It is baseball playoffs time. I just yawned as I am sure many others do about baseball and its postseason. This indifference, however, is a bit misleading. Many may talk and write about baseball’s demise, but attendance at major league games increased this year. More people went to the parks than in the years immediately preceding Covid. Even so, baseball and its playoffs do not gain the national attention they once did. We don’t anoint them with the significance of past years, nothing like the playoff that ended with the most famous home run in history — the home run that many at the time and even since saw as some sort of American turning point that went beyond baseball.

          I wasn’t aware of it when it happened. It was on television, I have read, but my family did not then own one. It was on the radio, but I did not care. I was aware of little beyond our backyard and our block, even though I ventured further than that to attend one of our two years of kindergarten. I was six years old.

          But my world changed a lot during the next three years, and when I was nine, I learned about it. By then the Braves baseball team had moved from Boston to Milwaukee. I had become a baseball fan, and the New York Giants had traded Bobby Thomson to my Braves prior to the start of the 1954 baseball season. Almost every mention of Thomson referred to that famous home run (only Babe Ruth’s “called” shot could compare) which Thomson hit on October 3, 1951. With the season nearing its end, the Giants were far behind the Brooklyn Dodgers—13 and a half games. The Giants, however, went on a tear winning 37 of their last 44 scheduled games. The regular season ended in a tie, which produced the National League’s first playoff, a two-out-of-three affair. The Giants won the first game; the Dodgers the second. In the decisive contest, the Dodgers were winning 4 to 1 going into the bottom of the ninth. The Giants scored one run and got two more runners on base. Thomson then hit a three-run homer that won the game and the National League Championship for the Giants. (The Giants went on to lose the World Series to the New York Yankees.)

          There have been other exciting, season-concluding home runs. Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays hit one to end the 1993 World Series, and even more dramatic was the end to the 1960 World Series. The New York Yankees had won three games over the Pittsburgh Pirates in blowouts, outscoring their opponents 38 to 3. Pittsburgh had won three close games. In the seventh and deciding game, the Yankees were leading when Pittsburgh scored five times in the bottom of the eighth after a ground ball took a bad hop hitting Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat and wiping out what appeared to be a double play. Down two runs, the Yankees scored twice in the top of the ninth with the aid of some unorthodox base running by Mickey Mantle. Pittsburgh’s second baseman Bill Mazeroski, who averaged a mere eight home runs per season and who had already hit a decisive home run in Game 1 of the series, led off the bottom of the ninth. On the second pitch, he hit a miraculous home run over the left field wall to win the game and the baseball championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

          And since 1961, Super Bowls, NBA, college football playoffs, and college basketball championships have concluded on exciting, improbable plays. Even so, that 1951 game with Bobby Thomson’s home run seems to live on in the American consciousness in ways Mazeroski’s homer and the other exciting games have not. Or maybe I just think that because several things I have read recently and a conversation with a Neapolitan have placed that game high in my consciousness.

          One of the books was the 1997 memoir of her childhood by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year. She was raised in a middle class New York City suburb that emerged after World War II in a family of rabid Brooklyn Dodger fans. The 1951 playoff between the Giants and Dodgers was a momentous event in her eight-year-old life. In those days, playoff and World Series games were played during the day, and her teachers had allowed their charges to listen to the first two games on the radio, but Doris asked to stay home on the afternoon of the decisive game to watch it on that new instrument, a television. Her mother readily consented. She was not alone. Half her classmates also were not in school that afternoon. But the spectatorship was many more than diehard New York and Brooklyn fans, for a continental cable had been finished a few months earlier, and these playoffs were the first nationally televised sporting event.

          Kearns, as she then was, describes the tension of a close game, with the Dodgers scoring three times in the top of the eighth to take a 4-1 lead. And then the fateful bottom of the ninth. The Giants had scored to pull within two runs and had two men on base. The Dodgers’ pitcher Don Newcombe was tiring, and the manager replaced him with Ralph Branca. “I was horrified,” Doris writes. “Images of Branca’s other failures filled my mind.” She pleaded for this move to be rescinded. “But my pleas were fruitless. The stage was set, the moment irrevocable. Ralph Branca stood on the mound, and Bobby Thompson was advancing to the plate.”

