Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (10 page)

Munson’s 1971 season started almost as miserably as his rookie year did. He started out 2 for 30, and was in an 0-for-27 slump beginning right after opening day. He was hitting .067, and he was going to have to repeat 1970, unable to bury it in the middle of the summer when few would see .067 posted. (In those days, before box scores and scoreboards carried averages, newspapers would run little side boxes showing the home team’s batting averages, so there it would be, every day.)

When he finally went 2 for 4 on April 18 and then 2 for 3 the next day, Houk sat him down.

“I want you to think about these last two games and focus on what you were doing right,” Houk told him.

A former catcher himself, Ralph was just a perfect manager for Munson—patient, professional, a man’s man. Thurman often stopped in Houk’s office before games to talk baseball. It was never really about the past—Houk had played with DiMaggio and Mantle, and had been a caddie to Yogi Berra—but about the current players and strategy and newspaper gossip. There were times you would find Thurman smoking a cigar with Houk in the office off to the left side of the clubhouse. It was all part of the learning process.

As for the 1971 Yankees, perhaps the less remembered the better. Despite optimism in the air, they never really got going. They were
six games under .500 at the All-Star break, fourteen and a half behind the Orioles. Shortly after the break, they won nine of eleven and took three and a half games off that lead. In early September, now eighteen and a half games out, they managed to win eleven out of sixteen, but it was too little too late, and in the end they would finish twenty-one games out, mired in fourth place from July 2 to the end of the season.

They finished 82-80 instead of 81-81 when the last day of the season found them winning by forfeit, playing the Washington Senators in that franchise’s final game at RFK Stadium. The 14,000 angry fans got hostile (okay, drunk and hostile) and stormed the field with two outs in the ninth, sending the Yankee players running for their lives. (The Senators were winning 7-5.) The umpires were unable to restore order and the Yanks were awarded a 9-0 victory. It was the first forfeit in the major leagues in seventeen years.

Munson’s high-water mark of the year was only .266. He finished at .251, a fifty-one-point drop from his rookie season. In fact, he hit .256 in the first half and .246 in the second half. He did make his first All-Star team, going in to catch Mickey Lolich in the eighth inning and calling for whatever pitch it was that Roberto Clemente hit out of the ballpark.

Writers called his season the “sophomore jinx” and no one seemed concerned because he still hit the ball with authority, drove it into the alleys, and did not get into a rut trying to swing for the fences in cavernous Yankee Stadium. But Murcer had hit .331 and even Jerry Kenney outhit Munson. It was just a bad season for a good hitter.

Ron Swoboda, a local hero as part of the Miracle Mets of 1969, joined the team in midseason. “In Thurman I saw a pretty raw and unconventional catcher,” he recalls. “On a steal he’d throw the ball as fast as he could from any arm slot he happened to find—mostly sidearm. The ball would head to second with this huge tail on it, like a meteor.

“He used an S-44 model bat. It had an uncommonly small barrel
but he could center the ball on it. Nobody else liked his choice of bats but they worked for him. Murcer was a better hitter with more pop and more polish. But you would see things from Munson that made you believe he could be something special. He could run for a little fat catcher. He was a better hitter every year I was with him from 1971 to 1973 and he wore out the Twins’ outstanding right-hander Bert Blyleven. Blyleven could bring it with a very nasty curve-ball and Thurman hit everything he threw over the plate, hard and in all directions. He was amazing from my perspective.

“Thurman was a pretty sensitive guy and loved to talk, but we used to joke that no matter where the discussion started he always brought the conversation back around to himself and what was going on with him as a player. The guys liked him, though. I know he had a bumpy relationship with the media. I think he was basically shy and very sensitive.”

Despite his lowly batting average, Munson enjoyed a remarkable season behind the plate. He caught 117 games in 1971, covering 1,019 innings, with 614 chances—and one error. One! And remember, the catching position is one with the potential for many more errors than the chances accepted would indicate, because of all the throws to second on base-stealing attempts and all the pick-off throws that could come at any time.

