Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (27 page)

This could have gotten uglier because Billy looked to the stands and thought for a moment about exchanging words with fans close to the dugout who were cursing him. Yankee players, who had returned to the dugout, now popped out again and looked over the roof to see what was going on. Milwaukee security officers hustled atop the dugout to keep the peace.

Martin informed Shulock that he was playing the game under protest, claiming that Caldwell should have automatically been ejected for throwing at Jackson. The public address announcer was instructed to inform the fans, which only elicited more howls. It is hard to get a Milwaukee audience riled up, but Martin had done it. Now this was a game in very hostile territory.

“Shulock let the game get out of hand,” Martin told reporters afterward. “He should have thrown Caldwell out. When he ejected Jackson and not Caldwell, that’s when I made the protest.”

“The pitch slipped,” said Caldwell after the game. “It looked like a good knockdown pitch. He sure thought it was.”

Reggie said, “I asked him if he had thrown at me on purpose, and he denied that he had. He just said that the pitch had gotten away from him, that it slipped off his fingers. I thought it was a knockdown, and I felt I had to do what I did to preserve some respect. But I had no idea of trying to hurt anyone. Thank God no one got hurt. If someone gets hurt, whoever it is, I’m going to be the loser publicly because I’m Reggie Jackson.”

“When the press came in later, I left,” he added the next day. “Because
anything I say gets blown out of proportion, it was better to take a little time to think about it. Last night would have been a big story if I had said anything, but I didn’t want that. I think I made my point.”

Some catchers return to home plate after such an episode and make light of it; maybe even make a joke of it with the umpire. To spend the rest of the game looking for close calls from the man a foot behind you could make for a very high-tension evening, to be sure. But Munson wasn’t like that. He began jabbering at Shulock, defending Martin, even saying, “This is one protest the league is going to accept, and you’re gonna look bad.”

But of course, that wasn’t going to be the case; the league allows a protest maybe once every thirty years. No matter how obvious an infraction may be, the logistics of doing so were more than it could ever be worth, and only on the rarest of occasions would a protest ever result in a game being replayed.

Munson knew that; he knew the politics of the game. But he also wasn’t about to give ground to Shulock.

In the seventh, with Ron Davis on the mound, Cooper homered again to give the Brewers a 5-3 lead, but then Willie Randolph hit a two-run homer in the eighth, driving in Rivers ahead of him, to tie it up at 5-5. Willie hit only five home runs all season; this was a big one. Munson liked Randolph a lot and certainly knew this was a key blow, a “money homer.” As the next hitter, he greeted him at home plate with a big smile and a firm handshake. Then he grounded out to first.

It had been a tough day at bat for Thurm. He hadn’t gotten the ball out of the infield. A grounder to second in the first; a 6-4-3 double play in the third, another groundout to short in the sixth, and now this groundout to first in the eighth. Not a Munson kind of ball game.

Thurman donned his shin guards and his chest protector and flipped his mask over his face as he headed behind the plate for the
ninth. Gossage had come into the game an inning earlier. This had been an unusual game for Thurman, not only at bat, but even behind the plate. No strikeouts, no putouts. Figueroa, Davis, and Gossage hadn’t managed to strike out a single Brewers hitter.

Paul Molitor led off by grounding out to Jim Spencer at first, Spencer making the play unassisted. Don Money (born the same day as Thurman, thirty-two years before) flied out to Rivers in center, Mickey making that patented snap catch of his, flipping his elbows as he threw the ball back to the infield. Two down.

Cooper came up. He of the two home runs, one off Figgy, one off Davis. Thurman settled behind the plate and called for an inside fastball. It went over the black for strike one.

The next pitch was also inside, but missed the plate, and it was 1 and 1.

The third pitch was fouled off.

Munson crouched down and gave a signal for another inside fastball. This was, by that earlier rough math, maybe the 200,000th squat behind the batter over his ten seasons in the majors. And he felt every one of them as he grinded this one out.

Gossage pitched and Cooper connected.

“Ah, shit,” said Gossage as the ball took off.

“Shit!” said Munson out loud, wishing he could have that one back.

