Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (12 page)

The final game at the old stadium drew only 32,238, most determined to leave with their seats, no matter how much they had to twist them out of the concrete and break their iron legs in the process. Everyone in attendance got an LP of
The Sounds of 50 Years at Yankee Stadium
(which I had helped to produce), but since a family of four got four records, three would wind up being scaled onto the field, disrupting play on several occasions.

The wrecking ball would arrive the very next morning, with Mrs. Babe Ruth receiving home plate, Mrs. Lou Gehrig getting first base, and most of the active players heading home on Monday flights.

Thurman hit .301 for the season with 20 homers, which would be a career high. Thirteen of them were on the road, as old Yankee Stadium still proved too much for this right-handed hitter to conquer. The new stadium would have more reasonable distances and would do away with the so-called Death Valley of left-center. To his credit, Thurman worked with the ballpark, never tried to hit home runs, and never lost that smooth swing that sent line drives down the line or into the power alleys. He was a skilled hitter who accepted the geometry of his home park (he had no choice, of course), and worked within its limitations.

He hit only .261 in September, so he was as responsible as any of
his teammates for the collapse, and he did not go home feeling very good about the season. But he did feel good about what he saw in the owner and in his will to win. It mirrored what Munson wanted to accomplish.

Thurman didn’t play in the final “lost weekend” of the old stadium. Duke Sims, a journeyman acquired only on September 24, was not only the catcher but had the dubious distinction of hitting the last home run in the old park; Babe Ruth had hit the first. It said a lot about the 1923 Yankees and the 1973 Yankees.

A few weeks after the World Series, Steinbrenner would be placed on suspension by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for his involvement in illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign—a link to the overall scandal known as Watergate. For the franchise, it would be a major setback. Not only would they be heading to Shea Stadium for two years while Yankee Stadium was remodeled, but their new win-at-all-costs owner was going to be sidelined.

While the years spent at Shea weren’t a physical burden on the players, the 1974 and 1975 seasons felt like a long road trip just the same.

The Yankee players used the New York Jets locker room, which was not the first-class facility a home team likes to use. It was so cramped it was hard to imagine a full roster of big football players in pads changing there. The incentive was to get dressed quickly and get on the field and out of there.

There were missteps en route. The Yankees tried to hire Dick Williams to manage the team, fresh from his world championships with Oakland. Although Steinbrenner was suspended, it was clearly an early “George move,” going for the glamour of the man who had just won the 1973 Series, and who had then left Charley Finley’s employ in a huff.

The intermediary in getting Williams to the table was Nat Tarnopol, Munson’s friend and also a good friend of Williams. Gabe Paul, now running the Yankees with Steinbrenner’s absence and Lee
MacPhail’s departure for the American League presidency, had called on Nat to make the connection. And so Nat had emerged as an important outside power broker, a nice development for Thurman.

Outgoing AL president Joe Cronin, in his final act, vetoed the deal. He said that even though Williams had quit, he was still under contract to the Athletics, and compensation would be required to move him to New York. The proposed compensation from the wily Finley was pitcher Scott McGregor and outfielder Otto Velez, “our crown jewels,” according to Paul.

And so although a press conference was held to introduce Williams to the New York media and photograph him in his Yankee jersey, the deal was off. It was a shame for Munson, because the Tarnopol connection had already made him feel like family with Williams.

“Plan B,” which included a far less lavish press conference, was the strong silent type, Bill Virdon, best known as a Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder and later as the Pirates’ manager. He had a lot going for him: he was available and he would work cheap. Tal Smith, the brilliant baseball man who now held the GM title but who reported to Paul, was a big Virdon advocate. Munson was out of the loop on that one.

So 1974 had all the earmarks of a loony season. The owner was suspended, the stadium was being remodeled, and the manager was a second choice.

The big new off-season acquisition was lovable Lou Piniella, obtained from Kansas City so that the Royals could break in the rather ordinary Jim Wohlford. Piniella, being both hot-tempered and a good sport all at once, would never hear the end of his new teammates’ teasing him about “Jim Fucking Wohlford” taking his job away. Lou was a great baseball mind, had the best smile in the game, and could go from raving lunatic on the field after a bad umpire
call to laughter and a smoke and a cold beer in the clubhouse three minutes later. No one who ever played with or for Piniella could ever forget him. Players always got on him about being a big guy and hitting few homers. Piniella and Munson hit it off and remained close to the end.