The one error came on June 18 in a game at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Andy Etchebarren, the Orioles’ barrel-chested receiver, was on first when Paul Blair doubled. Etchebarren had little speed, but Billy Hunter waved him around third and toward home. Murcer had run down the double; now he threw to Gene Michael as the cutoff man, and Michael fired home. Munson had his left leg out to block the plate. The ball and Etchebarren arrived together. Both Munson and his counterpart knew the collision was inevitable; it was the way the game was played.

Thurman took the impact, got knocked backward, blacked out, and dropped the ball. He was unconscious for five minutes before
being taken off the field on a stretcher and driven by ambulance to nearby Union Memorial Hospital.

Art Franz, the home plate umpire, had never called Etchebarren safe. He simply waited and then saw the ball lying next to Thurman’s head. At that point, he signaled “safe.”

The official scorer called it an error.

“Even looking back on it almost forty years later, it’s still an error—a tough one, but an error,” says Bill Shannon, the principal scorer at Yankee Stadium and author of
Official Scoring in the Big Leagues
. “Some errors are heartless, but they are what they are. It wasn’t an unusual call.”

It was not a big deal at the time, although the Yankee players were pretty hot about it. No one could have anticipated that this would be the only error Munson would be charged with all season.

Munson suffered a concussion, but he was back in the Yankee clubhouse before the end of the game, munching on a doughnut.

“He was so mad,” says Fritz Peterson. “He wanted John Ellis to go out and beat up the entire Orioles club (which John could have done!).”

In fact, he pinch-hit the next day and then caught and got three hits the day after. If he needed to enhance his gritty résumé, this was the play that did it.

The one error for the season gave him a .998 fielding percentage for the year. He threw out 23 of 38 base stealers—61 percent where 35 percent is more common. The 38 attempts were also remarkably few over the course of a season, indicative of the respect for Thurman’s throwing arm and quick release. For his first two years, he had thrown out 63 in 107 attempts, or 59 percent. Here, his reputation was made.

“He had the quickest release of any catcher I had ever seen,” says Peterson. “And Gene Michael really helped him when he was at short with his quick tags and good glove.

“I had an understanding with Thurman that whenever I saw a
runner break off first I would automatically switch what I was going to deliver to the hitter to a fastball so Thurman could gun him out at second. Most catchers couldn’t react like he could to a quick change like that.”

Because he caught only 117 games, and the record book cites 150 as the standard required for fielding percentage records, his “almost 1.000” season cannot be properly measured. But his .998 percentage tied Elston Howard’s 1964 Yankee catching record.

“Nobody could call a game the way he could,” said Mel Stottlemyre. “From the day he arrived it was as though he had been somehow studying the hitters throughout the league. He knew what to call, and we had immediate confidence in him.”

When Tommy John later came to the Yankees, he made five spring training starts but never happened to pitch to Munson. Then in the opening series against Baltimore, Munson was finally behind the plate. “When we came back to the dugout after the first inning, Munson said, ‘You didn’t throw a lot of curveballs to these guys in the spring, so we’re going to throw a lot of first-pitch curves.’”

John said, “How do you know? You didn’t even catch me all spring!” And Munson responded, “What do you think, I wasn’t watching?”

Sparky Lyle arrived on the scene in 1972, a tremendous addition to the team. While the term “closer” had not yet become part of the baseball lexicon, it came to mean the man whose bulldog determination and daily success over one inning of work could essentially shorten a game to eight innings, with the opponents knowing they had little chance in the ninth.

Lyle embodied the personality of a closer, although he would usually be asked to work two or three innings. He had the arm for it.

He was a fun-loving character with an infectious laugh, and he knew how to have a great time. If he hadn’t been a baseball “fireman,” he might have been a real-life fireman. He was a Pennsylvania guy with a blue-collar attitude and a wonderful approach to life.

“When I was with the Red Sox I always enjoyed playing against Munson,” recalls Lyle. “It was because he was a
ballplayer
. And you like to compete against guys like that.

“He called the game based on who the batter and pitcher were, not what he might be looking for if he was the hitter.

“I loved to have him back there when I was pitching. He was like me in that we were successful because neither of us was afraid to fail. That was just who we were.

