The Shot Heard 'Round the World (but never seen, again)

Bobby Thomson passed away this week. A lifetime .270 hitter, Thomson played over half his career with the Giants. He hit over 260 home runs, but he is most remembered for the one he hit in the bottom of the ninth in the 1951 playoff series against the Dodgers. That home run climaxed an amazing comeback by the Giants, in which they made up a 13 1/2 game deficit during the last two months of the season.

While there have been numerous books written about that game, and countless re-tellings in others, I want to mention two: Pafko at the Wall, by Don DeLillo (Scribner:1997) and Miracle Ball: My Hunt for the Shot Heard 'Round the World, by Brian Biegael (Crown: 2009). While DeLillo's work is fiction and Biegal's is a semi-autobiographical tale, both center around what might have happened to the ball Thomson hit out of the Polo Grounds that day in October, 1951. That ball disappeared in the melee that occurred with the celebration and there has been disagreement as to what actually happened to the ball.

DeLillo's novella is taken from his larger Underworld. In the story, Cotter Martin is a black teenager from who sneaks into the game and ends up wrenching the ball away from the hands of a playing-hooky aquaintance, Bill Waterson - a white middle-aged businessman. Chased through the streets, Cotter is offered various amounts of money for the ball, but he wants to keep it, as a remembrance of the day. In the end, Martin escapes into the alleyways of Harlem, while his pursuer is forced to retreat back to familiar territory.

Brian Biegael's father always claimed that he was the one ended up with the home run ball, and would regale his family and friends as to how he came to obtain it. Grown up, and now a reporter, Biegael decided to determine whether the baseball his father had was the one Bobby Thomson hit and, if not, then the true story of its disappearance. His book reads like a detective story, in which he searches through documents, interviews people and players, and in the end arrives at an almost unimaginable ending. I won't spoil the ending, because the book is a well written page-turner but, like me, I'm sure you will wonder if Biegael's findings define the end of the story.

The Bobby Thomson home run is one of the great stories of baseball, along with Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hit streak, Bill Buckner's error, and Willie Mays' over-the-shoulder catch. I'm sure most players dream of hitting a game-winning home run or pitching a perfect game, while others dream of just getting the chance to play in the Majors. Bobby Thomson certainly accomplished the dream of many. As for the ball he hit - who knows? Perhaps it's on a shelf somewhere, buried under odds and ends in a box, or rotting away in a landfill. In the end, whatever its fate, the mystery just makes for a good story.