Shot Heard Round the World

n baseball the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" is an epithet used to describe a game-winning home run by New York Giants outfielder and third baseman Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 3 1951 to win the National League (NL) pennant. Thomson's dramatic three-run homer came in the ninth inning of the decisive third game of a three-game playoff for the pennant in which the Giants trailed 4-2.1 The gamethe first ever televised nationallywas seen by millions of viewers across America and heard on radio by millions more including thousands of American servicemen stationed in Korea listening on Armed Forces Radio. The classic drama of snatching victory from defeat to secure a pennant was intensified by the epic cross-town rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers and by a remarkable string of victories in the last weeks of the regular season by the Giants who won 37 of their last 44 games to catch the first-place Dodgers and force a playoff series to decide the NL champion. The Giants' late-season rally and 2-to-1-game playoff victory capped by Thomson's moment of triumph are collectively known in baseball lore as "The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" a descriptor coined by the legendary sports columnist Red Smith.