“I’d throw him a slider in the dirt on an 0-2 count with a runner on third and the guy would strike out. It would be a tough pitch to handle because the guy was swinging and the ball was bouncing, all at once. But he’d catch it. And he’d hold the ball and walk out to the mound with this shit-eating grin and say, ‘You didn’t think I was gonna catch that, did you!’ And we’d laugh because we were competing at the highest level and we were also having fun.”

When I worked for the Yankees during that time, I played a little role in the Sparky Lyle mystique. His entrance was always dramatic at Yankee Stadium. He’d arrive in the Datsun bullpen car (our sponsor), throw open the door, jump out of it with fire in his eyes, throw his warm-up jacket to the waiting batboy, and storm to the mound. A few quick warm-ups and then he’d stare in to Munson, waiting for the batter to dare to step up.

I thought,
This is great, this needs a theme song
.

So I asked a friend in the music business to suggest a song, and he said, “‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ It’s about the end, the culmination.”

Also known as the “Graduation March,” it worked. Toby Wright was our stadium organist and the drill was for me to look into the bullpen with binoculars to make sure Lyle was getting into the car, then phone Toby in the organist’s booth over first base and say, “It’s Lyle.” And he’d hit that first chord as the gate from the bullpen opened. The fans picked up on this quickly and at the sound of the first note, they would begin cheering. By the time Lyle emerged from the car, the place was going crazy.

Today, every closer seems to have a theme song, and Lyle has told me on more than one occasion that my choreography of his entrance really made me the creator of “The Closer.” It isn’t true. Dick
Radatz had a great act in Boston in the 1960s. But I love it when he throws me that compliment, even if he did say, “Let’s not do it” the following year.

“Too much pressure,” he said, and this from the man who thrived on it. Oh well.

The 1972 season, when Lyle saved thirty-five games, many in highly dramatic fashion, was really great fun, although it began with the first players’ strike in history. Although future strikes would be longer, this was very painful to all of us in the game. It was unimaginable that the industry could shut down. But it did. For those of us who lived through all the work stoppages baseball has thrown at us, 1972 was the worst because it was so unthinkable.

Although the Yankees were never in first place—not even for a day—the race was so tight that we had to prepare for a possible World Series, printing tickets, designing a program, setting up a postseason media operation. The team had not had to go through this exercise since 1964.

On September 1 the Yanks were tied for second, just one and a half games behind Baltimore. A Stottlemyre shutout that day over Chicago, and then a 2-1 win by Steve Kline the next day, put the deficit at just a half game. These were truly exciting days, and no one was enjoying them more than Munson, tasting his first pennant race and loving every aspect of the competition. Three-for-four on September 1, he was hitting .292 and enjoying his first season in which he didn’t have to climb up from the depths in the batting department. He started the year with an eight-game hitting streak, was at .338 on May 12, and would wind up with a solid .280. He hit .292 from July 15 to the end of the season. His buddy Murcer had a monster year, belting 33 homers, driving in 96 runs, and leading the league in runs scored and total bases.

Sadly, the hopes and promises of the season went unfulfilled. Detroit wound up winning the Eastern Division over Boston, with Baltimore
third and the Yankees once again fourth, six and a half games out, thanks to losses in their final five games, all at home. The Tigers didn’t clinch until the next-to-last day of the season. They won by only a half game, the worst possible result of an uneven schedule, necessitated by the strike and unplayed games never made up.

The lost games cost the Yankees their four-game opening weekend against the Orioles, which included opening day and a Sunday Cap Day, easily 100,000 in total attendance. For the season, the Yankees would draw only 966,328—about 34,000 short of a million. It would be the first time since 1946 that the team failed to crack the million mark, a very unsettling stat.

The truth was, attendance was never great at Yankee Stadium—not for being the glorious Yankees in the nation’s number one population center, playing in a beloved, historic ballpark. The team was capable of drawing two million, as it had done for five straight years after World War II. But then attendance sank toward the 1.5 million mark as people stopped going to the Bronx. When the Dodgers and Giants left for California in 1958, Yankee attendance actually dropped 70,000 for the year. And in 1961—a great team, a great pennant race, and the great home run race with Maris and Mantle—attendance was up only 120,000 from the year before, and still a paltry 1.7 million as the only team in town.