Shot Heard 'Round the World (baseball)

In baseball, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" was a walk-off home run hit by New York Giants outfielder and third baseman Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 3, 1951, to win the National League (NL) pennant. Thomson's dramatic three-run homer came in the ninth inning of the decisive third game of a three-game playoff for the pennant in which the Giants trailed 4–1 entering the ninth and 4–2 with two runners on base at the time of Thomson's at-bat.^[1]

The game was seen by millions of viewers across America and heard on radio by millions more, including thousands of American servicemen stationed in Korea, listening on Armed Forces Radio. The dramatic victory to secure a pennant was intensified by the cross-town rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers and by a remarkable string of victories in the last weeks of the regular season by the Giants, who won 37 of their last 44 games to catch the first-place Dodgers and force a playoff series to decide the NL champion. The Giants' late-season rally and 2-to-1-game playoff victory, capped by Thomson's moment of triumph, are collectively known in baseball lore as "The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff", a descriptor coined by the legendary sports columnist Red Smith.^[2]

The phrase "shot heard round the world" is from the 1837 poem "Concord Hymn" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, about the first clash of the American Revolutionary War, and has been popularly applied to several dramatic historical moments.^[3]