A conversation with Joshua Prager

Joshua Prager is author of The Echoing Green, the authoritative book on what might be the best-kept secret in sports cheating: Bobby Thomson’s homer in the 1951 playoffs against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Prager, who broke the story in a 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal, spent five years researching, interviewing, and writing the book, which Publisher’s Weekly described as “a brilliant narrative not only about the most famous home run in baseball history but also about the mystery that haunts it.” Prager also recorded an abridged audio version of the book.

RK: What’s the significance of your title?
JP: It comes from a poem by William Blake. The poem is amazing. It was written in the late 1700s and it’s all about loss and hope and innocence and experience and it really paralleled a tremendous amount what I was writing about. What was so exciting about the title is that the whole book really is about the reverberations of one moment. It just so happens that it’s called “the shot heard ‘round the world,” so it really is about the echoes of a single moment, both in the lives of two men and the country at large.

RK: So, chicken-and-egg questions: What came first, the title or the book? Did you write the book and then find an appropriate title?
JP: Yes. But I knew I was playing with the word “echo” quite a bit, so when I found [the poem], it made me very happy.

RK: The audiobook contains less than one-third of the written product.
JP: The tape was very baseball-centric. The 70 percent of the book that’s not there is basically about the lives of the people, the backgrounds, why they reacted the way they did to this moment, and why it the moment that it became.

RK: How did you come to do the narration?
JP: Once I knew that they wanted to turn it into an audio book, I asked if I would be able to read it. I felt I would be able to do it with the right inflection and [read it] enthusiastically. So when they heard my voice, they said fine.

RK: Did you enjoy doing it or was it a chore?
JP: I loved it. It was lot of work because they edited it down tremendously. The problem was their editing, while generally done well, was filled with discontinuities and inconsistencies. [For example,] someone would be taken out [of the story] at one point and reintroduced without realizing that they’d taken him out earlier. I actually worked tremendously hard on fixing their edits but I really enjoyed reading it. It was only a shame that it was such a drastic cut. It was standard; these books are about eight hours but it was still sort of sad to me. But I was delighted that it would introduce it to a different audience.

RK: So speaking of success, how is the book doing?
JP: I’m very lucky in that the reviews have, for the most part, been wonderful. I think the greatest honor was what The New York Times said, that it was the best baseball book since The Boys of Summer. The sales have been not as good as the reviews, but that’s okay. The truth is, if I were to choose between the two, between great sales and great reviews, I would, every time, choose the great reviews. But my publisher probably wouldn’t agree with that.

RK: Chicken-and-egg again: Did the Wall Street Journal article come out of the book, or did the book come out of the article?
JP: The book came out of the article. One of the things you don’t have in the audio book: In chapter 26 I talk about how the article came to be, through a guy named Barry Halper. A lovely guy. He was the first person to mention to me the rumors that the Giants had stolen signs. I worked on the article for five months. It had been rumored for many years. I proved it, obviously, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I found the telescope they used, I found the exact day they started. I found who was the electrician [Abe Chadwick. who rigged up the electrical system to transmit the signals], I found who was the spy, who relayed the signs, etc., etc. What I cared about in the book, as I write there, was much less the debatable effects of the telescope on play than the undeniable effects of the secret on [Thomson and Branca]. That was really my focus.
They were very open with me, they opened up their lives to me. They’re incredible men, the two of them.
There’s one chapter in the book that’s about 100 pages, all about the lives of Thomson and Branca. Just wanting to know where they were born. I went to Scotland, and with the help of researcher found Bobby Thomson’s birth certificate; he didn’t have that.
I undertook it seriously to get everything right. There are 4,000 endnotes in the book. I wanted people to know where every little detail came from. That was very important for me. Very simply put; I saw this as a great honor in one sense. There are very very few moments that literally millions of people remember where they were when they happened. JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, etc. For various reasons that I go into a great deal in the book, Thomson’s homer was one of them. And to be able to write the definitive account of one of those moments was … really a thrill.

RK: Those who were around at the time, who remember the event, are now in their late fifties and beyond. Do you get any kind of response from these readers?
JP: Oh yes, I get a lot of wonderful e-mails and letters and that’s really exciting. People want to share their experiences of that day and it’s been thrilling for me.

