Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (21 page)

“During that big ’78 ‘massacre’ series, he asked me if I knew who was pitching the next day and I said, ‘Yeah, Bobby Sprowl; Bill Lee is in Zimmer’s doghouse.’ And he said, ‘Who the fuck is Bobby Sprowl!!!’ and he laughed and laughed.”

Castinetti owns Sportsworld in Saugus, Massachusetts, today. He sells autographed goods but keeps his special Yankee collection at home, for himself.

“A single signed baseball from Munson is worth about $17,000 today,” he says, shaking his head. “You know how many I had and gave away? What they would be worth! He just didn’t sign very many.”

The games came to be known as the Boston Massacre. The Yanks swept, winning 15-3, 13-2, 7-0, and 7-4. They would have been happy with a split; this was nirvana. Munson went 8 for 16 in the series, but it was a total team effort, a historic annihilation, and a series that lives forever in the history of the Yankee-Boston rivalry, just as the 2004 ALCS will forever be “the answer” for the long-suffering Red Sox Nation.

During the 1978 series, Thurman was hit in the head with a pitch from Dick Drago and had to be replaced.

“When he came to, he started looking around for his catching gear,” recalls Willie Randolph. “He thought we were in the field.”

A few days later in Detroit, he was experiencing terrible headaches, and was sent for a brain scan to a local hospital.

“My first reaction was that I didn’t want to die,” he said. “I never experienced anything like that. This wasn’t a headache, it was tremendous pain.”

But he would be okay.

People who think of 1978 forget that the Red Sox did not roll over and die after those games. The Yankees couldn’t shake them, even after winning two of three back in New York a week later. The Yanks played inspired baseball, Guidry was on fire, and everything was clicking. The team won seven of their last eight games. But Boston wouldn’t die; wouldn’t go away.

On Sunday, October 1, the final day of the regular season, a Yankee victory would have clinched the division. The team was playing the Indians at home. In the first inning, Thurman singled and Piniella doubled him to third. When Jackson grounded out, Munson scored, a gritty, “money” run. Had it been a 1-0 game, his bulldog
trip around the bases on bad knees would have been a Yankee play for the ages—a bit like Joe Girardi’s big triple in the deciding game of the 1996 World Series.

But it wasn’t to be, as Catfish, the starter, didn’t have it that day and the Yankees lost 9-2. To Hunter, a great kidder who could give as well as he could take, it recalled an earlier exchange with Piniella on a team bus (naturally) in Boston, when the driver got lost and wound up giving the players a historic tour of the city.

“This is a Revolutionary War cemetery,” he said at one point.

“That’s where Catfish’s arm is buried,” announced Piniella.

Boston won on that fateful Sunday, and the two teams, perhaps destined for this all year long, wound up tied for first. A playoff game needed to be held the following day in Boston to decide who would play the Royals for the pennant.

It was not hard to find 32,925 Red Sox fans to fill Fenway Park on Monday afternoon on short notice for one of those “games for the ages.” The Yanks got to town on Sunday night, with Munson, Piniella, Lyle, Nettles, and Gossage heading for Daisy Buchanan’s saloon near the Sheraton. They were confident and relaxed. Lemon had created a tone of peace over this franchise. They had come this far, and they intended to finish the Sox—again—in a few hours.

It would be Guidry, 24–3, against their old teammate Mike Torrez. Everything was perfect about baseball on this day. The weather—cool, crisp, October baseball—the ballpark, the rivalry, and the fact that two elite teams were about to go at each other with this great historic rivalry at its zenith.

Munson batted second and went 1 for 5 with three strikeouts. But he and Guidry were in a good rhythm, and even though the Sox jumped to an early lead, the confidence didn’t wane. And Thurman’s one hit would be a big one.

In the historic seventh inning, with the Yanks down 2-0, Chambliss and White both singled. With two out, Bucky Dent came to bat
and we can still hear Bill White saying, “Deep to left… Yastrzemskiiii’s … not going to get it… It’s a home run!” and the Yankees took a 3-2 lead. Kind of a highlight moment in Bucky’s career.