          And the home run came, and along with it, she reports, “the never-to-be forgotten voice of Giant announcer Russ Hodges. ‘There’s a long fly. . . . It’s gonna be . . . I believe.’ He stopped for a moment. Then, as the ball dropped majestically into the lower decks of seats, there came that horrifying shout. ‘The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!’”

          Broadcasts were not routinely recorded in 1951, but many of us have heard Hodges’ depiction of the famous Bobby Thomson home run 1951. Doris Kearns Goodwin makes it seem as if she heard it on the television, but the reports I have read said that his call was preserved on a tape recording by a Brooklynite made off the radio. Perhaps Hodges was simultaneously broadcasting on radio and TV, but that seems unlikely, and if the Goodwin family was listening to the radio while watching the television broadcast, I would have thought the Goodwins would have been listening to the Dodgers announcer, Red Barber. (Barber, it is reported, pronounced Hodges overexcited call as “unprofessional.”)

          Perhaps Doris really did hear Hodges make the call. Perhaps, like me, she heard it later. It is memorable, and perhaps she conflated it into the actual memory. What’s clear is that for her this game produced what has been sometimes called a “flashbulb memory” in which a memory of a momentous event becomes, we believe, indelibly etched into our mind. We probably all have some of these. Research, however, has shown we are often mistaken in details of these memories. (When I looked at some of this research for an academic project, they were called flashbulb memories. With the decline of flashbulbs, I wonder if researchers now use a different term.)

          Kearns Goodwin makes clear the importance of the event. “It was the worst moment in my life as a fan. . . . From that moment to this, Bobby Thomson and the Brooklyn Dodgers would be forever linked, the mere mention of his name calling forth in every Dodger fan instant recognition, comradeship, a memory of where they were, how they felt.”

          Doris had been posting the baseball scores in the window of a local butcher shop whose owners were Giants fans. She was so miserable that she avoided the shop until she received a bouquet of roses from the owner (“It was the first time anyone had sent me flowers.”), imploring her to come back because she was missed. “My excitement about the flowers drained my humiliation and pain over the Dodgers’ collapse.” She went to the store and posted the last Dodgers’ score of the season.

          The memorability of the game and the pomposity of its importance to some sports fans is seen in a continuing reaction. Goodwin writes that she now lives in Concord, Massachusetts, that is celebrated as the site of the first battle of our Revolutionary War, which was commemorated in a famous line from a no-longer famous poem written in the first half the nineteenth century. When she takes visitors to Concord’s Old North Bridge and sees the inscription on the monument there, ‘the shot heard round the world,’ “I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s home run.” This characterization, however, is not confined to her private thoughts. Thomson’s homer was characterized with the Revolutionary War line almost from the moment that ball landed in the stands. I recently tested my assumption that that playoff result lives in the minds of many Americans who had no personal connection with the game. I asked a biergarten drinking buddy, who was born twenty years after it happened, if he was familiar with Bobby Thomson’s home run. He immediately said, “The shot heard ‘round the world.’”

          I have also been dipping into American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith edited by Daniel Okrent. Smith, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning sportswriter, is best known for the four-times-a-week columns he wrote for New York City newspapers in the four decades after World War II. Of course, he wrote about the famous home run with a lede, published on the day after the game, that has been characterized as one of the best: “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.” Okrent labels that opening and the rest of the piece “the platonic ideal of a column about a major sports event.” I found Smith’s recounting to be enjoyable, and his often-remarkable prose is always worth examining. However, what first struck me in the October 4, 1951, column is that the writer immediately sensed that Thomson’s home run was not just one among many exhilarating sports events that he had seen. It stood alone. Not just to the rabid fan of one team or the other, it was, as they say, a game-changer even to the seasoned sportswriter, who could no longer believe that he had seen it all.

          But I noticed something else in Red Smith’s column. He mentioned that there were “34,320 witnesses” to the game. The later depictions of that afternoon make it seem as if the whole country or at least all interested in sports or at least all of New York City or at least all of its baseball fans were living and dying with each pitch. On the other hand, the Polo Grounds, where the game was played, had a capacity of 55,000. More than 20,000 seats were empty. Perhaps the game was not as important when it was played as its extraordinary outcome later made it become.

(concluded October 16)