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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World Roberta Newman Joshua Prager. The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World. New York: Pantheon, 2006. 498 pp. Cloth, $26.95. Just when it seems as if all that could possibly be said about "the shot heard round the world" has, indeed, been said, Joshua Prager offers substantial new evidence that the New York Giants' late season surge, culminating in Bobby Thomson's home run against the Dodgers' Ralph Branca on October 3, 1951, was mechanically enhanced. In The Echoing Green, Prager, a senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal, documents the way in which the Giants, under the direction of their irascible and, in this case vengeful, manager, Leo Durocher, successfully stole signs from opposing teams' pitchers, helping New York to overcome a thirteen-and-a-half game deficit to force the fateful three-game playoff series against Brooklyn. But, as its title (taken from a poem by William Blake written in 1789, the text of which comprises volume's epigraph) suggests, Prager's work is not a conventional, statistics-laden baseball book. Rather, it is a richly told social history, itself poetic at times, which paints a picture of a pennant race, the individuals involved, and America at a cultural turning point. Although, according to its subtitle, The Echoing Green is The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World, particularly compelling are the untold stories of the lesser-known participants, those who labored behind the scenes at Durocher's behest to steal signs. Here we meet Henry Leonard "Hank" Schenz, utility infielder and owner of a 35mm Wollensak telescope with perfect optics for thievery, and the improbably named Abe Chadwick, a Ukrainian immigrant and rabid Dodgers fan, who, as an electrician working at the Polo Grounds, rigged the buzzer system used to [End Page 119] relay signs to the bullpen. We also encounter Herman Franks, an expert reader of stolen signs, who manned the telescope at a Giants' clubhouse window high up in centerfield at the Polo Grounds, and Sal Yvars, the third-string catcher whose value to the Giants lies in his ability to flash the stolen signs to the dugout. Indeed, it is the stories of those who may very well have directly aided Thomson and certainly made his homer both possible and necessary, along with that of Branca's tragedy and Thomson's triumph, which give this text both its richness and its poignancy. Cultural and historical context are also key to Prager's approach, clearly situating the dramatic ending of the National League's 1951 season among contemporary events. Describing the game's impact as the first sporting event seen coast-to-coast on live television, for example, the author compares it to the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, broadcast using the same technology, which, according to Prager, "brought to light the limitless reach of unscripted live television" (180). Considering the increasing importance of television in 1951, moreover, he cites Milton Berle's long-term contract with NBC, which paid the cross-dressing comic the astonishing salary of two hundred thousand dollars per year. He even invokes The Catcher in the Rye, published just that spring, when describing the letters TURN, inscribed by Brooklyn's Clem Labine on the fingers of his glove, a reminder to rotate his hand following his delivery so as not to tip his pitches. Prager's treatment of the "shot heard round the world" also extends beyond the 1951 season. One of the most concise and beautifully written passages provides context for the mass exodus of the National League from New York, just six years after Thomson's home run. He writes, "It was also now, in the eye of a bereft city, the crystallization of a time no longer. For what lingered most of a home run was the carnival it begat" (302). He goes on to say: Indeed, since a home run had life disillusioned, had crusades upended and breakthroughs blurred. Six years had turned cigarettes suspect, the Pill...