Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World » (Reprint)

Joshua Prager lives in New York City. He studied music theory at Columbia College and is currently a senior special writer at The Wall Street Journal. He has three times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

At 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The ball sailed over the left field wall and into history. The Giants won the pennant. That moment—the Shot Heard Round the World—reverberated from the West Wing of the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo Grounds clubhouse, where hitter and pitcher forever turned into hero and goat. It was also in that centerfield block of concrete that, after the home run, a Giant coach tucked away a Wollensak telescope. The Echoing Green places that revelation at the heart of a larger story, re-creating in extravagant detail and illuminating as never before the impact of both a moment and a long-guarded secret on the lives of Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca.

The Washington Post - Elliott Vanskike

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.

Prologue     xiii
Our Sports Shall Be Seen     1
The Darkening Green     225
Such Were the Joys     287
Epilogue     347
Acknowledgements     351
Author's Note     355
Notes     359
Bibliography     435
Index     477