“I was just trying to meet the ball and drive it somewhere,” Cooper would say after the game. “I didn’t think it would go out.”

It did. It was a 6-5 Brewer win, a three-homer game for Cooper. Munson walked toward the dugout, pained, tired, and beaten.

While the fans outside cheered Cooper, who came back out for a curtain call, Munson flipped his mask into his locker, lifted his chest protector over his head, and sat down to unbuckle his shin guards. The tools of ignorance, they had once been called in baseball, a nickname long forgotten by this generation of players.

The mask was in its first year. His previous mask had been tossed aside and lost after he caught the final out of the 1978 World Series.

Now his equipment lay in his locker, the clubhouse silent after the sudden defeat.

He would not wear the catching gear again.

The Yankees played a Saturday night game at Milwaukee on July 28—a “date night” idea, which few teams embraced. Saturdays were for day games, even when it seemed that it was a nice thing to do, to give couples an option of a night at the ballpark.

Billy gave Thurman the night off, but during batting practice Munson borrowed a Jim Spencer glove and did some time at first base. Four years earlier Munson had played two complete games at the position, one in Anaheim and another at Shea Stadium, handling twenty chances without an error. He was an athlete, a former shortstop, and he took to it well, playing the position as though it represented a day off, to relax a bit. Of course Munson was too competitive to really relax, and he was aware that his concentration was not the same as when he was behind the plate.

His presence at first during BP led to speculation that he would indeed be back there one of these days, to give his knees a rest while keeping his bat in the lineup. But the bat—oh boy—he’d only gone 11 for his last 52, a .212 showing, and ten of the eleven hits were singles.

He watched the Saturday night game partly from the bullpen, enjoying the playful horsing around that goes with the early innings in the pen, and then moved to the dugout later in the game in case he was needed to pinch-hit. He wasn’t, and the Yanks lost 9-2 before 52,000 people, as they fell thirteen games behind the Orioles.

On Sunday, Thurman played first base.

He went 1 for 4 with a triple in the ninth, Jackson driving him home, but the Yankees lost again, this time 5-3, to fall fourteen back. It had been a wonderful weekend for the Brewers, sweeping the Yankees before three packed houses, and as though to put an exclamation mark on it all, Jim Gantner and Lou Piniella got into a fight in the sixth inning over a tag play at third, with Gantner ejected to the supportive cheers of the Millered-up fans. Third base coach Mike Ferraro had tried to step between the two after the hard slide, but wound up being taken down with Piniella by the charged-up Gantner. When Piniella went to left field, he was pelted with baseballs and play had to be stopped while the PA announcer asked for calm.

“It was a good play for [Piniella],” said Gantner. “I would have done the same thing.”

Piniella, always calm in the clubhouse after the most fiery displays on the field, said, “I made a bad play going to third; I was just trying to make up for it.”

Lou had to deal with the teasing of his own teammates all weekend as well. There in center field for the Brewers was “Jim Fucking Wohlford,” the journeyman outfielder who had long been the butt of Yankee humor at Piniella’s expense. The onetime “successor” to Lou in the Kansas City outfield had already been sent away by the Royals.

At first base, Munson had eight putouts, no assists, and no errors, keeping alive his career 1.000 fielding percentage at first. His game there was otherwise uneventful; he seemed comfortable and didn’t screw anything up.

But it had been a miserable weekend. Now it was on to Chicago. But first there would be a side trip.

After the game, Thurman and his father-in-law, Tote, flew home
to Canton to celebrate Michael’s fourth birthday. If there was a perfect example of why the plane meant so much to Thurman, this was it. The ability to fly home to be with the family on a special occasion, and then still be able to be easily in Chicago the next night, made it all feel worthwhile.

Bobby Murcer had been traded back to the Yankees on June 26 in exchange for a minor leaguer and cash. He was in his third season with the Cubs following two with the Giants, and it had never felt right—not to Bobby, and not to Yankee fans.

So his return to the Yankees was a joyous moment, even if it signaled the end of his days as a regular, star player.

