The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World [Hardcover]

Joshua Prager (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. October 3, 1951, 3:58 p.m., Polo Grounds, New York City: "Branca throws. There's a long drive. It's gonna be, I believe—the Giants win the pennant!" That's the way New York Giants' announcer Russ Hodges described what is arguably the greatest moment in American sports, the shot "heard round the world," as the Giants defeated the Dodgers to win the National League pennant. Prager, a senior special writer at the Wall Street Journal, has written a brilliant narrative not only about the most famous homerun in baseball history but also about the mystery that haunts it. Americans love a conspiracy, be it the grassy-knoll variety or perhaps a more innocuous one, like the stealing of baseball signs. For that is at the crux of this book: did the Giants know what the Dodger pitchers were going to throw before they threw it? (It should be pointed out that there is no baseball rule prohibiting stealing the opposing team's signs.) Prager, who first broke this story for the Wall Street Journal in 2001, tells a tale worthy of a "Deep Throat." The sign heist was ingeniously simple—all that was involved was a telescope, a buzzer and an isolated bullpen catcher.The baseball story is exciting, but Prager concentrates on what happened to the protagonists: Ralph Branca, the pitcher, forever branded a loser; Bobby Thomson, the phlegmatic gentleman, equally haunted by his heroics. We see the change in Branca when he learns the truth years later from Sal Yvars and the bitterness it engendered toward Thomson, a God-fearing man uncomfortable with his legal cheating. Finally we see a reconciliation between old adversaries, who became business partners, lucratively exploiting their infamy, becoming friends along the way.Although Prager does have a tendency to overpsychoanalyze both ballplayers, he paints a marvelous portrait of New York City baseball in the tradition of The Boys of Summer and Summer of '49, bringing to life once again a genuine piece of Americana.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Don DeLillo wrote a novel about it (Underworld 1997); public figures of every stripe, from Frank Sinatra to Harold Bloom, have shared their memories of it; and an entire borough never recovered from it: Bobby Thomson's home run, the "shot heard round the world," won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants, besting their crosstown rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in a three-game playoff, but in the end the home run became not only baseball's most-remembered moment but also the ultimate expression of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat (Thomson's triumph was paralleled by the dejection of Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca, immortalized by a photographer after the game, hands on head, moaning, "Why me? Why me?"). The story of the 1951 Giants has been told many times before, of course, but Wall Street Journal reporter Prager brings to the tale both a revealing focus on the entwined lives of Thomson and Branca and the first in-depth examination of the scandal that lurked beneath the surface of the Giants' victory: throughout their remarkable comeback, the team had been using a centerfield telescope to steal the opposing catchers' signs. Did Thomson know beforehand that Branca's second pitch would be a fastball? He says no--his mind was on the moment, not the sign--but the widespread disclosure of the telescope gambit in the 1990s did much to tarnish a nation's near-sacred memories of the event. Prager rides the sign-stealing hobbyhorse a bit too hard here--ladling on heavy-handed foreshadowing--but he does expose multiple layers of fascinating backstory to the drama within a drama, and his psychobiographies of Thomson and especially Branca are unfailingly compelling. Only his convoluted and overblown prose style ("the sportswriter had mined for gold dust the tedium of spring training") keeps this from being one of the best baseball books in decades. But content finally trumps form in what is still the biggest sports story of the last century. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421548
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421549
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #847,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good story, well researched, but some flaws in its telling, October 21, 2006

By 

"dave in milwaukee" (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews

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

I deducted one star that I might otherwise have awarded. I agree with the reviewer who felt this was a good book that could have been done even better.