What followed was important as well. Rivers walked, and Bob Stanley replaced Torrez. Rivers stole second, and then Munson laced a double to drive in Rivers and make it a 4-2 game. A big RBI, lost in the memories of the Dent homer, in perhaps the most famous game he ever appeared in.

Jackson homered in the eighth to make it 5-2, and that would prove to be the winning run, as the Red Sox, noble to the end, scored twice in the eighth, and the Yanks needed Gossage to save it in the ninth for the 5-4 victory. Yastrzemski, with two on, could have won it with a double, or maybe even a long single off the wall. Memories of the Impossible Dream of 1967?

Gossage got Yaz to foul out to Nettles and the Yankees won.

The Red Sox went home; the Yankees went on to face the Royals for the pennant.

The Royals, well, the poor Royals found it their destiny to face the Yankees again, and although this was a top-rate club with a fine manager in Whitey Herzog and first-rate players throughout the lineup and on the pitching staff, the Yanks just had their number in the 1970s.

The Yanks won this one in four games, but for Munson, everything about his gifts as a major league baseball player came together in game three in Yankee Stadium. Not only did he call another fine game for Hunter and Gossage, but when he came to bat against reliever Doug Bird, the series was tied at a game apiece and the Royals were winning 5-4 in the last of the eighth, prepared to take a two-to-one lead in games. George Brett was prepared to take his place in playoff history with a three-home run game.

Munson, who had hit just two home runs in Yankee Stadium all
season, tore into a fastball and sent it soaring deep, deep, way deep to the Babe Ruth monument in left-center field’s Monument Park area, measured to be 475 feet. Very few balls had been hit there. Tape-measure home runs were not part of Munson’s game. The unexpected nature of this titanic clout, and the fact that it set up a 6– 5 playoff victory and a two-games-to-one
Yankee
lead, made it the most important home run of his career.

Where did that power come from!? On replays of the shot, the swing looks like a normal Munson swing. The power was always there; he was a very strong man. He simply didn’t swing with an arc that lifted it as that one was lifted. He had a very disciplined swing and didn’t give in to temptation, not even in Fenway. But here, for a moment at least, he let it all out.

Everyone must have one “longest ever” in them, leaving you wondering why it is never duplicated. Why did Mickey Mantle never again hit one 565 feet as he did that afternoon in Washington, D.C., when he was twenty-one years old?

Everything had come together just right—a moment of baseball perfection. As a hitter, that was Thurman’s moment.

And the next day, the Yankees won the American League pennant.

“That home run was the greatest individual baseball feat I ever saw,” says Henry Hecht, who covered the Yankees for the
New York Post
during the “Bronx Zoo” years, and was often in the middle of controversy himself. “Thurman was physically incapable of hitting a ball like that anymore because he was a broken-down catcher by then. I’m still in awe of what he did—because he couldn’t do it.”

The World Series rematch with the Dodgers found Thurman batting in five runs in game five, just one short of Bobby Richardson’s World Series record, to help put the Yankees up three games to two. That was longer than Munson wanted the Series to last. As Guidry recalls, “There were a bunch of us in the clubhouse on the day I was scheduled to pitch. Thurman came in steaming. He had just read some
more Dodger quotes saying this was going to be their year, and he said, ‘If this was any other team but Los Angeles, I might just say forget it. But the way these guys have been carrying on, mouthing off, I would like nothing better than to kick their asses four straight.’”

Prior to game six, Hunter learned that his father had lung cancer. He was scheduled to pitch the game, and he did, but he also planned to skip game seven and get home to his dad. So there was a big desire to win it all that night in Los Angeles.

He wasn’t sharp. He was doubtless distracted. A finesse pitcher like Hunter needed to have his concentration at full strength.

In the third inning, Munson went to the mound and said, “Well, Catfish, you better make sure you hit my glove exactly where I put it because you ain’t got diddlysquat tonight.”

The two of them could banter like that. Munson often talked to his pitchers like that. Jim Kaat remembers Munson coming to the mound and saying, “Are you fucking
trying
to lose this game?”

Hunter responded to Thurman, “Hey, Captain Bad Body, just get back on behind the plate and catch it after I throw it. I’m in a hurry to get home.”

