Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (26 page)

“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s a beautiful experience! Ask Reggie, he was up with me. Nettles too. And Billy.”

“That’s okay, they might have thought it was great, but it’s not for me.”

With that, I stood and shook his hand and said I’d see him soon.

“Any book sale numbers?” he asked.

“That’s pretty much done, Thurman. Any sales at this point don’t really amount to much. It did okay, it wasn’t a big hit, but we didn’t get very controversial, and that was the result. It’s a book you’re proud of, right?”

“Yeah, it was good. I know we could have taken more shots. But it was good we didn’t, I don’t want to be like those guys. Especially after I boycotted Bouton. I wish it was funnier though. There were funny stories I could have put in there.”

That was our last conversation. He headed for the trainer’s room; I headed for the press room. The conversation was not as free and easy as when I was the team’s PR director, or when we had done the book together, but when you’re not an everyday insider, relationships change. And I knew he had a lot on his mind.

Ron Guidry shut out the California Angels 2-0 in the afternoon game of July 26 before a Yankee Stadium crowd of more than
43,000, many of them kids enjoying summer-camp outings. The practice of wearing “Yankee blue” T-shirts with favorite players’ names on the back hadn’t yet begun. That was a marketing plan waiting to happen. If it did exist, there would have been plenty of
MUNSON
15 shirts in the stands.
JACKSON
44 might have sold the most, but there would have been plenty of Munsons. The fans just connected with him. He was a “grinder,” in the words of NBC announcer Joe Garagiola. He was the one who went out there and grinded it out, pumping his fist, pointing here and there, keeping everyone in the game, quarterbacking the day’s flow of events.

Guidry put down the Angels with his shutout, and it was always nice to win on a travel day. It had been a duel of complete games, almost impossible to imagine today, with Jim Barr taking the loss despite an eight-hitter. Mickey Rivers, the clock ticking on his Yankee career, played the last two innings after Murcer led off and left the game with a sore right shin and a strained tendon behind his left knee. The M&M Boys—Murcer and Munson—were walking wounded, as were Chambliss, Rivers, Randolph, and Jim Spencer.

“It was Munson, however,” wrote Murray Chass in the
Times
, “who posed the most bothersome problem for the Yankees. The catcher has a chronically sore right knee and he aggravated it when he fell Tuesday night. He has missed the last two games and no one knows when he will be able to catch again.”

Martin said, “From what the doctor told me, he won’t be able to catch for a while. If I can afford to, I’d like to rest him for about a week, but I don’t know if I can do that.”

It was Billy’s way of using the press to say,
The front office isn’t giving me the players I need to win
.

Jerry Narron caught and batted seventh, going 1 for 2 with a run scored. Martin needed another catcher, the likely fellow being Brad Gulden, a left-handed hitter at Columbus, but the front office was not anxious to bring him up and Martin was seething over it. Slow
personnel call-ups handicapped his ability to fully manipulate his roster during a game; being unable to pinch-hit for Narron might cost him one of the twenty-seven outs he had to work with, and perhaps cost him the game. He was always on a short leash, and so he was displeased with being shorthanded.

Further, the Yankees hired Jeff Torborg that day to join their coaching staff. He had recently been dropped as manager of the Indians, and he was going to be assigned to the bullpen to help out with the faltering pitching. The last thing Billy liked was to have coaches around who were not of his choosing, let alone former managers.

The team would dress and fly to Milwaukee, arriving around nine, time enough to go out for some beers with the guys.

Into the clubhouse came Bill Kane, the Yankees’ traveling secretary. He had some bad news. Their plane was delayed, so there was no need to board the bus for LaGuardia at that time. Better to hang out in the clubhouse, kill time there, and head for the airport when all was ready.

Munson looked at Nettles and smiled the all-knowing, “nothing is running smoothly anymore this year” look. With all the stars in the room, this was still a team that was not only not going to Milwaukee on time, but also not really going anywhere in the American League East. Yes, they had just won five of six and were 5-2 since the All-Star break, but they had managed to lose ground to the Orioles during that time and were just not playing like the Yankees of 1976–77–78.

