The Echoing Green

This is the second book this year I've read about the home run hit by Bobby Thomsen off of Ralph Branca on October 3, 1951, to vault the Giants over the Dodgers for the National League pennant. This past summer I read Underworld, which was Don DeLillo' fictional meditation on the iconic moment in American sports history. Now I have read The Echoing Green, a point-by-point history of that moment and the aftermath, by Joshua Prager. The new twist is that the Giants remarkable run that season was aided by them stealing signs from a telescope in centerfield.

You certainly will get everything you wanted to know, and more so. At times the reader is bogged down in details, everything from a history of signals dating back to the dawn of man, to an entire chapter that is a biography of the electrician who installed the wire and buzzer that the Giants used to tip their batters to what pitch was coming.

Essentially, though, this is a dual biography of Thomsen and Branca, who both come off as decent men who where interwined in a lightning bolt of history, and never were able to shake that moment to this day (both men are still living). It's always interesting to me to read about the everyday lives of baseball players from the old days, and you get that here in spades. There are interesting stories about Giant manager Leo Durocher, backup catcher Sal Yvars (who relayed the stolen signals to Giant batters), and that Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason were at the ultimate game, and Gleason ralphed on Sinatra's shoes (a detail that is also in DeLillo's book).

Weighing this book down, though, is that, like many books about baseball, the author beats us over the head with his erudition. Baseball is a game that appeals to intellectuals, so there is a tendency in baseball writing for the highfalutin. The title of the book is from a poem by William Blake, and chapter epigraphs come from quotations ranging from Homer to Herman Melville. Most annoying is Prager's tortured syntax, which appears to have been translated from another language by Yoda. Several reviews on Amazon also point this out, and one reader wonders where the editor was, but it's clear to me this was intentional. Prager is trying to capture the grandiloquence of the baseball pressbox from the golden age of newspapers. In a book written in 2006, though, this style comes across as clumsy and pretentious.