that came very close to
satisfying O’Hara’s fictional conditions. The closest (I will spare you my
spreadsheet ranking the ten closest games) took place on August 3rd,
1939 against the Detroit Tigers. Exactly as O’Hara described, the Yankees won
the game comfortably by a score of 12 to 3, they scored the bulk of their runs
in the bottom of the fifth inning, and most significantly Joe Dimaggio hit a
home run in the bottom of the eighth inning. (It differed from O’Hara’s
description in that the Yankees scored 6 runs, not 5, in the bottom of the
fifth, and that the Tigers had their strongest inning, not their weakest, in
the top of the ninth.) And, not that this is textual, but I always imagined
that the game in the story took place on a Sunday, since the point of it is
that the protagonist is a working man who cannot just choose to take a day off
work to go to a ballgame. August 3rd,
1939, however, was a Thursday.
So O’Hara, not too surprisingly, created a plausible
scenario that we have every reason to believe could be historical but which
turns out to be lovingly embellished. This conforms closely to his stated
method of spinning stories, in which he would actually witness some event,
typically a conversation between two people unknown to him, and then imagine
the backstory and the result of the snippet of overheard conversation. I’m sure O’Hara’s imagination made for a
livelier narrative than the true backstory and the actual result, as it did
here—it’s hard for me to read “Bread Alone” without
misting up a bit.
The boxscore to the game I reference above can be found
here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA193908030.shtml
3 comments:
Many thanks, Steven. Wonderful take on this. Richard.
Than you, Steven. Wonderful take on this. Richard
Thank you--I learned at the Powerhouse Arena that this is also Lorin Stein's favorite John O'Hara story.
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