Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (44 page)

There is a bronze plaque behind home plate at Veterans Field in Chatham honoring Munson, who played for the Chatham A’s before turning pro. The Thurman Munson Batting Award is given each season to the Cape Cod Baseball League’s best hitter.

Jorge Posada, the best Yankee catcher who followed Thurman, was a fan of George Brett and Don Mattingly while growing up in Puerto Rico, but after signing with the Yankees, became fascinated with Munson, and would hear stories about him from Guidry, Gossage, Piniella, and Murcer.

“Guidry would talk about his ability to call a game, by being so good at remembering what everyone hit, or missed,” Posada says. “He became a role model for me, since he was Yankee catcher, and since I just came to love the way he played the game. I watched him a lot on tape or film—he was always in the middle of everything, whether getting the big hit or making the big play at the plate.”

In the weight room at Fenway Park (of all places), Posada saw a picture of Munson hanging on the wall with the inscription, “Look, I like hitting fourth and I like the good batting average. But, what I do every day behind the plate is a lot more important because it touches so many more people and so many aspects of the game. Thurman Munson, 8/25/75.” He took it and hung it in his locker at Yankee Stadium.

“I think about him whenever I pass that empty locker,” he says. “I really wish I’d known him. He must have been a helluva competitor.”

Yankee fans always were passionate about Thurman Munson making the Hall of Fame, and there was a flurry of thought after his death that he might even be named at once, as Roberto Clemente had been. Indeed, he was made eligible for the 1981 election, with the five-year waiting period waived. But he gathered only sixty-two votes that year, his high-water mark for the fifteen years that he remained on the ballot. In his last year of eligibility, 1995, he had only thirty votes. The sixty-two represented just 21 percent, with 75 percent needed for election.

Bill Madden, the national baseball columnist for New York’s
Daily News
and a student of the Hall of Fame elections, says, “I used to get periodic letters and e-mails from diehard Thurman supporters, pointing out the three straight .300-average/100-RBI seasons and the fact that how many catchers ever did that? But the bottom line always was only eleven seasons (seven of them All-Star) for Thurman as opposed to twenty-four by Fisk (eleven of them All-Star) and seventeen by Bench (fourteen of them All-Star)—his two contemporaries. There was just no comparison. He didn’t play long
enough, didn’t have nearly enough All-Star seasons, and his lifetime numbers, nice as they were, pale in comparison to the real Hall of Fame catchers—Berra, Dickey, Cochrane, Bench, Fisk, Hartnett. For Thurman to make the Hall, he would have needed the old Veterans Committee that put in Ray Schalk and Rick Ferrell. Against them, you could make the case he was a Hall of Famer.”

Others have noted that while Munson’s career was cut short, his injuries and reduced playing time at catcher had effectively signaled to voters that they had indeed seen the bulk of his career, certainly his big years, and there was no reason to assume that he would play eighteen or twenty seasons and amass big lifetime numbers.

Time
magazine, the week after Thurman died, quoted Munson himself as saying, “I want to play long enough for [Michael Munson] to understand and appreciate what I have accomplished. If I have three or four more good years, I might have the kind of statistics that could get me in the Hall of Fame.”

Bill James, the master expert of baseball stats, weighed in thus: “Players in most cases have to be evaluated by what they actually did, not by what they would have done or might have done … Munson’s situation is an injury, an extreme injury, but an injury. There are dozens of players who would have had Hall of Fame careers if they hadn’t been hurt. Hell, there are more of those than there are actual Hall of Famers.”

The Hall of Fame did exhibit a glove and a mask of Thurman’s. In the 1990s, Jeff Idelson, another former Yankee PR director and then a public relations official with the Hall of Fame, realized a need and persuaded Gene Michael to part with Munson’s glove and mask for display in the museum. There was also a temporary exhibit by a New York artist named Steve Linn of a faux Yankee locker made of wood with a carved glass image of Thurman, and bronze casts of his glove, spikes, bat, and jersey, which was on display until 1994 and then moved to storage.

Some fans maintain such loyalty that their stories stand out.

A fan named Terry Fudin started a Web site called
VoteThurmanIn.com
to try to spur Hall of Fame interest. “I am a computer programmer and in 2001 I decided to make a simple yet effective Web site which would try to get Thurman into the National Baseball Hall of Fame,” he says. “The site encourages people to send letters to members of the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee in support of Thurman’s inclusion.”

Frank Russo, a fan with a particular interest in “final resting places,” maintains a Web site called
thedeadballera.com
, at which he advocates for Munson being named to the Hall of Fame.