RK: As I was leafing through the book I found a section about Julius Rosenberg’s reaction from his jail cell. How did you find out about that?
JP: When you write a book that takes place in another time, I think it’s lazy when people say “The cost of the subway was a nickel, The Caine Mutiny was the number one book. I feel if you’re going to talk about those things, they have to be introduced into the book seamlessly. By that I mean, it has to be organic to the story. So if I want to say the subway cost a nickel, there has to be someone going on the subway and paying a nickel. Similarly, I felt that if the people and the issues of that time, from the Korean War to the burgeoning Cold War…if these things were going to find their way into the book, they had to be a part of the story.
What I did was I read every book I could — scores of books — that centered on that time, and I read all I could about the people who were involved in that time. And I contacted all their families — this is why it took me five years — and I went through their diaries and their letters and I figured, maybe Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, remember that day and could tell me something about the home run. So I contacted Michaeland he said, “I don’t have a strong memory of it.” He remembered where he was, but nothing too dramatic. But he said, “But my parents wrote about it.” I got the letters from him and read this entire book, all the letters they wrote, and I was able to sort of construct what his cell was like. And it was very powerful. “Gloom of glooms, the dear Dodgers lost the pennant.”

RK: Let’s talk about Chadwick for a minute.
JP: Sure. It was thrilling for me to have sort of a central Jewish character. He was sort of my excuse, in a sense, to be able to talk about everything from Tisha b’Av in the book to the prayer Anenu, which is said on Tsom Gedaliah [a day of fasting observed during the High Holy Days], which was the day that Thomson hit his home run, so there’s sort of a Jewish streak throughout the book.

RK: Did you speak to his family at all?
JP: Oh, endlessly, endlessly.

RK: Aside from the fact that he was a Dodger fan who ironically helped the Giants win …
JP: I even mention that. When I walk about that I talk about Haman because [Chadwick] was born on Purim and he was “hanged” on a gallows that he himself built.

RK: Did you get a sense at all of any remorse on his part?
JP: He confided not to his family about his sign-stealing, but …to some of his colleagues in the electricians union. And none of them said to me, “I remember him saying how horrible this is, that he had done this.” But by the same token…he watched literally every single game. He died of cancer one month to the day after the home run. And he was diagnosed and had to stop working, just one home-stand after he set up this system for [the Giants], and he watched every game on a little television his brother bought him. The Giants were so far behind the Dodgers at that time, and to watch those two teams converge over the course of those two months must have been unbelievably painful for him. He knew what was going on. So while I don’t have him saying “I can’t believe I did this,” it is not at all a leap [or] anything contrived to know with certainty that this was a tremendous lament for him.

RK: It’s been fifty years since this took place. There have been stories about the game itself, about Thomson and Branca …
JP: It’s the most written-about moment in American sports history.

RK: So why has there not been anything on this level before? There had been rumors going on forever and no one ever though to investigate it?
JP: You know what? I think there are very few books…

RK: Never mind the books, what about Major League Baseball to look into it?
JP: I think Mike Vaccaro from the New York Post said it was most researched book on any subject, period. I feel very strongly in research. It’s not true that people didn’t look into it, they did. But they did it the way most people do these things. Not with any incredible amount of thoroughness because that requires a lot of work. It was rumored about publicly ever since 1962 a nd I go through those rumors in the book. But to really something down requires a lot of work and I guess people were content to leave it be. Part of it is that. Part of it is something else that go into in the book, which is very important. Look at it this way: time has to pass before the public is ready for a real reexamination of something so exalted. It was the eve of the 50th anniversary of this moment when I started to look back. And when the players, who had held this secret inside for so many years, I think some of them were very relieved to finally unburden themselves of this secret and that’s something at the heart of the book: what is it like to carry a secret around with you for so long?

RK:Thomson and Branca are both getting on in years. If you had to write their obituaries, what would you lead with?
JP: It’s sort of funny, Roger Angell once wrote about the home run and wrote about Bobby Thomson and he said the home run would comprise the meaty portion of the first sentence of his obituary. And clearly both of these men were defined by this one swing, this one pitch. So I would, in fact, lead with that: “This person was on one side of it, this person was on the other.”
But what I would very quickly get to and dwell upon is that if a person feels good about himself, no matter what happens to him later in life, he will be able to hold onto that. The converse of that is that if a person doesn’t feel good about himself, no matter what happens to him in life, he still won’t feel good about himself. Thomson was a hero publicly, but privately was haunted by some of what went on. He was raised in a strict Scottish home, always told to do what’s right; he wasn’t made to feel particularly good about himself when he was a young man. Branca, on the other hand, was always made to feel good about himself. So although publicly he was a goat, he held on to that inner feeling.
At the beginning of every chapter, I have an epigraph, and there’s one that really sums up that whole thing that is at the heart of the book. Thoreau said “public opinion is a weak tyrant to compare to one’s own private opinion.” How a person sees himself is more important than how others see him, and that’s what I would focus on in their obituaries.” —

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Joshua Prager is currently on “book leave” from the Wall Street Journal to work on his next project. The paperback edition of The Echoing Green comes out this spring.