He threw a double-play ball to kill the Dodger rally.

The Yankees won the game 7-2. The last batter, Ron Cey, hit a high foul pop behind the plate. Munson turned and tossed his mask to his right, settled under the ball, and snared it for the world championship out. He turned toward Goose, took a quick glance at his mask with a momentary thought of retrieving it, but forgot about it and ran for the mound in triumph.

Lemon’s steady hand and noninterfering approach were just the tonic the Yankees needed. It was their twenty-second world championship—and the last they would win until 1996, a gap of eighteen seasons.

An emotionally spent Thurman Munson went home to the tranquillity of Canton.

Over the winter of 1978-79, Thurman, now a mature, 31-year-old veteran ballplayer and businessman, busied himself in Canton with his off-field interests, particularly aviation, as well as with attention to his family, always the priority. A couple of times, he visited his mother at the senior citizens home. He had joined the Congress Lake Club and played golf there and at Prestwick and Tam O’Shanter in Canton when the weather permitted. His roots in the community were deep. Even as a Yankee star, he’d go back to Lehman and talk to the teams.

“He was always the same guy, he just had more money,” laughs his boyhood battery mate Jerome Pruett. “The same lovable sarcastic Thurman.”

He’d play racquetball with Jerry Anderson, grab lunch with Tote Dominick at Lucia’s, survey his property holdings, fly his plane, and hang out a lot with Diana and the kids. They were full days.

In November he was a secret guest speaker for the Plain Local Midget Football League banquet, agreeing to appear only if the press wasn’t informed.

In February there was a “Munson Roast” in Canton that raised $51,000 for three local charities, which was certainly the only reason he agreed to be honored. Several teammates came, including Roy White, whom he could always count on to show up for him. Reggie Jackson came too, to the surprise of many.

“He didn’t even hesitate,” said Thurman. “He told me he’d be happy to come in, at no expense. That doesn’t sound like a guy who hates me, does it?”

He remained loyal to Canton and loyal to its public schools. Bob Henderson, his senior year basketball coach at Lehman, called the Yankees to see if Thurman might come back to visit classes during Right to Read Week. “I never expected he would do this at this stage of his career, but he spent a whole day with us, visiting various schools, talking about the importance of reading and getting an education. It was a wonderful day.”

Contractually, he was modestly content. His baseball salary, through the deal signed for four years—1978 through 1981—moved progressively from $317,500 to $417,500, and it grudgingly accepted his flying. Dick Moss, the former number two man to Marvin Miller at the Players Association, had negotiated the deal with the Yankees, managing to remove the standard clause in the contract that absolved the club of compliance with the agreement if the player dies while piloting a plane. Thurman, who had never used an agent, had reached out to Moss, a top-tier guy, when he knew he wanted to deal with the no-fly provision of the contact. But much bitterness had preceded the signing, and Thurman was never happy about the deal. “It was satisfactory the way it should have been before I was disgraced for two years,” he said. “In the respect that it satisfies me finally yes, but it doesn’t help my attitude. Are material things supposed to help a guy who’s had these things eating at him for two years?”

“Munson would have flown anyway,” says Moss. “He had two important
things in his life at that time: playing baseball and flying his airplane. It was an easy deal to do, but there was the problem of that flying clause. It took George a couple of weeks to come around, but the provision was stricken.”

Spring training of 1979 had a great air of sadness over it. Bob Lemon, shortly after his great triumph in the World Series, had suffered the loss of his twenty-six-year-old son Jerry in a car crash in Arizona. Lem tried to give it his all but he was filled with grief. What should have been a glorious spring was one of melancholy.

“He was never the same after that,” said Joe Garagiola Sr., who had taken Lem’s phone call in Arizona and rushed to the hospital until Lemon could get there.

Thurman blew off Jim Bouton, who had sought an interview during spring training, evoking old memories of
Ball Four
and reminding people that Munson was old-school and not ready to forgive Bouton for breaking the clubhouse code of silence almost a decade earlier. Days later, Thurman did a rare interview with John Dockery of WNEW TV from New York. He always preferred TV or radio to print, feeling his words could not be edited.