The Homer Heard Round the World

THE ECHOING GREEN

The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World

By Joshua Prager

Pantheon. 498 pp. $26.95

All baseball fans have at least one perfect memory of a game seared into their brains. The mere mention of a player's name can bring the event back to full life. The names Kirk Gibson, Mookie Wilson, Bucky Dent and Reggie Jackson all evoke those moments that fans replay in their minds with undimmed joy, season after season.

Probably no name has more evocative power than Bobby Thomson's, and no play more resonance than his home run in the bottom of the ninth to clinch the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants. Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who surrendered the hit, is forever cast as luckless goat to Thomson's shining hero. In "The Echoing Green," Joshua Prager tells the story of their lives and of the home run that earned both a measure of baseball immortality. The two ballplayers are framed in contrasts. Thomson is a shy, humble, superstitious man, told by his father to keep his head down and not seek glory.

Branca is brash, outgoing, cheekily wears uniform number 13, and is convinced from childhood that his athletic gifts make him special. Hours after Thomson launched the homer that would forever be known as the Shot Heard Round the World, he was lionized on a TV talk show while Branca received the first of hundreds of telegrams urging him to "drop dead."

Both men labored on in the big leagues for years, trying to outlive the home run -- Branca because he felt defined by his failure, Thomson because he knew he could never achieve a feat so marvelous again.

After baseball, Thomson sold paper bags and Branca sold insurance. The two are friendly now, making a good living appearing together and signing sports memorabilia.

But Thomson and Branca had resented each other for years because of a secret they both knew: The Giants had been using a concealed telescope to steal catchers' signs during their unlikely 1951 resurgence from 13 1/2 games back to a first-place tie in only 48 days. What's more, the Giants were stealing signs during the playoff game, and Thomson probably knew Branca was throwing him a fastball. (Prager's Wall Street Journal article that established the truth of this longstanding rumor was the genesis of "The Echoing Green.")

The book's early chapters plumb the lives of the players and technicians central to the scheme. Electrician Abraham Chadwick ran the lights at the Polo Grounds. When asked to help the Giants cheat, Chadwick, a lifelong Dodgers fan, followed orders. He rigged a buzzer system to relay the upcoming pitch -- fastball or curve -- from the center field spy to the coaches in the Giants dugout. Stricken with stomach cancer, he watched the fateful playoff game on TV, knowing that his ingenuity had helped the Giants beat his beloved Dodgers.

The story of how Thomson and Branca came to oppose each other on Oct. 3, 1951, and how each dealt with the aftermath gives "The Echoing Green" shape. But the brisk, detailed account of the playoff game and the home run that ended it gives the book pop. Prager contends that Thomson's home run resounds in the American consciousness more persistently than the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR's death or Kennedy's assassination. To those who would argue that a home run, even the most famous home run ever hit, doesn't signify in the way that grand historical events do, Prager has the perfect rebuttal: With novelistic detail and cinematic sweep, he situates Thomson's home run amid the daily lives of ordinary fans and against the backdrop of the Korean War and Soviet atomic tests.

Prager tends toward a showy style that crowds the reader. His inverted syntax puts verb before subject, as in "Thus spent Yvars his afternoons." He has a fondness for words found only in a thesaurus (e.g., "avoirdupois") and stages flashy, alliterative pileups ("A larrup to left long landed lingered"). Small beer, perhaps, but these quirks of style and pace are distracting. Thankfully, when he recounts the day of the home run and its immediate aftermath, the prose cracks along. At 3:58, the moment Thomson's drive entered the left-field stands, Prager stops time, and the narrative whips around the country to show us that Thomson's mother has just collapsed, George Carlin has accidentally tossed his cat toward an open window, a boy in New Jersey has hurled his peanut butter toast at the TV, and a Brooklyn Girl Scout troop has collectively burst into tears.

In thrilling passages like these, Prager captures the enduring impact of the memorable moments that mark our lives.