Dewey Wigod has sought to produce a film about the importance of Thurman Munson to the America of the 1970s. He works for a television program distributor, but hasn’t yet been able to see this project home. He never quits trying, though. I’ve been an adviser to him over the years and served as host when he shot a short segment for it at Yankee Stadium. Diana Munson is well aware of his efforts.

“The most important thing to me about Thurman Munson was that an ordinary man with above-average determination led the Yankees back to their former glory,” says Wigod. “He was a can-do, up-by-the-bootstraps guy—a quintessentially American story coming at what appeared to be a can’t-do time for the country and the world at large.”

In 1999,
Newsday
asked me to compose the inscription that might appear on a Munson plaque, not only because I had done his autobiography with him, but also because I had had a hand in writing the Hall of Fame plaques for twenty-one years.

So I gave them:

The year 2004 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thurman’s passing, and in addition to marking the occasion at Yankee Stadium on Old-Timers’ Day, a panel was held at the Yogi Berra Museum in New Jersey to recall his life. I was the moderator, with Diana, Gene Michael, and Bobby Murcer as panelists, and it was a terrifically “feel-good” gathering of two old teammates, one coauthor, one Yogi, and a hundred or so devoted fans. It was an honor for me to be asked to preside.

There would not be another in-season death of an active major league player until June 22, 2002, nearly twenty-three years later, when Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile was found dead in his hotel room in Chicago. (Pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin died in a spring training boating accident in 1993, and outfielder Mike Darr died in a spring training auto accident in 2002.)

On October 11, 2006, pitcher Cory Lidle died in a plane crash over Manhattan just days after the Yankees had been eliminated from postseason play. He had taken off from Teterboro, Thurman’s local airport of choice. Lidle was on the Yankees’ roster late in the season, but became a free agent as soon as the season ended. Still, he was treated as a Yankee in death, and of course the nature of his accident had everyone recalling that afternoon in August 1979.

Bobby Murcer died of a brain tumor on July 12, 2008. A memorial service was held in his hometown of Oklahoma City on August 6, attended by, among others, Diana Munson. It was the twenty-ninth anniversary of Thurman’s funeral, and of Bobby’s magical 5-RBI night.

In 2004, Diana and I both became officers of a now defunct sports auction house, along with Bobby Murcer and the nation’s premier collector, Barry Halper. When the National Sports Collectors Convention was held in Cleveland that year, she and I walked the floor together, looking at the many Munson items on sale, marveling at the love people still had for him. And the prices his autographed items brought were astounding.

One of the principals with the auction house met with Diana and encouraged her to consider putting some of her personal effects up for auction.

Rationalizing that she had lived with them long enough and perhaps it was time to let Munson fans take ownership, and perhaps tempted by the elevated prices that things were bringing at auction, she parted with some unique items. Sold at this and then later auctions were a single signed baseball ($13,650), Thurman’s Kent State college jersey ($8,041), his last catcher’s mitt ($51,518), his 1979 Yankee road jersey ($31,987), his pilot’s license ($7,938), the un-cashed check from Reggie Jackson for the July 1979 flight from Seattle to Orange County ($2,285), and perhaps most poignant, the bat used by Bobby Murcer to win the game on the night of Thurman’s funeral ($16,827). Bobby had given her his blessing to part with it.

At a 2008 auction to coincide with the All-Star Game in Yankee Stadium’s final season, Diana consigned additional items of importance to Hunt Auctions, all of which sold at remarkably high prices for someone not in the Hall of Fame.

These include $180,000 for his 1978 World Series replica trophy, $110,000 for his MVP award, $45,000 for his 1974 Gold Glove award, $40,000 for his Rookie of the Year Award, $75,000 for a 1979 home uniform, $32,000 for a game-worn cap, $75,000 for his 1976 World Series ring, $125,000 for the 1977 ring, $85,000 for the 1978 ring, $22,000 for his Mercedes, and $10,000 for the ball from his first major league hit.

Of course part of the reason for the high value of Munson items in the collectors’ market—not just these personal items—is that he died before there was a collectors’ market. He never participated in mass signings; never had an agent to produce limited editions. And he wasn’t especially forthcoming with autographs for fans, often using the trick of carrying something in each hand as he entered and exited ballparks, making it difficult to stop and sign.

He wasn’t the most accommodating signer under the best of circumstances. I know of only one copy of his autobiography that he signed, and it wasn’t mine. (I never thought to ask.)

In 2007, ESPN presented an eight-hour miniseries based on the book
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning
, by Jonathan Mahler. Its central focus was the 1977 Yankees, and actor Erik Jensen played Munson. Munson relatives, fans, old classmates, and others all thought it was a masterful performance and absolutely captured Thurman’s look, walk, and personality. I was a consulting producer for the project.