He was, from this point forward, though only thirty-three, an elder statesman on the team, the senior player in terms of having gone back with the organization the farthest, never mind the forced separation.

That Munson and Murcer should have a warm friendship was not surprising. They had a lot in common. They were both the local star athlete who married the prettiest girl in town. They had both been schoolboy shortstop. They were both anointed as “the promise of
tomorrow” after joining the Yankees. They were admired by fans. They should have been teammates forever.

Back on October 21, 1974, I was sitting in Gabe Paul’s office in the Parks Administration Building across the street from Shea. He had called me into his corner office, once occupied by Robert Moses during the days of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. With no advance warning to me, he called Pearl Davis, his secretary, and said, “Pearl, get me Bobby Murcer in Oklahoma.”

I sat on the couch facing Gabe’s desk and heard only his side of the conversation.

“Bobby? Good morning, Gabe Paul.

“What’s that? Well, remember what they say, Bobby: Only whores make money in bed.”

Gabe loved to use that line; he also loved calling people in the earlier time zones when he knew they would be sleeping.

“Well, I have some good news for you this morning, Bobby,” he said. “At least I think you’ll come to realize it’s good news … We’ve traded you to the San Francisco Giants.”

As I said, I couldn’t hear Bobby’s reaction, but it was easy to tell he was shocked. He had not that long before been told by Steinbrenner that he was the franchise player, the guy who could count on being there for life.

Gabe had been making calls like this since the 1940s. He covered the speaker part of the phone and whispered to me, “What’s his wife’s name?”

I answered, and he continued, “Bobby, I think you and Kay will love San Francisco. It’s a great city. Lots of great restaurants.”

I sensed there was silence and astonishment on Bobby’s end. Then he asked a question.

“What’s that?” said Gabe. “Oh, yes, Bobby Bonds.”

It was a last question; he wanted to know whom he had been traded for.

After Gabe hung up, I sighed to him, “He’s a good guy, I’ll miss him.”

And that of course was just another straight line for Gabe, who said, “Marty, I’ll take you to church any Sunday you want and introduce you to twenty-five of the nicest guys you’ll ever want to meet. But they’re not going to win us any pennants.”

Murcer and Munson had become friends from the day Munson joined the team. Now, with Murcer’s return at the end of June 1979, the M&M Boys were back. To me as a PR guy, it was a wonderful story. While not Mantle and Maris, they were top-shelf players. On the 1974
Yankee Yearbook
, I had an artist sketch the two of them, larger than life, forearms bulging, ready to take on the world.

Bobby and Thurman were friends the way ballplayers were friends—teammates first, friends second. They genuinely liked each other and there was no jealousy there. They ate together, shared taxis together, played catch together, played cards together. Did they pick up the phone during the winter to keep in touch? Not really. That wasn’t the way it was with players. You called if you had something important to discuss, like “Can you play in my celebrity golf tournament?” but you didn’t call to see how the kids’ flu was coming or to wish a happy birthday.

The wives did that sometimes. Diana and Kay would call each other, and then they might put the husbands on if they were standing nearby. It was just more of a wives’ thing to do.

Thurman was disappointed when Bobby was traded, but part of him knew that Bonds was a helluva player and that Steinbrenner was indeed serious about going all out to win. He didn’t criticize the trade, but he did call Bobby to say how badly he felt for him. But Munson wasn’t the type of guy who would miss his pal in the sense of having your best friend in fifth grade move to another state. They’d follow each other in the box scores and know how each was faring, and that counted as still being close.

And so Murcer was thrilled to be back with the Yankees but sad to have missed out on the pennants of 1976–77–78 and the glory that went with them. He was now one of the all-time favorite Yankees who had never played in the postseason. And here it was, 1979, and the team was struggling. Yes, it seemed like old times.

Murcer still had his apartment in Chicago, a small townhouse condo near Arlington Race Track, and after the Yankees left Milwaukee on Sunday, July 29, that would be his destination. He invited Munson and Lou Piniella to stay with him and Kay, rather than at the Continental Plaza on Michigan Avenue with the team. It would be three old pals together again, the Murcers playing host. It was a great break to the routine of hotels.