Shot Heard 'Round the World: Giants Win the Pennant!

By Wikipedia

The "Shot Heard 'Round the World" is the term given to the walk-off home run hit by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds to win the National League pennant at 3:58 p.m. EST on October 3, 1951. As a result of the home run, the Giants won the game 5-4, defeating the Dodgers in their pennant playoff series, two games to one.

The phrase "shot heard 'round the world" is from a classic poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, originally used to refer to the first clash of the American Revolutionary War and since used to apply to other dramatic moments, military and otherwise. In the case of Thomson's home run, it was particularly apt as U.S. servicemen and women fighting in the Korean War listened to the radio broadcast of the game.

The tiebreaker (not a playoff but an extension of the regular season - game statistics counted in the season records) had to be played because both the Giants and the crosstown rival Dodgers finished the regular season with identical 96-58 records. Brooklyn held a massive 13 1/2-game lead on the Giants on August 11, but the Giants turned around and won their next 16 games. While Brooklyn played the rest of the season at a respectable 26-22 clip, the Giants put together a streak almost unequaled in baseball history, winning 37 of the last 44 games, including the last seven in a row. Only a difficult 14-inning victory over the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the regular season enabled the Dodgers to force the best-of-three-games showdown.

Brooklyn won the coin toss to decide home-field advantage in the series. Controversially, manager Charlie Dressen opted to play only the first game at home, rather than the last two; he reasoned that if the Dodgers won their only home game, they would need to win only one out of two on the road.

The Giants won the first game 3-1 at Ebbets Field, with Thomson spearheading the New York offense with a two-run home run off Branca. When the series moved to the Polo Grounds, the Dodgers won the second game 10-0 on a complete-game shutout by the rookie hurler Clem Labine.

For the third game, the Giants' 23-game winner Sal Maglie would face Brooklyn's Don Newcombe in a battle of aces. In the first inning, Jackie Robinson singled home Pee Wee Reese for the first run of the game. In the bottom of the seventh, Thomson tied the game with a sacrifice fly, scoring Monte Irvin. In the eighth, the Dodgers touched the exhausted Maglie for three runs and headed to the bottom of the ninth with an apparently secure 4-1 lead.

Newcombe, however, was showing the effects of overuse in the season's final days. He had pitched a complete game the previous Saturday, then thrown 5 2/3 innings in relief the next day in the season finale. Pitching on only two days' rest and tiring badly, he attempted to take himself out of the game, only to have Robinson talk him into trying to finish the inning.

The Giants shortstop Alvin Dark singled to start the rally; Don Mueller then singled, allowing Dark to reach third base. But with a chance to drive in a run, Irvin, who led the National League that year with 121 RBIs, chased the first pitch and popped out.

However, Whitey Lockman followed with a double down the left-field line, scoring Dark and advancing Mueller to third. (Mueller slid awkwardly into the bag and broke his ankle, forcing the Giants to send in Clint Hartung to pinch-run for him.) Dressen, the Brooklyn manager, finally pulled the spent Newcombe and sent Ralph Branca into the game. The move has bewildered baseball historians to this day. Branca had pitched and lost Game 1 of the tiebreaker and had given up several home runs that year to Thomson, who had hit 31 during the season. However, in Dressen's defense, he had few decently rested pitchers available; in the last regular-season game alone the Dodgers had sent seven men to the mound.

Branca's first pitch was a fastball down the middle for a strike. His second pitch was a fastball up and in to Thomson, intended as a setup for his planned next pitch, a breaking ball down and away. But Thomson yanked the fastball down the left-field line and toward the invitingly close outfield fence, a mere 279 feet from home plate.

Andy Pafko, the Dodgers' left fielder, rushed toward the fence, thinking the rapidly sinking line drive might carom off the wall. Instead, the ball disappeared into the stands for a game-ending three-run homer. With one swing of Thomson's bat, the Giants had turned near-certain defeat into sudden victory and a pennant.

Seeing the ball disappear over the fence, Thomson hopped crazily around the bases, then disappeared into the mob of jubilant teammates that had gathered at home plate. The stunned Dodger players trudged off the field - all except Robinson, who stubbornly made sure Thomson touched every base before he, too, headed for the clubhouse.

The Broadcasts

Four broadcasters captured the moment for baseball fans in the New York City area and nationwide. On the NBC national television telecast, Ernie Harwell shouted "It's gone!" almost at the moment Thomson's bat struck Branca's pitch. Meanwhile, the Dodgers' radio voice, Red Barber of WMGM-AM, straightforwardly said, "It's in there for the pennant."

