Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (14 page)

It did not go well. Thurman had moved on. That relationship was over.

That would be the last communication the two of them would ever have.

I was busy in the PR office preparing our publications for the upcoming season with Bonds as our cover boy and new superstar when we got into the bidding for Catfish Hunter, the 1974 Cy Young Award winner with Oakland.

Charley Finley had failed to make certain payments to Hunter on time, breaching terms of his contract. Few thought such an infraction would lead an arbitrator to make Hunter a free agent, but that’s what happened. And we found ourselves in the Hunter sweepstakes along with a lot of other clubs.

“Gabe,” I said, facing my boss in his Flushing office. “Could this get up to a million dollars?”

“Damn right it could!” he said with what I thought was a measure of glee. “This is war! And we’re gonna win it.”

I sensed he had been given a blank check by the suspended Steinbrenner, with whom he was obviously in touch.

Finishing two games out of first place in 1974, then adding Bonds and Hunter, was thrilling to consider. Suspended or not, George Steinbrenner’s willingness to spend what it took was now apparent.

We got Hunter, and it didn’t hurt that Munson was calling him almost every day, trying to persuade him to play in New York. We announced the $3.5 million deal at a New Year’s Eve press conference in the group sales office at the Parks Administration Building across the street from Shea on a snowy night.

We now had the Manager of the Year, an owner willing to spend, and had added Munson in 1970, Lyle in 1972, Nettles in 1973, Piniella and Chambliss in 1974, and Bonds and Hunter in 1975. You had to like the way this team was coming together.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. That can happen in baseball. Usually teams find their own level over the course of six months, and only major injuries stand in the way of their finishing where they are supposed to finish.

That didn’t happen for the 1975 Yanks. Things actually went right and they still didn’t win.

First, trying hard to return to the starting rotation, Mel Stottlemyre just didn’t have it and was released in spring training. (“Thurman was the only Yankee player to come to our car in the parking lot to say good-bye,” recalls Jean Stottlemyre.) Having missed most of the 1974 season, and with all the roster turnovers, Mel’s closeness to his teammates had faded.

Then Hunter lost his first three starts, and if you don’t think that put a scare in the front office, you’d be wrong. We were all nervous. Pitchers are fragile. Bad seasons happen.

His 0-3 beginning set the team off poorly, and by Memorial Day we were still under .500. Then came a glorious June in which the
team went 21-9 to go eight games over .500 and briefly touch first place for a few days.

It didn’t hold up. Seven straight losses around the July Fourth weekend pretty much killed things off, as Boston, enjoying great rookie seasons from Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, was making its way to the front of the pack. In some ways, 1975 was the first real season of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry that we know today; the first year in which both teams were really good, and began to pack their ballparks when they played each other.

On a road trip to Texas, when things were really going badly, Thurman took it upon himself to run a team meeting to try to get things righted. This was before he was captain, of course, and Phil Pepe of the
Daily News
learned about it and wrote it. Munson was pissed. It was supposed to be a secret meeting.

“He didn’t talk to me for a full year,” said Pepe. “And we had been friends!”

Hunter’s 1975 season, by today’s standards, was truly out of this world. He made 39 starts and hurled 30 complete games, going 23-14 and leading the league with 328 innings pitched. It was the most work a Yankee pitcher had had since 1921, when Carl Mays, the year after killing Ray Chapman with a pitch, threw 337 innings in the Yankees’ first pennant-winning season. No American League pitcher since Bob Feller in 1946 had hurled 30 complete games.

Some would come to feel that the Yankees looked to get their full $3.5 million value in year one of the five-year contract, for indeed, his remaining four years did not measure up either in accomplishment or in durability. But he brought a lot more to the team than stats. Catfish was the sort of guy who just looked like a leader when he walked through the airport with his teammates. He had a stature about him that seemed to say “champion.” He brought with him a record of championship play in Oakland and maintained that commanding presence through good times and bad.

“He taught us how to win” were the six words spoken by many in the Yankee organization as the years went on.

Hunter attributed much of his Yankee success to Munson.