“Sauna?” suggested Nettles.

“Yeah, let’s do it,” said Munson. It meant getting undressed again, but it seemed like a decent idea under the circumstances.

The sauna in the Yankee clubhouse was off-limits to the press, which also made it attractive. The added time in the clubhouse, if the players chose to just sit by their lockers, would only be an invitation
to the pesky newspaper guys, the day game giving them a rare opportunity to finish their stories in plenty of time, and then fish around for some Yankee gossip. Nope, didn’t need that.

Already in the sauna were Dom Scala, the Yankees’ bullpen catcher, and Fred Stanley, who had been the team’s regular shortstop in 1976, but who had become a bench player with the coming of Dent. A good guy was Stanley, known as Chicken, mostly for his scrawny build and, well, “chicken legs.”

In the sauna was a copy of the team’s 1979 media guide, warped by humidity, lying on a bench with a photo of Goose Gossage jumping into the arms of Munson after the last out of the 1978 American League Championship Series. “The Great Comeback” it said on the cover. “World Champions 1978.”

The funny thing about a world championship is that you win it on the last day of the season, and you raise the pennant on opening day of the following season, but by then—it’s a new season, time to start all over again. The opportunity to strut through an airport in the company of your fellow world champions, feeling awfully good about yourself, doesn’t last very long. If you win the Series at home, there isn’t even the satisfaction of that last flight home together as a conquering team. You win, you celebrate, and by the time you are together again, there are roster changes, and the guys you went to war with are different. It’s already time to prove yourselves all over again.

Munson glanced at the media guide and flipped it over to look at the upcoming schedule. Two night games in Milwaukee on Friday and Saturday, a Sunday day game, then down the road to Chicago for night games Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. As a catcher, he would look at the schedule, almost routinely, and translate each game into who was pitching. Ed Figueroa, hurting, wouldn’t be able to take his turn in the rotation. That meant perhaps giving the veteran Jim Kaat a start, along with Tiant and Hunter in Milwaukee, with Tommy John and Guidry pitching the first two in Chicago. Losing
Figgy was tough; he was a solid, dependable starter. Munson liked working with him.

“It’s tough about Figgy,” Thurman said to his three sauna partners. “It’s a big hole to fill, maybe fifteen starts down the stretch. Hopefully he’s not done for the season.”

He realized he was thinking like a catcher as he pondered the rotation, but in reality, he had bigger things on his mind. It was the matter of his own future as a catcher. And he was having to face up to it.

The matter was the arthritic state of his beaten-down knees. It was even affecting his concentration behind the plate.

Figueroa would one day write his own book,
Yankee Stranger
, and in it he spoke of Thurman’s troubles in 1979:

A late arrival in Milwaukee, not a favorite city for traveling ballplayers anyway, made for few happy players on the Yankees. The Pfister
Hotel, on Wisconsin and Jefferson, was stately and classic, but had a depressingly gloomy lobby and very old-fashioned rooms. The hotel had opened in 1893, and early on was considered too elegant for actors or ballplayers, who were usually relegated to lesser accommodations. But eventually it opened its doors to baseball teams. Those who visited to play the Milwaukee Braves, and later the Brewers, knew it well.

It was perhaps best known to baseball for the Yankees’ lobby brawl in the closing days of the 1974 season.

The team checked in more politely this time. Only eight players—Hunter, Tidrow, Chambliss, Nettles, Piniella, Murcer, White, and Munson—remained from that team.

Although the bus to County Stadium on this Friday, July 27, would depart the Pfister at five p.m., many players took taxis and headed to the park early. In towns that offered little of a downtown to walk through, it was common to get to the park early, hang with the guys, play cards, run on the warning track, take extra batting practice, or do whatever got you out of the hotel and the boredom of daytime TV.

This was going to be a big weekend for the Brewers, a team of coming stars who would go to the World Series in three years. Nearly 150,000 fans were expected for the three-game series with the Yankees. Despite their slumping campaign, the Yankees were always a big draw on the road. Many had bought tickets well in advance of this slump, and a summer weekend with the Bronx Bombers was a big event in town.