For Thurman, sadly, there would be a spring training injury in 1974 that never quite healed, and it ruined his reputation for throwing out runners. He would make 22 errors in 1974 while fielding .974 and then 23 errors with a .972 mark in 1975. These were the worst fielding stats for any catcher since World War II, and remained so more than three decades later. How ironic that the records would land on the back of the man who had tied the Yankee fielding percentage record by making only one error in 1971. Almost all the errors were on throws to second that wound up in center field. (Despite this, he won Gold Gloves in 1974 and 1975, a tribute to his reputation for signal calling and general handling of the game behind the plate.)

The injury went back to April 2, an exhibition game between the Yankees and the Mets in Columbia, South Carolina, where ex-Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson was the head coach at the University of South Carolina, and had persuaded the team to play an exhibition there on their way north. Early in the game, a Mets outfielder named Dave Schneck, a left-handed hitter, swung through a pitch, and his backswing made contact with Munson’s throwing hand, right where the thumb and the forefinger come together. Thurman dropped to his knees in pain, but played four more innings.

While at bat later in the game, he was jammed with a pitch and the very act of holding the bat hurt. X-rays failed to reveal anything at that time, and Thurman played opening day and then caught 144 games that season.

“He suffered a deep bruise of the thumb/forefinger junction in his hand and a deep bruise of his thumb’s thenar eminence,” said
Gene Monahan, the Yankees’ athletic trainer. The thenar eminence is the large muscular base of the thumb on the palm side.

This would later be compounded by a wear-and-tear shoulder injury that eventually required surgery. According to Monahan, “He injured the distal end of his clavicle, the collarbone. It was injured at the end where it meets the acromion. The cartilage there was torn up and the actual tip of the clavicle deteriorated. He had to have it resected, shaved down. He ended up throwing sidearm for that reason.”

“I wish I had rested more,” Munson said. “I played every game in pain and pushed myself too hard. I definitely would have had better numbers in ’74 if it wasn’t for the hand. I’m not trying to make excuses, but I really couldn’t grip the bat properly and my whole defensive game was hurting. It’s disappointing to me because I felt I could have helped the club a lot more. Maybe if I didn’t hurt the hand we would have come out on top.”

Not until 1977 would he feel that he was back at full strength.

Pain or not, his pitchers wanted him out there.

Not everyone felt this way, of course. There was Rick Dempsey, a catcher who came to the Yankees in 1973 and stayed until 1976. He was what Houk was to Yogi—the backup. But he also had terrific defensive skills in his own right, including an accurate rifle of an arm.

Dempsey loved Munson as a teammate, but it would drive him crazy that his managers (Bill Virdon and Billy Martin) couldn’t see the logic of having him catch and just finding another place for Munson. It killed him to see all those throws drift into the outfield, as they curved away from whoever was covering the base.

Despite this natural in-house rivalry, Dempsey and Munson had a special affinity for each other, even a special sign of friendship between them, where Munson would tuck in his three middle fingers and wiggle the thumb and pinky. In 1973 Munson told the rookie, “You’re the kid who’s gonna try to take my job, aren’t you?”

Dempsey replied, “Yeah, if I can.”

“Well, nice to have you around,” said Thurman, and he put his arm around his shoulder.

“From that day on Thurman was my idol,” Rick says. “He was always reassuring me, telling me that someday I would get my chance. He was never afraid to tell me how I could go about taking his job.”

Later, when Dempsey was with Baltimore, he stole second and scored on a close play in the ninth. “Thurman was really mad ’cause he thought I was out,” says Rick. “But in the bottom of the inning, he smiled at me from the dugout and flashed our sign, meaning, ‘Nice going, kid.’”

“Rick did go on to be a first-rate big-league catcher,” says Tippy Martinez, his Yankee teammate who wound up going with him to the Orioles in the big 1976 trade. “And if you’re a big leaguer, you have to feel that you’re good enough to be a regular, and he did. He loved Munson, like we all did, but sure, it would frustrate him to see all those errors, knowing he had such a great arm.

