Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (13 page)

“I’m going to kill them,” he said to Hunter.

Hunter, laughing, told him not to get carried away. But Munson was furious, and he raised the weapon and fired it at the shadowy figures behind the fence.

“Oh shit!” screamed Hunter.

Munson fired twice more, at which point Hunter grabbed Thurman
from behind and wrestled the gun away from him. All the time Hunter was thinking two thoughts: that his fingerprints were now on the gun, and
Please, please, don’t nobody get hit
.

“I didn’t hit anybody,” Munson told him, “but I’m going to run them over!” And with that he screeched out of the lot, leaving Hunter standing there. Hunter was never sure if Thurman was serious.

Early in the season, an ugly press incident took place between Thurman and Herschel Nissenson of the Associated Press.

Nissenson wouldn’t take crap from a player just because he was, well, a player. And he could be provoked in that bad mixture that sometimes emerges from the heat of the clubhouse after a bad game.

There had been a game in Anaheim when Thurm had dropped a pop-up, but his instincts took over, he recovered the ball, and nailed a runner at the plate. Because the batter had reached first, he was charged with an error. It was a legitimate scoring decision.

A week or so later, the Yankees were back in New York and a similar play happened. It was a meaningless moment in the game, but again, he was charged with an error when he dropped a pop-up, even though the team managed to record an out on the play.

Ironically, Thurman had been presented with his 1973 Gold Glove award before the game, so it was hard for a journalist to resist the contradiction. After the game, Nissenson passed Munson in the cramped Yankee clubhouse. “So Thurman,” he said, “what’s the record for the most pop-ups dropped by a Gold Glove winner?”

This was exactly the kind of comment that could set Thurman off. After all, what in the world did a $%@#%$# sportswriter know about what happens down there on the field?

“What’s the record for the most horseshit stories written by a sportswriter?” he answered.

Okay, it was a decent comeback to a provocative question, and it
could have ended there. But Bill Sudakis, a provocateur himself who had recently joined the team as a backup catcher to Munson, egged him on.

“You gonna take that bullshit?” he said to Munson. “What the hell does he know about playing the game? Look at him! Don’t take that crap.”

The clubhouse, small to begin with, seemed to encourage a closing of ranks. If Munson and Nissenson were four feet apart, it may have felt like four inches.

“How far can a sportswriter travel across the room if I hit him?” Thurman said.

Now there was a silence, an anticipation that things might get ugly. There had been scattered cases over the years of players hitting writers—and a rare one now and then of writers hitting players—but this was not an area where either party wanted to go. The nastiness of “charges being brought” looms large over such moments.

Nissenson should have shaken his head and walked away. He didn’t. He was feeling a rush of blood to his face.

“I’ve seen you hit a baseball,” he said. “I’m not worried.”

Oh boy.

Some teammates stepped back anticipating the worst. Some, to their credit, stepped forward, ready to break up the inevitable.

As the PR guy, on the other side of the clubhouse, near Bill Virdon’s office, I was not aware of what was going on, but the shifting of bodies and Munson’s raised voice had gotten my attention. Policemen are trained to go toward trouble, not away from it. That certainly wasn’t part of my training, but it was instantly clear that I needed to move closer to the situation.

And the next thing I saw was Nissenson pinned against a corner, face-to-face with Munson. No one had any idea where this was going, but it was scary.
Why isn’t a teammate or a coach stepping between them?
I thought, as I now moved toward them.
Is this going to fall on me?

Munson had the good sense never to touch Herschel. Not with his hands, not with his chest. In the days to come, it was said across the league that Thurman had spit at Nissenson, which would have in itself been very damaging.

“It didn’t happen,” said Herschel later. “He never spit at me. We were so close that there might have been some flying spittle in the air, but it wasn’t an overt act. And in the end, I had the feeling that if you growled back at him, he was okay.”

And that’s how it ended. No blows exchanged, no contact. No lawsuits.

Jim Ogle, the senior writer covering the team, made peace between the two of them a few days later. They shook hands.