Munson got to the ballpark around 3:30. The clubhouse, old-fashioned, humid, and cramped, did not lend itself to sitting around. Besides, these guys were athletes, ballplayers; guys who liked being outdoors and feeling the competitive juices rise within them as the early activity on the field took form.

Groundskeepers went through their paces and early-arriving vendors
sat and watched the lazy activities on the field as brats began to cook and kegs of beer began to move to the vending stands.

Thurman put on his underwear, his jock, and got his sanitary socks and navy blue stirrups on just right. He’d been going through this ritual since he was a kid. It was the routine, the daily chore that went with reporting to work. On the back of his sweatshirt, in capital block letters, was
MUNSON
with “15” below it, carefully printed in black felt marker by Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse attendant since 1927.

He pulled on his gray baseball pants and threw a windbreaker over his head, postponing his actual uniform top until after batting practice. Lacing his spiked shoes and heading through the tunnel, he emerged onto the turf and began to run toward left field. He wanted to get a general feel for how his legs were going to operate on this day.

To his pleasant surprise, it wasn’t so bad.

He ran to the left field foul pole and stopped short. No real pain. He headed for center field, stopped, and turned. There was a sensation in his knees that wasn’t right, but he thought he could play with it.

And so despite telling everyone he might be done catching for the year, he decided he might in fact be able to play this very night.

“Yogi, old man, I’m gonna catch tonight,” he told his coach. Berra, a lifer at ballparks, was always there early too.

“If you think you can, then tell Billy early before he makes out the lineup,” said the Yankee legend. “He should be here anytime.”

Anytime, of course, really meant “anytime” when it came to Martin. It could even mean thirty minutes before the game. But Billy arrived with Elston Howard around five, and Thurman went into his office.

“Skip, I can catch tonight. Write me in there,” said Munson.

Billy was surprised. Based on everything he’d heard and things Munson had said, it seemed that option was no longer in play.

“Really, I tested it, I did some running, some turning; I can do it. At least let me go and see how it plays out.”

So Billy wrote out the lineup card and had “Munson, c,” batting third. Figueroa, also among the walking wounded, would start and test his arm, and see what he had left.

“We’re gonna be like two guys from the old soldiers’ home out there,” Thurman said to Figueroa. “I hope they have two stretchers ready in this place.”

Before the game Thurman headed for the training room, where he saw Gene Monahan and said, “I’m gonna give it a shot tonight, Geno; give me a good rubdown.”

“You got it, Thurman,” said the Yankees’ trainer. “I hope this is the start of a good turnaround for us! We need you back there!”

The game was to be an eventful one.

Cecil Cooper, the tall, thin Brewers slugger who had come up through the Red Sox system, homered in the first. When he came up in the last of the third, Figueroa threw one tight to him, but didn’t hit him.

In the top of the fourth, with Reggie Jackson leading off, Mike Caldwell twice dusted the Yankee cleanup hitter and sent him sprawling.

“Uh-oh,” said Phil Rizzuto on the radio.

Hitting a high foul pop-up toward his old Oakland teammate Sal Bando at third, Jackson flipped his bat in Caldwell’s direction while headed for first. It was a provocative act; bats don’t get flipped toward the pitcher’s mound. And confrontation was already in the wind.

Jackson rounded first as the high pop settled into Bando’s glove. Caldwell, incensed by the bat throwing, walked over, picked up the bat, and slammed it into the ground, breaking it. That was all Reggie needed on his way past Caldwell and back toward the dugout. He threw off his batting helmet, charged Caldwell, and grabbed him by the throat. They both hit the ground as teammates raced out,
dugouts and bullpens emptying. Munson, wearing his shin guards and chest protector, joined in the scrum, which was quickly halted by the umpires. John Shulock, the home plate umpire, tossed Jackson from the game. Martin angrily fought with Shulock and the other umpires, insisting that Caldwell be ejected as well. He was in Shulock’s face, finger pointing, but to no avail. As Martin left the field, the normally placid Brewers fans threw garbage at him and cursed at him.