MLB’s Bobby Thompson Remembers the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World”

Before moving to San Francisco, Major League Baseball’s Giants were in New York. Thanks to retired UK archivist and scholar Bill Marshall who wrote Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951, the Louie B.  Nunn Center for Oral History at University of Kentucky has an incredible collection of oral history interviews with some of the great players of Major League Baseball.

Bobby Thompson, the New York Giants player who, in 1951 hit the famed “shot heard around the world” died this week at the age of 86.  Thompson, nicknamed the “Staten Island Scot,” hit his famous home run in a playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers to overcome a 4-1 deficit and clinch the National League pennant.

Since the San Francisco Giants are currently in the 2012 World Series (and playing quite well), in tribute to Thompson and the Giants, the Nunn Center is featuring an audio excerpt from this interview conducted by Marshall on September 13, 1985 where Thompson remembers, in great detail, hitting one of the most famous home runs in baseball history.

We are currently in the process of digitizing this entire collection and hope some day to have them all online.  You can view the entire collection of interviews on SPOKE, the Nunn Center’s online collection catalog.

Listen to Thompson (recorded on September 13, 1985) describe the final moments of that game: