Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall

There’s a long drive. It’s gonna be. I believe. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant. The Giants win the pennant.

92Y presents the video of Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi and Tony Shalhoub’s dramatic reading of Don DeLillo’s classic baseball novella Pafko at the Wall—a masterpiece of American sportswriting and a transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century.

Celebrating the start of the new baseball season, video of the October 3, 2019 performance will be available for a limited, 48-hour broadcast window (March 28 – 30). An audiobook of the performance will be released by Simon & Schuster Audio on March 30.

“I was incredulous at how alive it was as a performed text. It was really kind of an extraordinary experience,” said novelist Jennifer Egan, who attended the 2019 reading with DeLillo. “It reaffirmed my sense of how much fiction can do.”

Pafko at the Wall reimagines an unforgettable moment in baseball history: Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters gathered at the Polo Grounds that day in October 1951 to see the New York Giants beat the Brooklyn Dodgers: Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays down on the field; Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor and Jackie Gleason with J. Edgar Hoover in box seats; and announcer Russ Hodges calling the action in the broadcast booth.

Originally published in Harper’s magazine in October 1992, Pafko was published as the opening of DeLillo’s novel Underworld (Scribner) in 1997, then Scribner released the story as a stand-alone novella in 2001—the 50th anniversary of Thomson’s “Shot.”

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