“But the part about calling the game and working the whole dynamics—Rick just wasn’t there yet at that stage of his career. There is so much you have to learn about that. Like the way Thurman would work his pitchers with the umpires, how he’d quietly argue on their behalf with the umps when nobody but he and the batter and the umpire knew about it. We didn’t even know about it on the mound sometimes. But he was always there pulling for us.

“The other thing he taught me was about respecting rookies. They were full teammates, he’d tell me, just like anyone else. Usually, rookies were kind of ignored. But he’d call me for breakfast or for coffee and he’d tell me what a great future I had and I never forgot that. In my fourteen-year career, I always thought about Thurman whenever a rookie would show up.”

Rick Manning was a rookie outfielder with the Indians in 1975. “I was tagging up to try and score on a fly ball and I went into home headfirst,” he recalls. “Thurman was waiting for me and knocked me silly. As I walked away he said, ‘Hey Rook, don’t do that again.’

“I told him not to worry; I wouldn’t. But he was always playing mind games with you.

“He’d talk a lot behind the plate and tell me what pitch was coming. I wouldn’t believe him, and sure enough, they’d throw that pitch. I’d take it and Thurman would shake his head and say, ‘I told you it was going to be a fastball.’”

Even rookie umpires had their special Munson initiations.

“Steve Palermo had just broken into the big leagues as an umpire,” recalls Rich Marazzi, baseball’s rule-book expert, someone umpires call on for interpretations. He consults for several teams. “He told me that part of his ‘initiation’ to the big leagues was calling Thurman out on a pitch that was knee high on the outside corner, a good ‘pitcher’s pitch.’ Munson raised a fuss and said, ‘Rookie, they don’t call that pitch a strike up here.’ Undaunted, and meeting his rookie test, Palermo replied, ‘That pitch is a strike in any league.’

“After Thurman returned to the playing field with his gear on to start the next inning, he complimented Palermo, granting that he had in fact made a great call. Palermo answered, ‘Why don’t you go over to the dugout and tell your Yankee buddies that I made a great call!’

“‘Oh, I can’t do that,’ Munson answered sheepishly. They never had another dispute.”

The Yanks opened the 1974 season on April 6 with a three-game series at home with Cleveland, and then, after a pair at Detroit, played a four-game series at Cleveland, emerging from that with a 5-4 record. The team was working with a nine-man pitching staff, which seemed sufficient at the time: Stottlemyre, Dobson, McDowell, George Medich, Peterson, Steve Kline, Fred Beene, Tom Buskey, and Lyle.

Munson had once been closer to Peterson; they had been among the leaders in the lunatic hockey games that were played in the clubhouse.
After the wife swap a lot of players were more ill at ease with Fritz, since this was something that was really over the top for them. People still liked him, but the relationship wasn’t as free and easy.

Fritz had had his measure of fun with Munson over a mail-in order. Thurman, a gun collector, had purchased a .357 Magnum. While reading a gun magazine in the clubhouse, he saw an offer for a holster that seemed just right. He checked off thirty-six-inch waist, right-hander, and put it in the clubhouse “outbox” for mailing.

Peterson, an eternal prankster, retrieved the envelope and changed the order to a twenty-inch waist. It took more than a month to arrive, but when it did, Thurman went crazy when he opened it and saw the skimpy holster. Finally, Munson repackaged it and mailed it back.

And of course Peterson retrieved the package, hid it in his locker, waited a few weeks, and then mixed it in with the incoming mail. Yes, Thurman had his “replacement” and again it was only twenty inches long. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t know Fritz was behind this.

On the subject of guns, and on a scarier note, some years later, after a game, Munson was with Catfish Hunter when they came upon Munson’s free promotional Cadillac in the players’ lot at Yankee Stadium. The windshield had been smashed in. Hunter told this to me after it happened, and repeated it to journalist Michael Paterniti for an
Esquire
story many years later. Thurman was furious and thought he spotted the vandals on the other side of the fence. He went to his trunk and pulled out a .44 Magnum revolver.