Around the World

Baseball fans can attest a home run at a particular time is one of baseball’s most exciting moments. What kid in times past didn’t dream of stepping to the plate with the game on the line, two strikes, and two outs? What kid never missed the next fastball down the middle of the plate and then touched them all.

Baseball fans remember Joe Carter’s World Series winning shot. Or Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair down the left-field line. Or Kirk Gibson, hurt, going deep off Dennis Eckersley.

But the first and the game that was first ever televised nationally came in 1951 by New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ralph Branca. The “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” sent the Giants to the National League pennant.

The season looked to be in the Dodgers’ hands as they lead by a wide margin but the Giants went 37-7 in the last 44 games to tie the Dodgers and forced a three-game playoff series and the iconic home run at the Polo Grounds.

The Dodgers left fielder at the time was Andy Pafko, who just looked up to see Thomson’s ball sail over the fence. Pafko, later on, was Bobby Thomson’s roommate while in Milwaukee.

Sign stealing has been around in baseball probably since the first game was played. And so it was for the 1951 New York Giants. Many years later it came out they were using a telescope situated in the outfield to look in on the catcher’s fingers. This is detailed in Joshua Prager’s book The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thompson, Ralph Branca, and The Shot Heard Round the World.

The epithet “Shot Heard Round the World” came mostly from post-game articles. But I liked Red Smith’s recap in the New York Herald Tribune.

“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”