Carlsbad author brings new life to baseball’s ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’

For every hero behind an iconic October baseball moment, there is a tragic figure on the opposite end.

Carlsbad-based author Bob Mitchell examines this phenomenon through the lens of the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” and the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who surrendered Bobby Thomson’s legendary home run in his new book, “Ralph Branca and the Meaning of Life.”

Mitchell, 81, was just a boy on Oct. 3, 1951, when Thomson shook the baseball world with his famous “shot.” The famed call of broadcaster Russ Hodges — “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” — provided the soundtrack of a seminal moment for Mitchell.

Thomson’s home run and Hodges’ jubilation capped a remarkable rally. The Giants trailed the Dodgers by 13 games back with 44 games remaining in the 1951 regular season. The teams finished the regular season tied, then played a best-of-three tiebreaker series to determine the National League champion.

The Giants won Game 1. The Dodgers took Game 2, and were ahead 4-1 in the winner-take-all Game 3 before the Giants’ rally.

“Ralph Branca and the Meaning of Life” begins with Mitchell inviting readers into his childhood home in Brooklyn. Sitting in his present-day home in La Costa, Mitchell laughed at the irony. He grew up a committed Giants fan while living in the heart of Dodgers country.

“There have been all kinds of great rivalries in sports. But the Giants and Dodgers were teams in the same city and the same league,” he said. “The hatred was so intense, there were Dodgers fans who never celebrated Halloween because of the colors orange and black. I lived through this.”

Both franchises moved to California later the same decade. Mitchell did the same after playing soccer, squash and tennis at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and teaching French at Harvard, Ohio State and Purdue.

The Dodgers-Giants rivalry crossed the continent and continues today. But as others have muscled in on the feud — like the Padres — the rivalry has perhaps never been as hot as it was in 1951.

Brooklyn never won the World Series to that point and had to wait another four years to do so. By then, the titular figure of Mitchell’s book, pitcher Ralph Branca, was effectively out of the league.

A three-time All-Star earlier in his career, Branca delivered some of his best individual numbers in 1951, posting a 3.26 ERA and 118 strikeouts. But his relief appearance against Thomson became the defining moment not only of his season, but for the next 65 years until Branca’s death in 2016.

Mitchell’s book is not a biography of Branca, the author said. Instead, it’s “the greatest example for sports being a metaphor for the human condition,” Mitchell explained.

Drawing from another of his life’s passions — literature — Mitchell introduces the audience to a cast of characters that includes the tragic Greek figure Sisyphus; Hester Prynne of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” — and even the late Larry King. The longtime radio and TV commentator and diehard Dodgers fan provided Mitchell with initial inspiration for “Ralph Branca and the Meaning of Life.”

King’s presence underscores a point made throughout the book: Just like every October hero has a mirror-opposite  — a Mitch Williams for every Joe Carter, a Ralph Terry for every Bill Mazeroski, a Ralph Branca for every Bobby Thomson — every happy fan has a devastated counterpart.

“Ralph Branca and the Meaning of Life,” published by McFarland & Company, is available on Amazon.com.