NONFICTION
A fascinating baseball tale
Would you believe that a nun from Buffalo was in the middle of one of the all-time great baseball mysteries? Stay tuned.
It was 3:58 p. m. on Oct. 3, 1951, in New York’s Polo Grounds and virtually the entire country was chewing its nails in anxiety. The Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Giants 4-2 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs and two men on base, with the Giants’ Bobby Thomson at bat. He took Ralph Branca’s fastball for a strike, then lined the second pitch into the left field stands for a three-run, game-winning homer that overnight became known as “The Shot Heard ’Round the World.”
Why all the fuss? Let me count the ways.
First, it was the rubber game of a three-game playoff to decide the National League championship. Also, the rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers could more properly be called a long-term enmity. More fuel for the fire, the Dodgers held a 13z-game lead over the Giants in late August, but frittered it away to end the regular season tied, leading to the three-game playoff. And on top of that, national interest was so manic that the playoff finale became the first baseball game televised coast to coast.
Thomson’s homer has been called the most famous hit in baseball history. It has spawned an immense market for memorabilia of all sorts, everything except the ball. For more than 50 years nobody had any idea what happened to Thomson’s home run ball when it landed in the left field stands. It just vanished.
Enter Brian Biegel.
Biegel was born in Brooklyn to a family of baseball fanatics, and eventually built a career as a sportswriter and filmmaker. In 2000 his life went into the tank after a serious illness and an anguished divorce left him profoundly depressed.
Earlier, his father Jack was browsing in a Salvation Army thrift store and had bought for two bucks an old National League baseball, autographed by Thomson and others, that he came to believe was the missing 1951 home run ball. Jack kept urging Brian to take on a project that might absorb his faculties and help to override his depression.
Brian took the suggestion and began trying to determine if Jack’s old baseball actually was the missing 1951 Thomson ball. It clearly was of the correct vintage, but his research uncovered evidence that it was not the famous ball. However, because of Brian’s close relationship with his father, he kept that possibility open rather than risk hurting his feelings. But for Brian the detective work fired an intense curiosity to discover what actually happened to that ball after it landed in the stands.
“Miracle Ball” is not only the chronicle of Brian’s almost frenzied pursuit of even the smallest clues that might throw light on this mystery, it is also a parallel portrait of a man working his way through the agony of depression. In the early chapters, which set the scene for the intense search, his writing is prosaic and dated, replete with hackneyed phrases such as “Dem Bums” for the Dodgers. It was as though he were still depressed.
But as Brian gets the scent of the truth about the missing ball his language is transformed, not into something erudite or intellectual, but into a prose that radiates the palpable joy of both discovery and occasional disappointment. This aura makes it an engrossing read.
To describe every avenue of investigation would be both impossible and a disservice. Brian’s dogged search was ultimately aimed not only at solving the mystery, but also producing both the book and a film, so a camera man accompanied him on all his journeys, which included visits to the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, the 1951 Giants’ clubhouse manager’s family, Bobby Thomson’s New Jersey home, and countless newspaper offices and photo files. And as publicity about his search spread, he was beset by countless loonies trying to sell him unrelated memorabilia and junk.
The appeal of his project helped Brian in enlisting, either pro bono or for a professional fee, a phalanx of private detectives, missing-persons experts and state-of-the-art forensics specialists. And after all the dead end searches and accumulation of innumerable small clues, it turned out that the most valuable evidence was hiding in plain sight. It was a famous 1951 photo called “Pafko at the Wall,” a shot of Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko looking up disconsolately as the home run ball disappeared into the stands.
Here a microscopic forensic analysis of the photo located the ball still in midair, and indicated where it would land. Based on a game report that the ball had bounced seven feet to the left, this put its final resting place virtually in the lap of a serious-looking, dark-haired woman.
The exhaustive research into the identity of that woman is almost a separate story in its own right, involving both brilliant sleuthing and dumb luck. Finally, it turned out that she was apparently a nun named Sister Helen from the Felician Sisters’ convent in Buffalo, an order with such strict rules of conduct that she would have had to violate some of them to get to the 1951 playoff finale.
Those strictures would also explain why Sister Helen, who died in 1990, could never tell anyone about the trip to the Polo Grounds and ownership of the ball. It would have been an admission of serious sins.
Brian’s conclusions are based on circumstantial evidence, but the pieces fit together so neatly that it seems about 90 percent certain that he is correct. Case closed.
The fate of the ball itself will be left for readers of the book to discover. As for Brian, he talked to all of Sister Helen’s surviving relatives, and came away knowing he will never see the ball, but with virtual assurance that he knows what happened to it. That was enough for him.
Herman Trotter is Music Critic Emeritus for The Buffalo News and a lifelong baseball fan.
Miracle Ball:My Hunt for the Shot Heard ’Round the World
By Brian Biegel,
Crown
231 pages,
$25
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