Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (6 page)

“His most memorable game for the A’s was definitely the ‘crutch’ game,” says Frobose. “He had sprained his ankle on that home run against Bobby Valentine’s team, and he was on crutches. It was an embarrassing injury; he had twisted it hitting home plate funny. Now we’re tied in the ninth inning, one man on, and Skip sends Thurman up to pinch-hit. He goes to the plate with his crutches, tosses them aside, hits a game-winning single, hobbles to first base on the crutches, and that was all that was needed.”

Chatham won the championship and a lot of big-league scouts watched Thurman play there. One of them was Harry Hesse of the Yankees.

Hesse, like Al Cuccinello, was a New York area scout. The two likable ol’ baseball guys would seldom produce a prospect because the Northeast just wasn’t turning out many good ballplayers anymore. (Cuccinello had played for the 1935 New York Giants with Mel Ott and Bill Terry.) So despite what might have seemed like “pressure” on Hesse and “Cooch” to occasionally come up with some names, they were both cautious and would rather not recommend failures
than throw out names just to possibly look good one day if they got lucky.

The Yankees trusted them.

“I like this catcher at Chatham, the one from Kent State,” Hesse told Johnny Johnson, the Yankees farm director and later president of the minor leagues. “You might want to make sure we watch him during his senior year. He could go high in the draft.”

In his junior year, 1968, the team jumped to 16-9, and Thurman hit .413 with 3 homers and 30 RBIs. He set school records with 38 hits, 10 doubles, and 6 triples, and was named first-team All-American by the American Baseball Coaches Association and first-team All-District IV. He was also all-region. He was not the team captain (that was Ron Macks—a seniority thing for Moose). He would be the only player in school history to have his number (15) retired. His lifetime college average was .390.

“Being named All-American first-team catcher was, if you think about it, maybe a bigger honor than being named Rookie of the Year or MVP in the American League,” Thurman would later say. “There are so many more players you are competing against, especially for the rookie award. I mean, think of how many college catchers there are every year. And I was first team!”

He was All-MAC-conference in both 1967 and 1968, joined in the latter year by his battery mate, Steve Stone, who also lettered twice and went on to have a sterling career in the major leagues.

Today the team plays nearly sixty games a year. It switched to metal bats in 1974, so many of Thurman’s marks are small by school standards, but at the time he held a number of school records for a season and a career, and was named to the Kent State Varsity “K” Alumni Association’s Hall of Fame in 1979.

Major league scouts were a fixture at Kent State games by Thurman’s junior year. The Yankees assigned Gene Woodling, who lived in nearby Medina, to watch him. Woodling had been one of Casey
Stengel’s platoon outfielders in the late 1940s and early ’50s, alternating with Hank Bauer in right. He was one of the twelve players who were part of the five consecutive world championship teams of 1949-53, Stengel’s first five seasons. Woodling was a practical man, one of the few who didn’t spend his life living off his Yankee fame. He gave his all wherever he played and was happily employed as a Yankee scout and spring training instructor, but was a guy you could rely on, like Hesse, for an honest assessment.

Moose Paskert would point him out to Munson and Stone when he was at their games.

“Woodling really used to frustrate me,” Thurman said. “I’m a talkative guy. I would have enjoyed having a conversation with him, but I never could get one going. When the day finally came where he introduced himself, I acted as if I hadn’t been aware of his presence all along.”

The Cleveland Indians, the “hometown team,” also scouted Thurman, but their scouting report said he couldn’t run well, and although he was a catcher, the team never showed much interest. They had a promising catcher coming along named Ray Fosse.

When the 1968 season ended, Thurman returned to Cape Cod, departing on June 6, the day of the baseball draft, the day before his twenty-first birthday. “There was no reason not to go,” he said. “Even if I was drafted I could play there all summer and sign later. We’d just watch and see what happened.”

Thurman knew he would be a high draft pick, but of course had no idea who would get to select him. After all, he was rated the number one catcher in the nation. Any suspense was over which team more than when picked. He was pretty calm about the whole process.

