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The Echoing Green

By Dr. John D. Eigenauer
August 11, 2006

The story of Bobby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca to end the 1951 season and send the New York Giants to the World Series is perhaps the most famous in baseball history. Even casual baseball fans know that Thomson’s home run reached mythical status as “the shot heard round the world,” thereby equating it with world changing political events described with those same words. Therefore, you would think that there remains little to say about this most famous of home runs.¹ Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green (due out September 19, 2006) proves otherwise. In a beautifully documented and intensely engaging narrative, Prager retells a story that everyone supposedly knows and makes it interesting and surprising.

The book is part biography, part history, and part mystery. As biography, it recounts the lives of Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, hero and goat of the 1951 playoffs between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. While there are many fascinating details about both players, most interesting are the ways in which their lives became intertwined after the home run. For example, Thomson and Branca sang together in public, each recounting the tale of praise and blame like lovers. Branca, reciting his woe in a beautiful singing voice, brought his audience to tears; they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and together countless other times thereafter. Later in life they worked autograph shows together, appeared in old timer games, and accepted interviews in which they did everything except re-enact the moment. Prager describes the odd symbiotic relationship gracefully, not making it into more than it was, and letting the obvious pathos affect the reader without obtrusive descriptions.

Branca/Thomson Ralph Branca playfully gets his revenge on Bobby Thomson.

As history, the book performs a difficult feat: it recounts a story that you know before reading it. Prager overcomes this by making the book about more than the home run and the pennant race: it is history and mystery. He tells the shadowy tale of the Giants planting a telescope in center field to steal signs from the opposing catcher and then devising a way to transfer the information electronically to someone who in turn conveyed a signal to the batter. This theme is a significant one throughout the book as Branca, Thomson, and many others confirm and deny rumors of marginally illicit behavior that was said to influence the 1951 pennant race and eventually Thomson’s homer. The story is woven nicely into the narrative, never taking center stage, yet always making the reader aware of the underlying tension created by Thomson’s homer being potentially tainted.

Behind this mystery is a touching story of a simple man who helped the Giants steal signs, and died regretting that he had hurt his beloved Dodgers. His is but one of many human interest stories that are blended into the history, tying the biographies to the home run, to the age, to baseball, and to American culture.

Without being the subject of a chapter, a recurrent and fascinating theme is baseball as a shared cultural experience. Thomson’s home run became a conversational entrée, people asking, “Where were you when Bobby Thomson hit his home run?” in the way that they would after Kennedy’s assassination. We find the infamous spy Julius Rosenberg lamenting the Dodgers’ collapse while awaiting execution; a US senator forced to pause a speech on the Korean War while his fellow legislators celebrated; George Plimpton falling off his chair at Cambridge; famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr lamenting having left the game early; and John Steinbeck commenting on the game in a letter. This theme elevates the book beyond a history of the 1951 pennant race, the lives of Thomson and Branca, and the emotionally exhausting home run itself. It raises it to the level of cultural commentary as it demonstrates that any thoughts on American mentality are incomplete without mention of baseball.

Finally, this book is first class history. Prager researched thoroughly, interviewed everyone involved in the 1951 pennant race, and exhausted every lead over the course of five years before publishing. I sensed throughout the book that he undertook a topic that he cared deeply about and wrote about with respect, awe, and tenacity. I offer the book my highest rating and endorse it unconditionally to casual fan and serious historian alike.

1. Numerous articles have been written about the topic, as well as several books, including The Great Chase: the Dodgers-Giants Pennant Race of 1951, The Home Run Heard ‘Round the World, and The Giants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant!

John Eigenauer can be contacted at jeigenauer@yahoo.com. A complete list of his reviews and more about him can be found here.