“Thurman was like a hundred years old in baseball knowledge,” he said. “He was amazing. I trusted him totally.”

Munson and Hunter formed a close friendship. Thurman had called him almost every day when he was a free agent to try to persuade him to play for the Yankees. They had a similar maturity, which is not to say that they couldn’t be prone to moments of boyish mischief, as happens with athletes. They loved their Burger King cheeseburgers and their fast food pizza on the run. But on the field they were all business. They would share an apartment after Hunter’s family returned to North Carolina late in the summer.

“Thurman liked to sleep on the couch,” said Catfish. “Next to the phone so he could make his business deals.

“He’s the only player I’ve ever seen who busts his butt all the time. Of course, I like to get on him a lot by saying he was the only player in the league who never hit a home run off me. But he says it’s because I was always knocked out before he had a chance to bat. When I played against him, I never knew he was this good a guy.”

Bonds, the other superstar acquisition during the off-season, was indeed one of the most gifted athletes to ever wear a Yankee uniform. He could run like an antelope, hit for power, and field with flashes of brilliance. He had been a Gold Glove winner. He did strike out far too often, and broke Mickey Mantle’s single-season team record in that department. (I sent Mickey the “record-breaking” baseball, signed by Bonds.) He respected the game and played through pain to contribute what he could, and while he was healthy before running into a wall in Comiskey Park, the team was peaking.

Alas, the Bonds injury, striking as it did the team’s key power hitter, led to a slowdown by the club, and with that came a manager shift. One year after Virdon had been Manager of the Year, he was
to pay the price for not taking the team to the pennant despite the arrival of Bonds and Hunter. It would be George Steinbrenner’s first firing of a manager, Ralph Houk having resigned.

Virdon’s demise was sealed when the Texas Rangers fired Billy Martin. With Martin available and extremely attractive to Steinbrenner as a turnaround artist, the lure of having this important Yankee player from the 1950s was irresistible.

Although he was technically still under suspension, there was little doubt that it was at Steinbrenner’s urging that Gabe Paul and scout Birdie Tebbetts were secretly dispatched to Colorado to run down Martin days after his firing in Texas and bring him home as manager.

Days earlier, Virdon had been instructed to play a tape made by Steinbrenner during a clubhouse meeting, in which the voice of the owner said, “I’ll be a sonovabitch if I’m going to sit up here and sign these paychecks and watch us get our asses kicked by a bunch of rummies.” The players mostly reacted with amusement, although some felt it clearly undermined Virdon’s role as the manager.

While the mission to Colorado was secret, the writers knew that Martin’s availability made for a tempting confluence of bad timing for Virdon. The ownership that had sent Martin into exile in 1957 was long gone.

Munson and Virdon were never close. That was mostly Virdon’s style; he was not one who got close to his players, even the leaders of the team. It would have been helpful. There even came a point late in the season when several of the Yankee veterans, including Nettles, Piniella, and Munson, began giving their own signals on the field during games.

“He hadn’t said a word to me in weeks,” Munson recalled. “Then I walked by his office at Shea and I hear him say, ‘Thurman!’ So I went in. And on his desk were a bunch of baseball cards someone had mailed in. He wanted me to sign mine. We never really had much to say to each other, unless it was a conference on the mound.
But even then, he’d often sent Whitey Ford to the mound, even to change pitchers.” Ford was the Yankee pitching coach under Virdon that year.

It was something that nagged at Steinbrenner. Virdon had been sending Dick Howser to the plate for the exchange of lineups at the start of games, and Ford to the mound to talk to the pitchers. His old friend Mel Wright, a coach, was his principal contact with the players. The communication skills were not strong, and Steinbrenner certainly wanted a more fiery manager when the going got tough.

Indeed, times were tough enough by Old-Timers’ Day that Virdon would get sacked on the Friday night before, and then Martin would be introduced on Saturday. It was a difficult weekend for me as PR man. Planning Old-Timers’ Day was one thing; changing managers was quite another. I walked with Joe DiMaggio from the executive entrance at Shea to the Yankee clubhouse around ten in the morning and said, “You know we’re naming Martin as manager today, right?” (It had been in the papers.)