The 1974 season got off nicely for the Yankees. On Friday night, April 26, Stottlemyre won his fourth start in a row and the team was 11-8 and just a half game behind Baltimore. That was when the PR director (that would be me) made it known that a trade would be announced at the conclusion of the game.

And so I disappeared from my seat for a few innings and prepared the necessary press release back in my office across the street from Shea. At the end of the game we announced a seven-player trade. We were getting rid of almost half the pitching staff—Peterson, Kline, Beene, and Buskey (another rookie award winner taking his wristwatch to Cleveland: that would be five if you’re keeping score)—for the Indians’ first baseman Chris Chambliss and pitchers Dick Tidrow and Cecil Upshaw.

Suddenly four guys in the winning clubhouse—ours—were gone. It was a very awkward moment, made all the more so by Gabe Paul, the trade’s engineer, marching into the clubhouse, chest out with great pride, a big smile on his face, to hold court with the media in front of all the players.

The players were in shock. Trades are not usually announced in such an embarrassing way, with the “victims” right there, left to clean out their lockers in the middle of their friendships.

The feeling among the Yankee veterans was that Mike Hegan, the regular first baseman, was getting screwed out of his job, and that Fred Beene had become an effective relief pitcher who was well liked in the clubhouse. Peterson, despite his somewhat awkward relationship with his teammates following The Swap, was in his ninth year in the rotation.

No one was more outspoken, angry, and generally pissed off than Munson. In front of the writers he let his outrage be known. “Beenie! How can they trade Beenie!” he repeated several times. “We’re turning into the Indians, is that what they want? Because Gabe Paul came here from Cleveland he has to bring all his players?”

It wasn’t Thurman’s finest hour. By the time the new guys arrived on Sunday, he was still in a hostile mood and happy to let everyone know it. The welcome mat was definitely not out for the new arrivals, a process usually led by the veterans on the club. In this case, everyone was still mad that Hegan was losing his job and that half the pitching staff was gone.

Chambliss, one of the nicest guys in the game, had been hitting .328 at Cleveland and thought he’d be better received. He had been Rookie of the Year the year after Munson. Instead he found himself just quietly going about his business in wonderment and hoping his new teammates would come around.

They did. They were professionals and they got back to playing, and they came to see that Chambliss and Tidrow could be good contributors and were consummate professionals.

But the Gabe Paul/Bill Virdon moves weren’t done. The biggest move of the season came on May 26, when Virdon put Elliott Maddox in center and moved Murcer to right.

Maddox was thought to be a utility outfielder when he joined the
team from Texas, but Virdon knew the value of a great defensive center fielder, having been one himself, and was down on Murcer. So he made the shift, something that further angered Munson and the veterans, who knew that center field had descended from Hall of Famers Earle Combs to Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle, and then to Murcer. It was hallowed ground for this franchise. Elliott Maddox? What were they thinking?

Murcer was not happy about it, and was not playing well in Shea Stadium either. One would think that a subpar season from Murcer and a bad attitude from Munson would spell trouble for the team.

On the contrary, the Yankees overachieved—and got themselves well into a thrilling pennant race. And suddenly Paul was looking like the wise old baseball man he was supposed to be, and Virdon was looking like the Manager of the Year—which in fact he won.

The Yanks were in last place as late as July 14, and even lost seven of eight after the All-Star break. But then the pieces began to fall into place, and the fact that they were never more than seven and a half games out at any point began to have meaning. They went 15-3 from August 7 to Labor Day and found themselves just a game out of first. This, then, would be a third straight pennant race. Would this one have another bad finish?

Munson, now making $75,000 (plus $5,000 for PR participation and extra spring training expenses), was not having a great year. His average was under .250 for much of the season, he was crankier than usual, and the spring training injury had turned him from a 1973 Gold Glove winner into a fielding liability.

But with Medich and Dobson both winning 19, with Maddox unexpectedly hitting over .300, and with Sandy Alomar prying second base loose from Horace Clarke and improving the defense up the middle, the Yanks wouldn’t go away. Baltimore was a far more talented team, but there were the Yanks, one game out of first with two games to go as they headed for Milwaukee on September 30. They
had won four in a row, and were feeling really good about themselves, even with the Orioles in the driver’s seat.

