Prince &amp - the Panda - A Not-So-Grimm World Series Fairy Tale - NYTimes.com Illustration by Sam Manchester/The New York Times NCE upon a time, 29 long years ago, a baseball player named Cecil Fielder sat one evening by his hearth and poked the fire, while his wife sat opposite, spinning. He said, "What a sad thing it is that we have no children." "Yes," answered the wife, and she sighed. Even if it were only one, and if it were bigger than this house, I should be quite content. Now some time after this she had a baby boy, and the happy parents found him so regal they named him Prince and they let him want for nothing. The boy went to work with his father at the baseball stadium in Detroit, cavorting in the locker room before games, swatting balls during batting practice. He grew bigger and bigger, until he weighed more than 300 pounds as a high school sophomore. He looked out on the world with intelligent eyes, and soon showed himself a clever and agile figure, despite his great size, and when he swung a Louisville Slugger, he could rip the hide clean off a baseball. You would think this would make for a happy father-son relationship, but, sadly, you would be wrong. When Pop helped the Prince negotiate his first major league contract for a fine piece of gold, he thought he was entitled to a share. The Prince thought otherwise. The busybodies at the village rumor mill claim that Pop took $200,000 of the Prince's signing bonus to pay off his debts from gambling and bad business decisions. Father and son stopped talking to each other. The story is sad but not new: money makes people do crazy things, and the money in baseball today is crazier than crazy. And so it came to pass in the autumn of 2012 that the rotund Prince was pitted against an equally rotund Panda in a contest of great importance called the World Series. The Prince played with a team of Tigers from Detroit while the Panda's teammates were all Giants from San Francisco. In the very first inning of the very first game, the Panda hit a ball far over the outfield wall. When fans of the Tigers saw this, they thought all was lost, and off they ran helter-skelter as fast as they could go, each to his own refrigerator for a fresh beer to soothe jangled nerves. The beer did not help. The Panda is 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 240 pounds, which is tall and stout and strong even for a Giant, and he hit two more balls over the outfield wall during the game, which the Giants won with ease. Only three other people in human history have hit the ball over the wall three times in a single World Series game, a feat so remarkable that the president of the country where the Panda was born, Venezuela, quit acting like a dictator long enough to send the Panda a message on Twitter that said, "Well, there goes the third! Pablo for history! Viva Venezuela! The name on the Panda's passport is Pablo Sandoval. The next night, the Prince tried with all his might to even the score. In the very first inning, he was hit on his large right arm by a fastball. Unfazed, he jogged to first base. The next Tiger batter hit the ball a long way, and the Prince ran as fast as he knew how all the way around the bases. But the Prince is also 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 275 pounds, even more than the Panda, and he is not swift, and the ball got to home plate before the Prince did. Later, while playing first base, the Prince tried vainly to catch a foul pop-up, sprinting, stretching, diving. He landed with such force that the Earth shook - reports of a 4.2 reading on the Richter scale could not be confirmed - and Tigers faithful all over the land groaned, fearing the Prince had injured his great belly. But the Prince rose, dusted himself off, and kept playing. The Tigers would not score any runs all night, alas, and the Giants won again. And all the Giants lovers in the town of San Francisco ate and drank and made merry far into the night. Their Panda, after all, had done something almost unthinkable. He had hit three home runs in a single World Series game after hitting just 12 home runs during the entire 162-game season. Two years ago, the Panda played little during the World Series because his performance had slipped and everyone blamed it on his weight. Nobody seems worried about the Panda's weight now. Certainly not Bruce Bochy, the manager of the Giants, who was gay and lighthearted after winning the first two games of the World Series. When someone asked him about the Panda's weight, Bochy said: "The weight thing, sure, that's something that's going to be talked about a lot, and it's something he's going to have to keep under control. And this winter, when this is all over, he'll have to get back on track and come into spring training hopefully a little bit lighter. But right now, we like where he's at. And the manager of the Giants laughed merrily at the truth of what he had said. Any ballplayer who hits the ball over the wall three times in a World Series game can come to work looking like, well, like a Panda. Or Babe Ruth.