The Shot Heard 'Round the World (review)

The Shot Heard 'Round the World. Producers and Editors, Bob Bodziner and George Roy. Writer, Steven Stern. Narrator, Liev Screiber. Music, Brian Keane. 2001. hbo in association with Black Canyon Productions.

Generally, sports videos concern the accomplishments of a team, the events of a noteworthy season, or a great player's career and the place of each in the history of the sport. But this video focuses primarily and expertly on the significance of one pitch, including the events leading up to it and its aftermath—"the shot heard 'round the world." The title comes from Emerson's Concord Hymn( 1837), which depicts the shots fired by American colonists at Concord on the British in 1775 as the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War—"Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard 'round the world." In its traditional hyperbolic manner, baseball, which grandly stages a "World Series" limited to teams from North America, has appropriated an expression associated with the war that led to American independence to describe a single event in its twentieth-century history. Yet for those who were involved in this baseball moment, it was "the shot heard 'round the world." And by "those involved," I mean that this is a tale of twos: two teams, two ballparks, two groups of fans and two boroughs and, finally, two players, then and now.

From 1947 through 1958, at least one of the three New York teams appeared in eleven of the twelve World Series. Each of these teams reflected their respective ballparks and fans. The dominant Yankees, regal in their pinstripe uniforms as they romped to victories in the vast expanses of Yankee Stadium, won the Series eight times during this period. The raffish Brooklyn Dodgers played in the small and intimate Ebbets Field, where their Damon Runyanesque fans reacted to the action on the field with colorful antics and language worthy of borscht-belt comedians. Finally, there were the nondescript New York Giants, who played in relative obscurity across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium on 155th Street and 8th Avenue in the horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds, with a center field that went on forever and two short porches in left and right field. One of the major joys of this video is the testimony from the various Giant and Dodger fans about the social and psychological importance of their teams. In the years I was growing up in Brooklyn and fanatically rooting for the Dodgers, I met only one Giant fan, who I am certain rooted for the "Jints" just to antagonize the rest of us right-thinking fans. But this video proves that there actually were Giant fans as equally devoted to their team as we were to ours.

The 1951 season began with the "boys of summer," who had barely lost the 1950 pennant in an extra-inning game on the last day of the season to the Phillies, fielding one of their greatest teams. By contrast, the Giants, who had not won a pennant since 1937, looked dismal from early in the season when they suffered an 11-game losing streak. By the end of April, the Giants had won only 3 games, to the consternation and increasing fury of their feisty manager, Leo "The Lion" Durocher, who had managed the Dodgers for eight and a half years between 1939 and 1948 but was now roundly hated by his former players, especially the sharp-tongued Jackie Robinson. By mid-August, the Dodgers went 13.5 games up, 15 games in the loss column, after sweeping a 3-game series from the Giants. Fatally, Dodger manager Charlie Dressen (1951-53) encouraged some of his players to taunt the Giants through the thin wall separating their dressing rooms, and Robinson's voice could be heard above all the others singing, "The Giants are dead." On the next day, August 12, the Giants, inexplicably, began...