Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (8 page)

“Thurm wanted so much to be included in the little ‘side trips’ that I would arrange on off days,” recalls Fritz Peterson. “The routine was ‘okay Tugs,’ or ‘okay, Beer Can’ (nicknames I’d given him), ‘you just wait out in the hallway [of the hotel] and we’ll pick you up when we get up and you can come along,’ when we would go to a lake or motorbiking, or whatever. He was great to have along.

“Once we went riding motorized trail bikes—Stottlemyre, Bahnsen, Munson, and me. All of a sudden he made a sharp curve and we all followed. He was going too fast. He missed the curve, went straight, and disappeared. He had driven right off the road into a deep ravine. The bike turned over twice, the headlights and tail-lights were smashed, and Thurman was cut and bruised all over. He had so much pride in not getting hurt that when we reached him and saw that he was alive, he just said, ‘Let’s go.’”

Munson kept lifting his average day by day until, on September 17, he went two for five against the Red Sox and reached the .300 mark. He never looked back and finished at .302 for the season, tops on the team. After the 1-for-30 start, he hit .322. After July 21, he hit .370. And he led all the league’s catchers with 80 assists, half of them nailing would-be base stealers.

The line drives kept coming off his bat, and the team was playing very well. The Yankees had moved into second place on August 1—rarefied air for this team—and never relinquished it. The Orioles were so good that their ultimate margin was fourteen and a half games over New York, but the Yanks won ninety-three games, certainly their best season since 1964, with Lindy McDaniel recording 29 saves and Peterson winning 20. Although it was embarrassing to those who remembered the Yankees winning pennants every year, the team celebrated the clinching of second place with a modest champagne celebration in the clubhouse.

“I know old Yankee purists must have been thinking that celebrating second place was really bush,” said Munson, “but we enjoyed it.”

The Baseball Writers’ Association named him first on twenty-three of twenty-four ballots as he easily won the Rookie of the Year Award. The only strange thing about it was that The Sporting News Rookie of the Year Award, voted on by players, somehow went to Cleveland outfielder Roy Foster, who hit 23 homers to Munson’s 6. (Foster would hit 45 in a three-season career.)

Players always like to think they are the best judges of other players, and while it is hard to dispute that intellectually, they have occasionally cast some really dumb votes when given the opportunity. Most notably, they awarded a Gold Glove for fielding prowess to Rafael Palmeiro in 1999 when he only played twenty-eight games at first base all season.

Thurman was the first catcher to win Rookie of the Year honors in the American League since the award was created in 1947, and the sixth Yankee to win the honor in that time. The only other catcher to win the award was Johnny Bench of the Reds, who had won it in the National League two years earlier. Here, then, you had the beginnings of a decade in which Munson and Bench would be the two premier catchers in their respective leagues, perennial all-stars, World Series rivals, and admirers of each other.

Bench would ultimately come to be thought of as perhaps the greatest catcher in the game’s history. Prior to him, there had been no clear-cut winner. The debate would include Gabby Hartnett, Mickey Cochrane, Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, and Roy Campanella, with a nod to Josh Gibson of the Negro Leagues. Although Bench’s lifetime batting average would be only .267, he had a great highlight reel and revolutionized defensive play at the position. Thurman was honored to be compared to him.

Oh yes, but then there was Carlton Fisk.

Fisk was the anti-Munson. If Affirmed needed Alydar, if Ali needed Frazier, and if Evert needed Navratilova, Munson and Fisk needed each other.

Fisk first tasted the big leagues on September 18, 1969, about a month after Thurman did. It was enough to eventually make him a four-decade player.

He played a little bit in 1971, and then won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1972, making him the
second
AL catcher to nab the honor.

In many ways, he was everything Munson was not—tall, handsome, graceful, maybe even a little delicate in his movements and body language. The players would sometimes tease him about the latter as only players can. His famous “coaxing” of his walk-off homer in the 1975 World Series was an example of what opposing players saw as the delicate movements.

People think there was always a Yankee-Red Sox rivalry, going
back to 1903, when the Highlanders (the original Yankees) were formed, and certainly heightened by the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, and later by Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams being opposing players.

In fact, there really wasn’t much of a rivalry at all after the Sox fell onto hard times after the Ruth sale. A rivalry can only be strong when both teams are strong. And for a long, long time, leading to the Munson-Fisk years, tickets to Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium for Yankee-Red Sox games were not that hard to get.

The Red Sox “Impossible Dream” pennant of 1967 turned a moribund team into a good one, something that, remarkably, is still going on. Not since Ruth helped the Yankees win the 1921 pennant—their first—has a single season so turned around the fortunes of a franchise.

But the Yankees didn’t catch up right away. While the Red Sox remained strong after 1967, the Yankees were still down, save for the surprising 1970 finish. It wasn’t until the mid-seventies that both teams peaked, and Munson and Fisk seemed to be the symbols of both.

Fisk was the New England lumberjack, Munson the Ohio blue-collar worker who led their teams to the top of the American League East.

Munson genuinely hated Fisk. And it was pretty much mutual.

“I know they were aware of each other’s presence,” said Bill Lee, the Red Sox pitcher. “Munson was always checking Fisk’s stats, and Carlton would go nuts any time a reporter mentioned Munson’s name.”

It was partly due to his competitive nature, and of course it was fueled by the rising rivalry between the two glamour franchises, but Munson was also jealous and resentful of the attention Fisk was getting, and the All-Star elections he was winning.

“It’s Curt Gowdy on the Game of the Week always playing him
up,” said Munson. “He used to be the Red Sox announcer, he loves them, and now he’s on the national games and he’s always talking about Fisk this and Fisk that. And you know what? Fisk is always getting hurt, and I’m always playing through injuries, and he’s getting credit for things he might do if he was healthy. Gowdy has this thing for him.”