DiMaggio sort of rolled his eyes and said, “Good luck.” He knew this was going to be the start of some challenging times for the organization. Billy was not low-maintenance.

In fact, Billy Martin’s new managing contract stated that he had to “personally conduct [himself] at all times so as to represent the best interest of the New York Yankees and to adhere to all club policies.” So, built into the welcome was the clause designed to hasten his firing. It was a tinderbox.

From the day of his arrival, August 2, until the end of the season, Martin led the Yanks to a 30-26 record. They were in third place, ten games out when he arrived, and finished in third place, twelve games out on the final day. But there were positive signs. The team ran more, played with more abandon, and seemed to be enjoying themselves more.

Bonds became the team’s first ever 30/30 player (30 homers, 30 steals), and Chambliss hit .304.

In a setback, a knee injury in the spongy Shea outfield effectively ended Elliott Maddox’s promising career, and opened up center field for the taking.

By hitting about .330 after Martin arrived, Munson showed new fire after the managerial change. For the season, Thurman would hit .318 and would drive in 102 runs despite hitting only 12 homers. He was the first Yankee in eleven years to top 100 RBIs, and he led the American League with 151 singles in the process.

He may have been helped by the healthy birth of his son Michael on July 29.

“He was so happy at having a son,” recalls Mara Young, Ron Blomberg’s wife at the time. “I remember seeing him outside of an elevator at Shea Stadium, and he picked me up and said, ‘I’m so excited! It’s a boy!’”

For Thurman to hit triple figures in RBIs without a lofty home run total spoke a lot about how frequently he would come through in clutch situations with men on base. And this was indeed the beginning of a long run in which Munson would be this sort of hitter—a guy who was extremely dangerous with men on base.

From 1975 through 1977, three seasons, Thurman would hit over .300 and top 100 RBIs every year. He would be the first player in the major leagues to accomplish this feat since Bill White did it for the Cardinals from 1962 through 1964, and the first in the American League since Al Rosen did it for the Indians in 1952-54. SABR-maticians would have been all over this with today’s fast computers, but back then I stumbled onto it accidentally while scanning White’s records in preparing his bio for our media guide. (White was the Yankee’s announcer by this time.) That sent me searching for the last American Leaguer, who would turn out to be the future president of the Yankees and a longtime pal of George Steinbrenner’s.

The last catcher to accomplish the feat had been Bill Dickey, in 1936-39, when the Yanks won four straight world championships.

Martin, like Virdon before him, recognized the value of having Thurman call the games despite his propensity to commit errors on throws to second. It just went with the territory, and both managers knew they won more than they lost in the process.

“Wait till I have this team with a full spring training and can lop off guys from the roster that didn’t show me much,” said Martin as the 1975 season concluded. “I can’t wait for ’76.”

The 1975 World Series between Cincinnati and Boston was thrilling and was largely credited for a resurgence of interest in baseball. A lot of people still claim that to be the case today. Those who do tend to overlook the value to the game of having a strong Yankee team in New York, particularly one that would be playing in a new stadium. And so it would be the combination of the 1975 Series and the emergence of the 1976 Yankees that would, in fact, revitalize the game and send it into its modern period of marketing success.

Martin as manager and Munson as team captain would have a lot to do with that.

The idea of naming a team captain first came to George Steinbrenner during the winter of 1975-76. It came from the football mentality he was always accused of being consumed with, and he knew he needed to “persuade” Martin to go along.

All along, he was going through the arrangements that would get Bowie Kuhn to lift his suspension as the new Yankee Stadium was being prepared for opening day. I was involved with both efforts, meeting with lawyers in the evenings to develop the PR reasons for the need to lift his suspension, while working with the excitement of a new stadium.

Meanwhile, Gabe Paul was shaking things up by making huge trades. The winter meetings of 1975 were quiet for a few days, and then we stole the headlines.

On December 11 came the news that after just one season, we were trading Bobby Bonds. He would not see the new Yankee Stadium in a home uniform. He would be a one-year Yankee whose Yankee career would be confined to Shea.