Jason Aronoff was an excited 11- year-old kid, watching on a little black-and- white TV set in Millville, N. J., when he saw “The Catch.”

Nearly 55 years later, he can’t forget it.

It was Memorial Day 1954. Aronoff and his brother Remy — staunch Brooklyn Dodger fans — were watching their team in a hard-fought game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

The Dodgers led, 5-4, in the bottom of the 12th inning. Two runners were on and there were two outs. When the Phillies’ Willie “Puddin’ Head” Jones clobbered a deep liner to left field, it looked like the Dodgers were done.

But Brooklyn outfielder Duke Snider, a future Hall of Famer, had other ideas.

He raced toward the outfield wall, and then, like Spider-Man in a baseball uniform, he seemed to zip right up the wall. He reached his glove hand high toward the sky and grabbed the ball, saving a Dodgers win.

“It was one of the great memories of my childhood — an extroardinary, amazing event,” Aronoff recalled. “Even though it was in the Phillies’ stadium, all the fans rushed out onto the field and they were mobbing Duke Snider. That’s what an incredible catch it was.”

Fast-forward to 2009. Aronoff, a retired school psychologist and lifelong baseball fan from the Town of Tonawanda, is now a published author. And Snider’s great catch is the reason.

Aronoff’s quest to find out everything he could about that sweet baseball memory of his youth led him to write “Going, Going . . . Caught!” — a book about the greatest catches made by baseball outfielders in the years 1887-1964.

“It all started in 2001, with me trying to find a picture of Duke Snider’s catch,” Aronoff said. “I couldn’t find one on record anywhere. But I kept finding these wonderful old newspaper articles, not only about Duke’s catch, but other great catches.”

His digging also led him to the conclusion that—as far as he could determine — no one had ever done a book on the greatest outfield baseball catches in major league history. He decided he would give it a try.

“I didn’t approach it as a historian, or as a sportswriter. I approached it as a baseball fan,” Aronoff said. “I loved doing it. It’s really a book written by the baseball newspaper writers of years ago. I just put it all together.”

He’s 66 years old now, but Aronoff still gets as excited as a youngster as he talks about the awesome catches — by Snider, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio and other greats — detailed in his book.

“These catches were amazing accomplishments. I wanted to be able to share not only the information about the catches, but the colorful, passionate quotes from the writers who saw these things happen,” Aronoff said.

“Going, Going . . . Caught!” focuses on 69 catches made by 42 major league players. Not surprisingly, the player with by far the most catches detailed in the book is Mays, with 13. He’s followed by Jimmy Piersall with six, Snider with four, and DiMaggio and several other players with three.

Aronoff deliberately focused on a baseball era long before ESPN and its endless nightly re-runs of top fielding plays. Many of the catches in Aronoff’s book were never caught on film.

The book includes information about many famous catches, but also some very obscure ones.

In 1887, an outfielder named William Ellsworth “Dummy” Hoy was playing for the Oshkosh, Wis., team of what was then called the Northwestern League. At that time, it was not unusual for people to sit in a horse and buggy just outside the outfield perimeter, which was marked by posts but did not have a fence.

According to the New York Clipper newspaper, the batter hit a high fly ball that looked like it was going to be a home run. Hoy dashed after it.

“[Hoy] saw it was going to be high and far out. As a matter of fact, it was coming down where a horse and buggy were standing,” the Clipper reported. “The clever outfielder deliberately leaped on the shaft of the buggy and reached out for the ball over the horse’s head.”

In May 1897, “Wee Willie” Keeler, then the top outfielder in the majors, was playing at a baseball field that had barbed wire at the top of the fence, like a prison.

“Al Selbach lined a shot to the bleachers, but Keeler stopped the passage of the sphere by shoving his left arm into the barbed wire netting, and his mitt froze to the ball,” the Washington Post wrote. “Willie’s escape from scratching his hand on the barbed wire was as marvelous as his catch.”

In August 1909, a New York Giants outfielder named Red Murray made a legendary bare-handed catch in a game played in severe thunder and lightning — “unprecedented conditions,” according to newspaper reports.

“And that was before the stadiums had lights in them,” Aronoff said.

Aronoff said he enjoyed quoting colorful old-time baseball writers throughout his 266-page book.

“Sometimes, you’d see a writer devote an entire article to one great fielding play,” he said. “And sometimes, it was interesting to read about the catch from the viewpoints of several different reporters.”

His favorite quote in the book was written in 1924 by John Kieran of the old New York Herald-Tribune. Kieran was writing about Arnold “Jigger” Statz, who played for several teams and was considered one of the best outfielders of his time.

“Statz doesn’t run; he flies,” Kieran wrote. “If he had one small feather he would be a bird.”

“I love that,” Aronoff said.

Aronoff’s project was a labor of love, not a quest for cash. He worked for seven years on his book, averaging about 10 hours a week. He spent thousands of dollars traveling to several different cities to research old news clippings, and hiring researchers in several other cities.

Darryl Swanson, an art teacher at Kenmore Middle School, contributed several drawings of famous catches. And Aronoff managed to get one of the most honored baseball scribes ever, Dave Anderson of the New York Times, to write the foreword.

Published by McFarland & Co., the book costs a hefty $40 — a price set by the publishers. It is available at the Talking Leaves book store, 3158 Main St., and on the amazon.com and barnesandnoble. com Web sites.

At $40 a crack, Aronoff does’t expect “Going, Going . . . Caught!” to be a best seller, but regardless of how many he sells, he said he has no regrets.

“This is a project that I really enjoyed doing,” he said. “It was fun.”

So after all his research, has he reached any conclusion on what was the greatest catch of all time?

“Duke Snider’s catch,” he said with a grin.