Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (5 page)

Diane became a regular presence at Thurman’s side, attending all his games, making her home open to him, where he felt very comfortable in the close family setting the Dominicks provided.

Thurman wrote poems to her. He was discovering his romantic side.

“He was never around any other girls,” said Don Eddins. “It was always sports and Diane. He was the type of student who had enough smarts but used only just enough to get by. He saved his energy for the ball fields—and for Diane.”

A few of their classmates recall another boy here, another girl there, whom they had dated, but basically, they were each other’s only real boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Diane, her parents, my parents, my baseball coach, and I all agreed that college was the right move for me,” said Thurman. “But I knew I could only go if I could get a scholarship, because there was no way my parents could afford it.

“I got about eighty letters from colleges expressing an interest in me for their football programs, including Kansas, Ohio State, Syracuse, and Michigan. But it was baseball that I wanted, and schools just aren’t that interested in awarding baseball scholarships. I wound up with exactly three offers.

“Arizona State offered me one contingent on making the team. Ohio University offered me a half-scholarship contingent on making the starting team. I had no doubts I could accomplish that, but it was Kent State that offered me a full scholarship, no strings attached, and that was where I decided to go.”

And so Thurman would become the first member of his family to go to college. His siblings had all left home as soon as they could, Janice and Darla just moving out, and Duane joining the Air Force. (He later went to college on the GI Bill.)

The fact that Diane would be close by—Kent is just thirty-four miles from Canton—was certainly a plus.

“We had the Ohio All-Star Game in our senior year of high school,” recalls Steve Stone, the five-foot-nine pitcher who would go on to win a Cy Young Award with the Orioles. Stone lived in Lyndhurst. “It was actually three games. The east squad was loaded—Munson, Larry Hisle, Gene Tenace—a lot of really good players. For a lot of us, it was our first exposure to Munson, and man, was he abrasive. Nobody liked him. In fact, a kid named Jimmy Redmond beat him out to play shortstop in the first game, and we were all happy about it because no one could stand him. Then the third game ends and he comes over to me and says, ‘I’ll see you in September! I’m going to Kent State with you. I’m gonna be your catcher.’

“I said, ‘My catcher? I thought you were a shortstop.’

“He answered, ‘Hell no, I just play short in high school. I’m really a catcher. You and I are gonna be battery mates.’

“You could have knocked me over. I hated him, but we wound up being roommates on road trips and I loved the guy.”

Kent State University, founded in 1910, has a baseball program that dates back to 1915. Through the 2006 season, ninety-nine of its players have either been drafted or gone on to play pro baseball, despite the team’s short season, a fact of life for Northeastern colleges. It is not a collegiate baseball powerhouse. While the Sunbelt schools played schedules reaching seventy or more games, Kent State, a member of the Mid-American “MAC” conference, played more like twenty to twenty-five games a year during Thurman’s time there. It was a schedule that meant a player had to be hot to be touted; there was no room for prolonged slumps, or scouts wouldn’t have much to go by.

Bob Nieman (1951-62), Rich Rollins (1961-70), and Gene Michael (1966-75) were the first major leaguers who came from Kent State. Drew Carey, Chrissie Hynde, Michael Keaton, Arsenio Hall, Jack Lambert, and Lou Holtz also went to Kent State, with Holtz, like Munson, a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity.

Michael, who would become a close friend, teammate, roommate,
and somewhat of a mentor to Thurman on the Yankees, played for the Golden Flashes and lettered in baseball in 1958 before going on to a pro career that also included managerial stops with the Yankees and Cubs. As general manager and then as a superscout, he is widely considered to be the man most responsible for the turnaround in the fortunes of the Yankees by the mid-1990s, when the team became a perennial contender and stopped trading prospects for quick-fix players. He was one of the most highly regarded baseball minds in the country. The baseball field at Kent State would be named for him until replaced by the current Schoonover Field in 2005.

Kent State became well known nationally during Thurman’s rookie season with the Yankees when National Guardsmen killed four student demonstrators during the height of Vietnam war protests going on across the country. It was in many ways the lowest point of the antiwar campus protests: Americans firing on Americans.