The Chatham team of the summer of 1968 was going to be one of the great Cape Cod League teams ever. In addition to Munson, they had future major leaguers in John Curtis, a left-handed starting
pitcher, Bobby Valentine at short, Rich McKinney at third, and Stone on the mound. Munson, Curtis, Valentine, and McKinney would all get drafted high and leave the team. Stone got mononucleosis and hepatitis and spent the summer in bed. So much for the great Chatham team of ’68.

Munson was there only a few hours when his sister Darla called him. She had received a call from Lee MacPhail asking if she could have Thurman call him. She told Thurman that he’d been selected fourth in the nation.

“I reached him and told him to call the Yankees right away,” she said. “I was very excited. I was a big Yankees fan!”

Woodling’s final scouting report was reduced to two words: “Get him!”

Bad as the 1967 Yankees had been, leave it to their crosstown rivals, the Mets, to have been even worse. The Mets had the first pick in the draft and took infielder Tim Foli.

The Oakland A’s had the second pick. Leaving Kansas City for Oakland didn’t change their position, and with the first pick ever made by Oakland, the team took pitcher Pete Broberg. They never signed him, though; he eventually signed with the Washington Senators.

Third pick went to the Houston Astros, and they selected a catcher named Marty Cott over Munson. Cott was a high school kid out of Buffalo, where winters were long and baseball seasons were short. He never made it to the majors.

Bobby Valentine, Thurman’s Cape Cod teammate, was picked fifth, right after Thurman.

“We tried out Cott in Buffalo with Pat Gillick pitching to him,” recalls Tal Smith, then the Houston farm director, later the Yankees’ general manager, and one of the most respected baseball executives of modern times. “Our reports were good and he put on an awesome display of power. I guess it wasn’t the best draft pick we ever
made. We’d gotten John Mayberry the year before and J. R. Richard the year after. But picking Cott over Munson, well, we sure paid a price for that.”

“I remember that Cott was a bust, and our mistake was more in signing him than in drafting him,” says Gillick, who, like Smith, also went on to become one of the best general managers in baseball. “That was forty years ago. My thinking has really come full circle since then. Back then I looked at a player’s physical attributes much more than his mental. Today I know it’s about the mental attitude and about his heart. Munson had that. He absolutely overachieved on the abilities his body might have given him because he had that heart of a winner.”

And so Johnny Johnson, at a ballroom microphone in New York’s Americana Hotel, announced, “The Yankees take catcher Thurman Munson, Kent State University, twenty-one years old tomorrow.” Johnson told the press, “He was our first choice all the way.”

Not too long after Darla’s call, MacPhail, the Yankees’ gentlemanly general manager, was on the phone with Munson, and it was obvious that there was not going to be a Cape Cod League season for Thurman. He was going to sign with the Yanks. Quickly.

Without unpacking, he turned around and drove back to Canton.

The next day, June 7, Thurman’s birthday, MacPhail and Gene Woodling were in the Munson home on Twenty-second Avenue NE for the formality of signing him to a pro contract. MacPhail made the trip because he wanted to emphasize the importance of Thurman to the organization; to show that even the general manager of the team cared about signing their number one pick in person. He also wanted to explain the value of leaving college after his junior year to get his career going, with the Yankees pledging to finance his
remaining education if he wanted. It wasn’t necessary to push the point; Thurman was ready to sign.

While everyone in the house was buzzing with excitement over this great day, Darrell Munson was unmoved. Said MacPhail, “It was the strangest thing. There was his father, on what should have been a joyous day, lying on the couch in the living room. He barely said hello and didn’t join us at all for the signing. At one point he just hollered into us, ‘He ain’t too good on pop fouls, you know.’ It was really a bizarre moment. I think he might have even been in his underwear.”

Duane accepts the story except for the underwear part. “That part doesn’t sound like Dad,” he says, and Darla agrees.

Before beginning his pro career, Thurman was sent to veteran coach Cloyd Boyer, the brother of big-league all-stars Ken and Clete. Cloyd was a solid baseball man who was managing the Yankee farm team in Binghamton, New York. Usually he served as roving minor league pitching coach, but this summer he had a managerial assignment. Johnny Johnson asked “C.B.” to work Munson out at Binghamton and recommend what level he should start out in the minor league system.