The positive: Mr. Prager tells a great story and clearly did very painstaking research and preparation. The book left me with a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for both Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson, both of who for many years have borne their yoke of fame and/or infamy with character, grace and dignity that is hardly if ever seen in today's professional athletes. I especially liked the way Mr. Prager humanizes, as well, even the minor characters in the story, especially the very tragic Abe Chadwick. Even the scheming of the alleged "villains" in the story, Franks and Durocher, seems quaint and not especially evil in comparison to today's "win at any and all costs" professional sports environment. In that regard, I also give credit to Mr. Prager for reminding his readers that for all of Leo Durocher's many character flaws, with the Dodgers in 1947 he displayed a great deal of moral character and courage to stand up for what is just and right, as he served as Jackie Robinson's first major league manager.

The negative: I agree with the reviewer who complained that the book is often difficult to read because of sentences that seem overly verbose and/or strangled in their structure. I frequently found this distracting and annoying (example, p. 316: "For as painful to Branca as a home run had been traumatic and a secret shocking, was that the laying bare of a telescope had not one iota changed his lot, the helicopter come to his rescue departing without him." HUH?????). There were also a few missed details that, while not horrifying, did interrupt the flow of the story. For example, at p. 293, when describing Thomson's happiness in Milwaukee during his time with the Braves, the author says Thomson "moved with his wife and daughter to the banks of Lake Superior . . ." After puzzling over this sentence, I figured out that the author must have intended to refer to the banks of Lake MICHIGAN, since Wisconsin's "banks of Lake Superior" are well over 300 miles from Milwaukee, at the extreme opposite end of the state.

One more puzzling detail that may have been the fault of an over-enthusiastic artist rather than of the author: the end flap of the dust jacket says that the "sunlight" on the front cover was added to the black-and-white photo of the famous home run. The problem is that the sun appears to be setting over the right-field bleachers, which were at the east (i.e., facing the Harlem River and the Bronx) end of the park. The actual setting of the sun on that day or any other would have been in the West, at the opposite (Harlem Speedway, and, off in the distance, the Hudson River) side of the stadium.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great Story-- God-Awful Writing!, November 20, 2006

By 

A reader (United States) - See all my reviews

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

I finally finished The Echoing Green, all 350 pages of text. There are an additional 149 pages consisting of notes, a dissertation-length bibliography, a gazillion acknowledgements, and an index.


Although there's a great story in there someplace, the book mostly drove me nuts.

The first 200 pages should have been ruthlessly slashed by an editor to about 50 pages. As it stands I found those pages almost unreadable, every sentence packed and dragged down by so many facts that reading was less a pleasure than a sensation akin to tramping through a field of rock-filled mud. Prager seems determined to include in his narrative every last little fact he accumulated in the course of what can only be called compulsive research. Every subject mentioned gets traced back to the Stone Age; every person mentioned gets not a capsule but a quart jar-sized biography. The narrative, such as it is, slows down to a crawl and pretty much disappears beneath the weight of all this largely irrelevant material.

I kept wondering: does this author have a brother or some other relative who's an Ivy League English literature professor, a snooty fellow who looks down on poor Joshua for not earning a doctorate, and for his choice of a career in mere journalism? Prager seems determined to show how erudite he is, with those high-falutin' quotations from literary works both famous and obscure bedecking the opening of each chapter, and various references within the text that serve no other purpose than to show off. The reference to Hank Schenz's father being a letter carrier leads Prager to tell us that the US Postal Service motto, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat..." etc. comes from Herodotus. Herodotus??? How did HE get into a baseball book? And does a (needlessly exhaustive) discussion of the history of signs and sign-stealing in baseball really have to drag in Ferdinand de Sassure, the " father of semiotics," as Prager helpfully tells us ignorant sports-folks?

The author is basically an investigative reporter; the sports aspect of the story (which is central) is really not his thing. His writing about the 1951 baseball season is as stilted and awkward as the rest of the book. That memorable season is covered much better in several earlier books, both of which came out in 1991, and discuss the sign stealing controversy: Ray Robinson's "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," and Bill Gutman's "The Giants Win the Pennant." The recent biography of pitcher Sal Maglie by Judith Testa covers the 1951 season better in 2 chapters than Prager does in this entire book!