Russ Hodges, broadcasting the game on WMCA-AM radio for Giants fans, seemed perhaps the least likely man to immortalize the play; the broadcast was not national and Hodges was considered calm-voiced rather than excitable. Nonetheless, it was his call that captured the suddenness and exultation of the home run:

Bobby Thomson up there swinging... He's had two out of three, a single and a double, and Billy Cox is playing him right on the third-base line... One out, last of the ninth... Branca pitches... Bobby Thomson takes a strike called on the inside corner... Bobby hitting at .292... He's had a single and a double and he drove in the Giants' first run with a long fly to center... Brooklyn leads it 4-2...Hartung down the line at third not taking any chances... Lockman without too big of a lead at second, but he'll be running like the wind if Thomson hits one... Branca throws...

There's a long drive, it's gonna be it, I believe...THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they're going crazy, they're going crazy! Ohhhhh-oh!!!''

Ironically, the main reason the WMCA call was recorded and saved for posterity was because a Dodger fan sought to torture a friend who was a Giants fan by capturing and replaying Russ Hodges' heartbreak from a Giants' loss.

Furthermore, only a tiny minority of people actually heard the Hodges call live. Most heard Gordon McLendon's call on the Liberty Radio Network, which was carrying the game nationally. McClendon's account (complete with a similarly hair-raising yell of "THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!") remains the only complete broadcast account of the third game.

Afterward

Afterward, the legendary sportswriter Red Smith penned the following recap:

"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."

The official attendance of the third game was 34,320, a shockingly low number considering the importance of the game, the location of the opposing team (just a 45-minute subway ride from the Polo Grounds), and the bitter rivalry between the two teams. However, most historians agree this figure represents only the number tickets sold before the game, and does not account for the New Yorkers and Brooklynites who had left work early and gone to the Polo Grounds. Careful study of photographs and film of the event show that the 56,000-seat stadium was nearly full, and McClendon's live broadcast features him commenting more than once that the Polo Grounds was packed.

The Giants proceeded to lose the 1951 World Series to the New York Yankees.

In February 2001, Joshua Harris Prager of the Wall Street Journal, who later wrote a book on this game, reported that the Giants had positioned a spy in the center field stands during the game and had stolen the pitching signs of the Dodger catcher, Roy Campanella. Prager concluded that the spy had signaled pitches to the Giants' batters, including Thomson, thus enabling Thomson to know in advance what pitch Branca was going to throw him. However, acknowledging that sign-stealing was not made a violation of rules by Major League Baseball until 1961, and that it had been a part of baseball since the inception of signs as a means of communication between pitcher and catcher, Prager in an interview with CNN on February 3, 2001, left it to readers to determine if the sign-stealing, which Thomson denied, diminished the stature of the event.

Trivia

• Waiting on deck to bat behind Thomson was a young man who would hit many a home run of his own: 20-year-old rookie Willie Mays.

• The same day Thomson hit the Shot Heard 'Round the World, the future baseball Hall-of-Famer Dave Winfield was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

• In the movie The Godfather, Sonny Corleone (played by James Caan) listens to Russ Hodges' commentary of the playoff in his car just before he is shot dead, half an inning before Bobby Thomson hit the home run.

• The novel Underworld by Don Delillo opens on October 3, 1951, when a young man named Cotter Martin sneaks in to watch the game. In baseball the ultimate fate of the ball Thomson hit is unknown, but in DeLillo's world, Cotter Martin wrests this incredibly valuable treasure away from another fan he had just befriended.

• The ABC television show Sports Night used the Shot Heard 'Round the World in its episode "The Giants Win the Pennant, the Giants Win the Pennant", written by series creator Aaron Sorkin and former Roseanne writer Matt Tarses. When Sports Night anchor Dan Rydell (played by Josh Charles) finds out that his boss Issac Jaffe (played by Robert Guillaume) had been at the Giants game, he wants to use him in a feature story, despite Issac's protests. Dan eventually learns that, as a cub reporter Jaffe did cover the game, but missed the crucial ball - he was in the bathroom washing his hands because Branca was said to be notorious for taking his time warming up before pitching.

• The M*A*S*H episode A War for all Seasons depicts the previously baseball-apathetic Major Charles Winchester becoming heavily invested in wagers that the Dodgers will win the pennant, and is subsequently heartbroken by the loss.

See also: The National Baseball Hall of Fame's online exhibit on this game, including an MP3 of the famous call.