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The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World
Pantheon
September 2006
On Sale: September 19, 2006
512 pages
ISBN: 0375421548
EAN: 9780375421549
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Biography
The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn
Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just
three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And
not once in major league baseball’s 278 preceding playoff
and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run
deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at
3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run
off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant.
The
Echoing Green follows the reverberations of that one
moment–the Shot Heard Round the World–from the West Wing of
the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo
Grounds clubhouse, where a home run forever turned hitter
and pitcher 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 spyglass
would remain undiscovered until 2001, when, in the jubilee
of that home run, Joshua Prager laid bare on the front page
of the Wall Street Journal a Giant secret: from July 20,
1951, through the very day of that legendary game, the
orange and black stole the finger signals of opposing
catchers.
The Echoing Green places that
revelation at the heart of a larger story, re-creating in
extravagant detail the 1951 pennant race 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.
A wonderfully evocative portrait of the great
American pastime, The Echoing Green is baseball
history, social history and biography–irresistible reading
from any angle.
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