There's a disease worse than Writer's Block and a LOT worse than Writer's Cramp, and Prager has a raging case of it. The ailment is Writer's Tic: a repetitious and terminally annoying prose affectation. In Prager's case you could call it the "Throw Mama From the Train a Kiss Construction." All too often Prager uses a backwards sentence structure that's right up there with Chinese Water Torture-- you keep wondering when the next drop is going to fall. Examples: "a quartet of well-dressed women who sat every game beside the right-field foul pole;" "Yvars' coach soon took to the Yvars home a proposal;" "gathered in the Forbes Field clubhouse, sat silently Durocher's new team;" "Maglie...then gave up to Robinson a single to left." And so on and on. I started making a little red dot in the margin each time I came across one of these constructions, and the margins look like they have the measles. How any editor could have allowed this tic to reach the printed page is beyond me.

But I didn't think the book was all bad. After struggling through the first 200 pages, we FINALLY get to, and past, the actual home run. This, it seems to me, is where the real story begins-- the story of how Thomson and Branca have come to be yoked together for all eternity, NOT the entire history of baseball, of sign-stealing, and of everyone with any connection whatsoever to the story that fills those endless 200 previous pages. The last 150 pages are wonderful; even the Throw Mama Syndrome can't completely ruin this part of the book, where the story really soars.

Although the sub-title calls the book "the untold story" of the famous home run, everything in the first 200 pages has been told before, albeit in less overwhelmingly detailed form. After all, it was Prager himself who broke the story in 2001 in the Wall Street Journal, and as he points out, snippets of the story had been floating around in print since the early1950s. What's new is his insightful account of how Thomson and Branca have dealt with their fame/notoriety during those subsequent decades, and how their mutual knowledge of the sign-stealing secret affected the way each man reacted to the other, and to what fate dealt him.

This could have been a great LITTLE book, instead of a badly flawed BIG book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A great story -- beaten to death., November 7, 2006

By 

Daniel Elman (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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

I was thrilled to hear about this book, having thoroughly enjoyed Joshua Prager's excellent Wall Street Journal story in 2001. If only the book lived up to its promise.

Prager does a terrific job of setting the stage for Bobby Thomson's dramatic home run and describing the famous game itself. Plus, his insights into the relationship between Thomson and Ralph Branca are very interesting.

But he seems more concerned with waving his extensive research in our faces than with using it judiciously to tell the story. There are pages and pages of background on every person in this book. I mean everyone, including the surgeon who treated the electrician who installed the buzzer in the Polo Grounds. And do we need to know where everyone Prager ever met, heard of, saw on TV, read about or admired was when Thomson hit the home run? We get the point.

Far more troublesome were the myriad factual errors. In the chapter on the famous playoff game, for example, Prager writes, "Now, after Dark popped out to Robinson to lead off the bottom of the fourth and the count went 2-2 on Pafko, Dressen also inched down the line." In other words, a Giant (Alvin Dark) led off, then a Dodger (Andy Pafko) came to bat.

Another reviewer here notes Prager's claim that Bobby Thomson lived in the Milwaukee area on the shore of Lake Superior, when Milwaukee is actually on Lake Michigan.

My personal favorite is Prager's wonder-filled claim that no team before or since the Thomson blast ever won a playoff game after being down three runs in the ninth inning. In fact, the Mets did just that in game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series.

If these easily checked facts are inaccurate, how many more of the hundreds of arcane -- not to mention irrelevant -- details in this book are also inaccurate?

Prager also has the habit of referring to people only by their last names, sometimes even on first reference in a chapter. This isn't a problem when the name is Durocher or Branca. But it is when the name is Hodges, since two people by that name were involved in the critical playoff game - the Dodgers' first baseman and the Giants' announcer. Prager also likes to refer to both the Giants and the Yankees as "New York," sometimes in the same paragraph. Very confusing.

Other reviewers have mentioned Prager's "idiosyncratic" writing. I have never seen anything like it. How did this prose pass Freshman Composition, let alone a professional copy editor? Does Random House employ any?