A Home Run for the Ages - The Shot Heard Round the World

A HOMER FOR THE AGES "The shot heard round the world." The phrase seems hyperbole and gross exaggeration now. After all, it was only a home run, not the start of a revolution, a war, an assassination or a trip to the moon. But Bobby Thomson's home run off Ralph Branca was no mere game winning homer. It came in the 9th inning of game three of the playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants on October 3, 1951. It capped a Giant's comeback from 13 and a half games behind the Dodgers in August, put the Giants in the World Series, captivated not just the city of New York, but the entire country and became, in the eyes of many, the most famous home run in baseball history.

Joshua Prager's new book "The Echoing Green", examines the home run from every conceivable angle: the weeks long build-up to it, the careers of all the key players, the anguish and the joy afterward and the relationship between the two men at the center of it all. His book also details something he wrote about in the Wall Street Journal several years ago: the Giants' sign-stealing during the last half of the season. Manager Leo Durocher, one of baseball's most combative figures, placed a coach in the central field clubhouse with a powerful telescope. The New York players, if they wanted, could be signaled that the coming pitch was a curveball or a fastball. It was certainly an advantage, but the Giants played spectacular baseball the last two months of the season, both home and away.

They beat the Dodgers in game one of the playoffs at Ebbets Field (Thomson homered in that game off Branca) and at home (with the telescope)they lost game two, 10-0, as Clem Labine gave them just six hits. Signs are no help if you don't hit the ball. Thomson is equivocal when talking about sign stealing, admitting he accepted the help at times during the season, but answers no when asked if he had the sign on the fastball he hit into history. Thomson and Branca have gone through the last 55 years as bookends, the man who threw the pitch and the man who hit it. Now in their 80's, the first line of both men's obituaries will highlight that day.

They are friends, but their relationship has been strained at times. Thomson, a genuinely modest man, has said he was fortunate to hit the pitch. Branca, a very proud man, put up with jeers and catcalls till the end of his career because of that one day. How big was the game? On the day of the game the White House announced that the Soviet Union had exploded a second nuclear device. With the Korean war underway and the cold war at its height, America's top rival had continued testing atomic weapons. But in the U.S. and many other countries, the following days' headlines nearly everywhere trumpeted a baseball bomb, not a nuclear one. A recent survey showed that just one third of Americans consider themselves baseball fans. I don't know what the figure was in 1951, but it surely was far north of fifty percent, probably nearer eighty percent. Even casual sports fans followed the game.

It was a time when the NBA and NFL, for many, were merely something to pass the time between baseball seasons. The title of the book refers to a poem about memories of youth on playing fields of green. It seems appropriate as Prager mines a field of nostalgia: Sinatra and Gleason in a limo on the way to the game, U.S. Senators leaving a debate for the TV set in the cloakroom, a young Willie Mays waiting on deck behind Thomson, several generations of Dodger and Giant fans who remember to this day where they were on a day many still recall with sadness or joy. I've always considered "The Boys of Summer", "Ball Four" and "The Glory of Their Times" as the three best baseball books ever written. I still do, but "The Echoing Green" is surely in the starting lineup.