"Miracle Ball" a home run
Published: July 5, 2009
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share thisOne day in 1990, at a Salvation Army store in Levittown, N.Y., a man bought an old autographed baseball for $2.
Years later, he began to wonder: Could this be the very baseball that Bobby Thomson hit into the stands of New York's Polo Grounds in 1951, a shocking home run known as the Shot Heard 'Round the World?
That question became a mission for his son, documentary filmmaker Brian Biegel, who recounts his investigation in "Miracle Ball." It's a fast-paced, fascinating tale that combines shoe leather, high-tech forensics and some healthy dollops of luck.
Thomson's home run, in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Brooklyn Dodgers, clinched the pennant for the New York Giants. It's one of the most famous moments in sports. But the fate of the ball itself has been a mystery - one dropped into Biegel's lap by his dad's impulse purchase.
Over the next two years, Biegel worked to find out whether his father's baseball was the holy relic, or at least what happened to the real baseball. He got professional image analysts to turn up clues in photos of the famous home run.
Then he heard, thirdhand, about a chance conversation with an old man in a ShopRite store in Nutley, N.J. Biegel jumped on the information, which led him to an elderly nun in a convent in New Mexico - and the conclusion of his story.
Though not airtight, Biegel makes a compelling case he's solved the mystery. What is clear is that for a reader, his book is a home run.
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