Arriving at the stately old Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee after their flight, the team was a bit on the intoxicated side. The beer had flowed freely on the flight. Munson’s two backup catchers had been getting on each other during the bus ride from the airport to the hotel. Rick Dempsey, always upset not to be playing more, was being teased about it by Bill Sudakis, a redneck third-stringer whose repetitious plays of “Band on the Run” on his boom box had become both a rallying cry during long road trips and a source of annoyance to those who weren’t fans of Paul McCartney and Wings. (MP3 players have definitely contributed to greater team harmony.)

The teasing continued as the team entered the hotel lobby, a palace of aging Edwardian splendor. While waiting for the room keys to be sorted on the table near the registration desk, Dempsey heard one thing too many and lunged at Sudakis. Virdon made a move to stop them, but Murcer was closer and got in the middle. In the process, Murcer’s hand was injured. He would not be available for game 161.

His absence surely mattered. The Yanks battled but lost 3-2 in ten innings. The Orioles won, took a two-game lead with one to play, and clinched the division title. There would be no postseason for the 1974 Yanks, and for the third straight year, the pennant race had failed to find them at the finish line. For the tenth year in a row, there would be no postseason baseball in the Bronx.

Munson hit .261 in 1974, a forty-point drop from 1973. He called it an off year and he was right, but the spring training injury had surely hurt him for the full season. The Yanks gave him a modest $5,000 raise, up to $80,000 for 1975.

One little piece of business that year went undetected by the media. It seemed that during the season, with Gabe Paul still working the
phones and Cedric Tallis as the general manager in Kansas City, a deal was cooked up that would have sent Munson, Murcer, Tippy Martinez, Scott McGregor, and Jim Mason to the Royals for the league’s hottest hitter, John Mayberry, and shortstop Fred Patek. All letter
M
’s plus Patek. Like other trades before and since, it didn’t happen.

“It was close, I can tell you that,” says Jack McKeon, the Royals’ manager. “I told Cedric, ‘If you make this deal, I’ll win you the pennant’ I think Chris Chambliss was probably in it too, since we’d be getting rid of Mayberry and would need a first baseman. But Cedric backed off. He said they’d run him out of town if he traded Mayberry and Patek. We were this close.”

Tantalizing as this story is to ponder, Tal Smith, the Yankees’ general manager at the time, has no recollection of it. McKeon is sure of it. Take your pick.

Bobby Murcer had now experienced the excitement of three straight pennant races, but had never been to the promised land. He came up in 1965, still a boy of nineteen, but it was the year the Yankee dynasty collapsed. Now one could sense a new one on the way. But Bobby was not going to get there with them.

In a shocking trade announced shortly after the 1974 World Series, Gabe Paul traded Murcer to San Francisco even up for Bobby Bonds. Said Tal Smith, “When you can get one of the five best players in baseball, you do it.”

George Steinbrenner had given assurances to Murcer that he would be a Yankee for life, and as Mickey Mantle’s successor and the handsome heartthrob of the team since 1969, the idea of dealing Murcer was far-fetched. But Gabe Paul had a flair for the dramatic, and when Horace Stoneham of the Giants told him Bonds might be available, Gabe swung into action.

The phone call from Paul to Murcer early that Wednesday morning (I was in the room when Gabe called him) was a devastating one
for Bobby. It also stunned his teammates. His great friend Munson seemed less stunned.

“It’s a business,” Thurman told friends. “Nothing should surprise any of us. We know Gabe Paul likes to make trades.”

In 1973, Bonds had hit 39 homers and stolen 43 bases, falling one homer short of being the first 40/40 man in history. He was an enormously gifted athlete, and as Smith had said, one of the best players in the game. He had fallen to .256 with 21 homers and 71 RBIs in 1974, making himself vulnerable to a deal. The Yankees seized the moment.

So Bonds was a Yankee and Murcer wasn’t. Thurman’s closest friend on the team had moved on.

In Thurman’s “real” family life, Darrell Munson reappeared on the scene. Just before Christmas in 1974, he went to Canton to see his grandchildren. He caught up with Thurman at the local Y. The next day they spoke on the phone.