“A week later Johnny called me and asked where I thought he ought to be playing,” said Boyer. “I said, ‘Yankee Stadium.’ He thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t.”

The Yanks decided to keep him at Binghamton, where the Triplets belonged to the Eastern League. These were the final weeks of a franchise that dated back to 1923. Thurman thought the clubhouse, with holes in the floor, had to be the worst in all of baseball. Whereas the number four national pick in college football would be dressing in style in an NFL clubhouse, in baseball the minor
leagues were the starting point for pretty much everyone. (Five-time all-pro Russ Washington out of Missouri, who played fifteen years for San Diego, was Thurman’s number four counterpart in the NFL draft that year.)

What Thurman did have in Binghamton was Cloyd Boyer as manager.

Boyer told Munson, “You’re probably going to be in the big leagues next year.”

“I pitched the first game he caught,” says Mickey Scott, who wound up with a brief career for Baltimore, Montreal, and California. “He arrived in a very impressive new Corvette, and we called him ‘Stump’ that year. I remember pitching a four-hit shutout in Elmira, New York, the day he made his debut. He was the top draft pick, so everyone noticed him.”

The Corvette, purchased with a portion of his $70,000 bonus money, was a harbinger of a love for exciting and expensive new toys that would one day, it could be argued, lead to his decisions to purchase not just an airplane, but then bigger and faster ones.

Thurman wasn’t at Binghamton long when the matter of the Army and the draft came up, and the Yanks, using what they hoped were special connections, dispatched Thurman to Fort Lauderdale, where an Army Reserve unit was based right next to Fort Lauderdale Stadium, their spring training home. Reserve duty would require occasional weekend absences plus a week or two of active duty during the season, but it loomed as a far more inviting alternative than being called up and sent to Vietnam.

The Yankees did their best to court recruitment officers to help their players, but not always with success. A notable failure was certainly Bobby Murcer. They tried Reserve duty but instead lost Bobby to military service for the 1967 and 1968 seasons, a genuine setback to his career and to Yankee fortunes.

In Munson’s case, an extra bone spur in his right ankle, something
he hadn’t even been aware of, led to his being declared unfit for service, and back he went to Binghamton. Ironically, the absence cost him a few games, and he would wind up ten plate appearances short of qualifying for the batting championship. At .301, he was actually the Eastern League’s only .300 hitter that year—a season known to baseball fans as “the year of the pitcher.” Carl Yastrzemski, also at .301, had been the only
American
Leaguer to hit .300 that year.

The league featured Larry Bowa on his way up the ladder to the big leagues, and Jim Palmer, the Orioles star, working his arm back into shape on what would later be known as a rehab assignment. Al Downing, a Yankee star, also “rehabbed,” pitching to Munson while wearing a Triplets uniform.

In August, the Yankees brought the Triplets down to Yankee Stadium to play that regular-season game against Waterbury in Yankee Stadium. For Munson, it would not only be his first visit to the stadium, it would also be his first visit to New York City. Fran Healy, a future Yankee teammate, was the catcher for Waterbury.

“Well, we didn’t really see New York City at all,” Munson said later. “We bused it to Yankee Stadium and then bused it right out after the game.”

The game itself was played in a nearly empty stadium, with MacPhail and Ralph Houk watching from high above, looking at their future first-string catcher. The only other player Thurman spoke to that day, apart from Mantle, was Gene “Stick” Michael, his fellow Kent State alum.

That same month, Diana came up to Binghamton from Canton for a weekend visit, accompanied by her mother. Thurman and Diana decided to get engaged that weekend. Again, the Army was looming over their lives. Although the Reserve unit had declared
him unfit, the possibility of being drafted still loomed, which would require another physical, and no guarantees with it.

Since Thurm and Diane had been talking about marriage since they were about thirteen, this inevitable date was set for September 21, right after the Eastern League season ended. A minor league teammate, first baseman Tim O’Connell, attended the Canton ceremony, held at St. Paul’s Parish, with the Reverend J. Robert Cole-man presiding. Darla and her husband were there; their daughter was in the wedding party. Neither Duane nor Janice, by now scattered, attended. Thurman’s parents were at his side.

The couple would live upstairs in the Dominicks’ home on Twenty-fifth Street when they returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii.