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.