Although his sympathies were surely “antihippie,” Thurman was not drawn into the nation’s great debate over Vietnam. He and his friends—teammates mostly—concentrated on getting into the Army Reserve as a way of avoiding the draft. None of his high school friends can recall anyone from Lehman being killed in Vietnam, and as the Class of 1965, they were out of school before the war issue became divisive. College, then, provided an escape from the draft during the late 1960s.

Just as there were few teams known as the Polar Bears—his high school team’s nickname—at Kent State he played for the Golden Flashes, a unique college nickname. His sophomore and junior years, when he became a full-time catcher, saw him mature into a pro prospect.

Thurman lived in a dorm for all of his Kent State years, although he was a member of a fraternity. He started out as a business major but switched to health ed, with an eye toward teaching.

“Moose Paskert, our coach, was ‘old school,’” says Steve Stone. “He was a believer in seniority. If you were there longer, you earned the captaincy. If you were a senior, you pitched the big MAC tournament games instead of the sophomores. He had his rules. He was big and gruff. And we’d get on him.

“He used to say to us, ‘Boys, I can go anywhere in the country and within five minutes, someone will come by and say, “How ya doin’, Moose?”’ So we go to Durham, North Carolina, to play Duke on this one trip, and the umpire comes to the dugout, leans in, and says, ‘How ya’ doin’, Bruce?’ Ha! He called him Bruce. So on the bus trip home, Thurman and I sat in the back and every twenty or thirty minutes, one of us would holler to the front of the bus, ‘How you doin’, Bruce?’

“We never had a budget to take a Southern trip like other schools. Lynchburg, Virginia, was our idea of a Southern trip. It would be thirty-three degrees in Canton, then we’d bus it to Lynchburg, we’d get off the bus, and it would be thirty-two.

“One time we stayed in a place that wasn’t quite a motel. It had a gym on the third floor, a pool on the second floor, the boiler room on the first floor, and we stayed below that. The place was crawling with giant cockroaches. Moose probably got a deal and we stayed for free. Thurman kept a bat in his bed and kept swinging at the cockroaches, trying to kill them all as they crawled from the pipes. It was ugly. Finally Moose comes in and says, ‘All right, cut the crap. Anyone who wants to can go sleep in the bus for all I care.’

“Well, guess what? We all got out of bed and started to head for the bus. Moose blocked the door and made us go back to our bunks.”

On the field, Thurman was blossoming.

“Thurman already carried himself like a star,” says Stone. “He had no doubt that he was going to be a major league star. None. Amazing self-confidence. He was so gifted; he had this phenomenal ability, a heart the size of Long Island, and all of it wrapped in the wrong
body. He shouldn’t have been squatty; he should have been six-three with the grace of an antelope, not five-eleven and 195. But you know what? He was the second-fastest runner on our team, despite that body he was trapped inside of. He could really run.

“I’ll tell you this, you could not shake that confidence. He and I used to play pool all the time. I was better than he was. We played maybe twenty-five times. I beat him every single time. And yet, after every game, he swore that he’d beat me next time, and he meant it. He never lost that edge. And he was never a good loser.

“When he played in the Eastern League in 1968, he was hitting something like .360 through the first few months, and that has always been a real pitcher’s league. It was amazing. I caught up with him one day and said, ‘You’re really doing well,’ and he said, ‘Wait until you see my stats at the end of the season.’ Well, he didn’t maintain it, but he led the league and he really believed the .360 was going to go up.”

Playing freshman baseball in 1966, Thurman got into only three of the team’s eleven games, the season shortened by terrible weather. He fared much better with playing time back in the Canton City Baseball League during that summer. He came to understand why the game’s real prospects liked to play ball in the South, like Florida, Texas, Arizona, or Southern California.

In his sophomore baseball season, 1967, his first on varsity, the Golden Flashes were only 11-12, but Thurman hit .367 with 4 doubles, 5 triples, 3 homers, 16 RBIs, and 23 runs scored in his twenty-three games. He was named third team, all-district, and all-region.

“Oh, he was some catcher,” recalls Stone. “He could throw you out from any point where he caught the ball, like a quarterback hurrying a pass. If he caught the pitch knee high and away, he could throw a guy out from there. Especially with a curveball pitcher like I was, you need to have confidence that your catcher is going to be able to catch the ones in the dirt. I had that total confidence in him.

