The Giant Bites the Dust! The Giant Bites the Dust!

Or
The Rotting Corpse Heard 'Round the World!
(Kudos to Terry)
Bobby Thomson, Scotland’s greatest baseball player, has died following a long illness at 86, giving Ralph Branca a new place to walk his dog. Thomson hit arguably the most famous home run in baseball history as the New York Giants capped an amazing comeback to top their archrival Brooklyn Dodgers for the 1951 NL pennant. After trailing the Dodgers by 13 ½ games with a month and a half to go and Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen declaring “The Giants is dead,” the Giants won 16 in a row and 37 of 44 to tie the Dodgers on the last weekend of the season and force a three-game playoff. In game 3, with 2 on, 1 out and Branca on the mound protecting a 4-2 lead in the 9th, Thomson lived every kid’s backyard fantasy, hitting an 0-1 pitch into the left field stands, the Shot Heard ‘Round the World capping the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff, prompting Russ Hodges famed broadcast “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” and costing Charles Emerson Winchester III a fortune. That was actually Thomson’s second homer off Branca in the playoff series, as Thomson had hit a 2-run homer off Game 1 starter Branca for a 3-1 win. “Now it is done,” Red Smith wrote in The New York Herald Tribune. “Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.” Although his legacy was sealed on Oct 3, 1951, for his 15-year career, he finished with a respectable 264 home runs and 1026 RBI and made 3 All-Star Games.