The prologue is a fictionalized account of The Shot Heard 'Round the World, a home run by Bobby Thomson on October 3, 1951, that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. In DeLillo's account, the game-winning ball is caught by a young black fan named Cotter Martin, while J. Edgar Hoover, watching in the stands, is informed in the middle of the game of the first Soviet test of the hydrogen bomb.
The remainder of the novel, comprising six parts and an epilogue, is a reverse chronological account of the life of Nick Shay, the man who ultimately ends up with the baseball, from his undirected existence as an executive of a waste management company in Arizona in the 1990s back to his childhood in the Bronx in the 1950s, though the non-linear narrative includes a large number of digressions and ancillary subplots.
Part 1 takes place in 1992. Nick Shay lives in Arizona with his wife, Marian, who is having an affair with his colleague, Brian Glassic. Nick visits an art installation of painted B-52 aircraft in the desert by Klara Sax, with whom Nick is later revealed to have had an affair forty years earlier. It is revealed that Nick killed a man when he was a teenager, and that Nick's father disappeared when Nick was a child after going out to get a pack of Lucky Strikes. Nick prefers to imagine that he was killed by the Mafia. In a flashback to 1951, Cotter Martin's father takes the baseball from his son with the intention of selling it.
In Part 2, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marian begins her affair with Brian, while Nick acquires the baseball from an avid baseball memorabilia collector named Marvin Lundy after Brian meets Lundy on a trip to New York City to see the Fresh Kills Landfill. Elsewhere, in the Bronx, a pessimistic, germophobic nun named Sister Edgar, who was Nick Shay's Catholic school teacher in the 1950s, works among the unbelieving poor and sick. A videotape of a serial killer nicknamed the Texas Highway Killer is described.
In Part 3, in the spring of 1978, Nick attends a waste management conference in the Mojave Desert and meets a swinger named Donna, while Marvin Lundy traces the baseball to San Francisco.
Part 4, in the summer of 1974, mainly concerns Klara Sax, who is working as an artist in New York City, and Matt Shay, Nick's brother, a former chess prodigy, who is a scientist in the nuclear weapons program in New Mexico.
Part 5 encompasses the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with Nick Shay in juvenile detention, following Nick's relationship with a woman named Amy and later with his future wife Marian, and Matt's courtship of his wife Janet. Lenny Bruce's comedy routines on the Cuban Missile Crisis are mentioned several times. In another flashback, Cotter Martin's father sells his baseball to Charles Wainright, a white fan standing in line with his son outside of Yankee Stadium.
Part 6, from the fall of 1951 to the summer of 1952, relates how Nick Shay, running loose after his father left his family, accidentally kills his friend George Manza.
In the epilogue, Nick and Brian travel to Kazakhstan to watch a demo of a new waste disposal system that incinerates the waste with a nuclear explosion. Nick confronts Brian about his affair with Marian, but decides to stay with Marian. Esmeralda, a feral girl in the Bronx whom the Catholic nuns were trying to save, is raped and murdered. Her image then miraculously appears on a billboard. Sister Edgar dies shortly after witnessing the miracle.