“We had a trick play too, and with no advance scouting in the
league, we pulled this off eight times in one year. It involved wasting two pitches, putting me in a 2-0 hole, but we’d get an out out of it. After the first one, a fastball away, the third baseman would back up and I’d work from a full windup. The runner would take a bigger lead and I’d throw the pitch high and tight, backing a right-handed hitter off the plate. Munson would fire to third and get the runner. Eight straight games we pulled this off. The scouts took notice of his arm with this play, that’s for sure.”

In the summer of 1967, he returned to the Canton City League and was working part-time as a house painter when someone asked if he’d like to play in the Cape Cod League, a rather fast league for college players. The Chatham A’s needed a quick replacement for their injured catcher. Thurman went.

In his first game, he tugged on his mask (a sign) and fired to first baseman Glen Lautzenhiser for a neat pickoff. He was primed and ready.

This was a league of strong competition. He played for Joe “Skip” Lewis, who later managed in the Detroit Tigers organization, and also earned seventy-five dollars a week working for the Chatham parks department. (“I slept on the lawn while other guys cut it,” Thurman told Bobby Valentine, who was playing for Yarmouth.) His baseball summer was a lot better than his parks department summer. “Oh, he got fired three or four times from that job,” laughs Ed Baird, a Chatham pitcher. “The supervisor, a guy named Slippery Slade, had a glass eye. Thurman would always talk to him on the side he couldn’t see, and then when he’d turn around, Thurman would circle around him so he’d stay on the glass side. Drove him nuts.”

He wound up winning the league’s MVP award with a .420 average, sixty-five points higher than the runner-up, Glenn Adams, who later played for the Twins.

“I was in center field for Yarmouth the first time I ever faced him,” says Valentine. “They had a player from UConn named George
Greer (later the longtime Wake Forest baseball coach), and in the first inning, I ran down a long drive by Greer over my head and made a nice catch. When I came to bat, Thurman was catching. He was very talkative back there; I wasn’t used to that. He said, ‘That was a pretty good catch, kid,’ and I thanked him. Then he said, ‘When I come up next inning, you should stand by the fence, because I’m going to hit one over your head.’

“Well, I didn’t stand by the fence, but he was the cleanup hitter and I was playing him deep. And sure enough, he not only hit one over my head, but it went over the fence for a home run. And I remember writing a letter home telling my family about this guy with a strange name and how he called that shot like Babe Ruth.”

He wasn’t chatty with everyone though. Steve Greenberg, the son of Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg and later himself the deputy commissioner of baseball, was an opponent that summer between semesters at Yale.

“He was a man among boys when it came to hitting,” Greenberg recalls, “and the flat-out best hitter I ever saw. But he was a mean cuss. I must have batted against Chatham twenty times that summer, and I couldn’t get Munson to even acknowledge me, let alone have a conversation with me. I’d say hello, and Thurman would just spit tobacco juice, and put down the signs. He didn’t even grunt. He was one great but grumpy hitter.”

John Frobose, who pitched against Thurman in the MAC conference for Bowling Green, was a teammate on the A’s and remained a friend through adulthood.

“A bunch of us called him ‘Nate’ for some reason, I never knew why,” says Frobose. “But he was such a kick to have around. One day we were driving in my Chevy convertible to a road game in Cape Cod. We approach this overpass, and Thurman throws a ball over the overpass from about a hundred feet back. Steve Saradnik and Ed Baird were in the car too. One of them says, ‘Speed up! Let’s try to
catch it on the other end!’ And we race through the underpass and damned if Nate doesn’t catch the ball on the other side! You couldn’t do that again in a hundred years.”

His cocky confidence in evidence, he would take infield practice with the A’s wearing his catcher’s mitt at shortstop, according to Billy Bor, who joined the team late and lived with Thurman in the final weeks.

And he could indeed be a magician with a baseball. Or baseballs! Later on with the Yankees, warming up before the game, he could throw two balls with one motion, both with accuracy. Roy White remembers himself and Graig Nettles being on the receiving end. “We’d be about five feet apart; it’s really not that difficult,” says Nettles. “But his accuracy was the thing; it was amazing. And of course, you needed hands big enough to hold two baseballs firmly.”