Bobby Thomson HR books

Nothing to add except that the work Prager put in on that book is truly awe inspiring. Check out the acknowledgements and bibliography.

THAT is how you research a book.

 

Prager did an amazing job on that book.

 

I hope he made some cash money off of it, because he certainly deserved to. I just don't know how much sports books like that sell.

 

I loved Echoing Green, but know sales hit a wall, quickly. I stocked up on multi-$1 CD sets, as gifts.

. . . which includes the sharpest (if grotesquely-belated) profile of Dirtbag
Duroucher, ever.

 

An absolutely wonderful book. It clocked in at about 150,000 words and not one of them was wasted, imho.

 

Where the marketing problem lay, I fear, is how long ago this was. The "shot" lives on, but fear that deep, paying interest in all the delightful surrounding details doesn't run deep enough to make it pay big.

 

Quick Brance/Thomson story:

About 10 years ago I’m at the Baseball Assistance Team dinner in New York and I get both Branca and Thomson to sign a ball for me. (I’m not a journalist.)

I tell my college buddy a few days later and the first thing he asks is, “who did you get to sign the ball first?”

“Branca of course,” I told him.

I mean, that’s the protocol right? It’d be tough to ask Branca to sign a ball already signed by Thomson, although I bet he’s been asked a hundred times.

 

I think that was the right order, just as it was in real life - from Branca to Thomson to history.

But did you have a Giants coach watching through binoculars from about 500 feet away and, via the bullpen, giving Thomson the go-ahead to sign? Only then would it have been like real life.

In all seriousness, Thomson still had to hit the ball that was thrown to him that day. Simply knowing what the pitch was told him nothing about its placement or anything like that. He might have simply grounded or popped out or even swung right through the damn ball.

Kinda funny, when you think about it, that the ball game played that day, merely to decide a league pennant, probably held 1,000 times more interest than does any one game in this year's World Series. At least.

 

Read the opening section of Don DeLillo's "Underworld" -- it originally appeared as a novella in Harper's Magazine called "Pafko at the Wall." It's a fictionalized account of being at the ballpark that day. Incredible.

 

It was a perfect storm moment, no doubt. Two New York teams. The incredible Giants charge to tie the Dodgers for first. And then perhaps the most dramatic game ending in baseball history.

 

Don't forget Maz.