True or not, it was what Munson believed. (Gowdy had earlier been a Yankees announcer.) Thurman thought you played hurt. “Whenever someone was complaining about anything, Thurman would look at him and say, ‘So, retire!’” says Brian Doyle, later a teammate. “It was a wake-up call to remember how lucky we all were to be playing big-league baseball.”

And the Fisk attention on NBC did tend to reflect itself in the annual All-Star Game fan voting, which had begun in 1969 by edict of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

Players always have an arm’s-length regard for announcers anyway. They don’t hear the broadcasts unless they are in the clubhouse for a bathroom break or a change of jersey. Much of what they know about announcers is fueled by secondhand interpretations. One of my biggest problems when I was doing the Yankees’ PR was trying to tame what the players’ wives were telling their husbands that the announcers said about them. They often got it wrong, or misunderstood the context, and it invariably caused problems.

Munson’s point about Fisk’s injuries, though, was not off the mark. From 1972 through 1976, Fisk caught 516 games and was on the disabled list four times. In the same span, Thurman caught 728 games and was never on the disabled list. In fact, Munson would play his entire career without ever going on the DL.

Those were the years in which Munson formed his opinion about the brittle Fisk.

Of course, Fisk turned out to be one durable son of a gun. He would go on to be a four-decade player who would catch 2,226
games, including twenty-five games when he was forty-five years old. He played more games at the position than any man in history.

Munson would have come around and saluted his rival. He had a respect for durability because it was how he played the game, and he would have come around on Fisk, as he eventually came around on Reggie Jackson when they were teammates.

But for those early years of the rivalry, it was real and it was bitter. The two would take some shots at each other in the papers (when Thurman was choosing to talk to the press). And Munson told me that he’d speak to Fisk about things he didn’t like seeing when Fisk came to bat. He’d call him by his last name.

“Listen, Fisk, I saw what you said in the paper this morning and it’s bullshit,” he might say as Carlton settled in at bat. Stuff like that.

Of course, his Yankee teammates loved to tease him about Fisk. Gene Michael, who roomed with Thurman for five years, used to tear out good Fisk stories or handsome pictures from magazines about Carlton and put them in Thurman’s locker just to get his reaction when he arrived in the clubhouse. Michael says he’s sure that Thurman never knew who was putting them there.

Off their big 1970 finish, with Houk getting Manager of the Year and Munson being so lauded, there were grand expectations for 1971. The front office, however, made no major additions, and the Orioles were still quite formidable, having polished off the Reds in the World Series. Nineteen seventy-one would be the only season during the Yankees’ rebuilding in which not a single major new face joined the roster, save for aging but reliable Felipe Alou and a couple of midseason Rons—Blomberg and Swoboda.

Blomberg had been the Yankees’—and the nation’s—number one draft pick in 1967, the year before Thurman. He was a remarkably gifted high school athlete with basketball scholarship offers as well. His minor league development was notable for the decision to have him hit only against right-handers. True to his high school reputation, he positively creamed fastballs delivered by right-handers. It baffled fans why he wouldn’t bat against lefties in the minors, but his Syracuse manager, Frank Verdi, told the Yankees’ front office, “When I play him against a lefty, it screws him up against righties for a week!”

He arrived in midseason to much ballyhoo and became an immediate fan favorite for his zany and sometimes nonsensical interviews, his “Li’l Abner” folksy charm, and his embrace of his religion (he was Jewish) without apologies. Fans waited outside the stadium to give him bagels. He spoke of his parents’ wanting him to be “a doctor and a lawyer,” and he was a regular at the Stage Deli. His batting practice sessions were not to be missed. On at least one occasion, he hit the facade in upper right field, famous as the place where Mantle had twice come close to hitting the only fair balls out of Yankee Stadium.

Blomberg didn’t drink and liked to go to dinner with sportswriters. If the social occasion demanded it, he would order a vodka gimlet but never take a sip. (I used to tell him to order tap water with an olive in a martini glass.)

Munson was twenty-four when Blomberg, twenty-three, came up. Already behaving like a poised veteran, he became something of a mentor to Blomberg. Not much of a drinker himself (he was, after all, always in training while in high school and college), Munson was amused by Ron’s innocence and liked his honesty. The two roomed together on occasion. Munson would get on Blomberg if he didn’t think he was taking winning seriously enough, or if he detected that Bloomie was taking the easy way out of conditioning. There was a sense of mentoring going on that would foretell the time when Thurman would become team captain.

The two also had a common friend, a charismatic record company executive named Nat Tarnopol.

Nat was a huge fan, loving his association with the players, and able to get access to them in part by providing an unlimited supply of records and eight-tracks (players always loved free stuff) and by holding a coveted season box next to the Yankee dugout, which got him up close and personal in a hurry.

Nat, who was raised in a Detroit orphanage, was a figure of enormous charm: handsome, gregarious, generous, and a deal maker
with a trophy wife. (Oddly, the couple had been photographed by Diane Arbus, who specialized in disturbing images, often freakish in nature, in her captivating and later famous black-and-white photography. Nat and June had posed for her in their expansive backyard, looking like an ordinary couple, but perhaps demonstrating for Arbus the loneliness of suburban wealth.)

Nat’s fondness for Blomberg had a lot to do with Ron being Jewish, like Nat. He made a big thing out of it. He wasn’t limited to the religious bond—he formed close friendships with Oakland manager Dick Williams, Yankee infielder Jerry Kenney, and others. His label, Brunswick, mostly recorded black rhythm-and-blues artists (the Chi-Lites and Tyrone Davis being his biggest), and he had a lot of friends in the black community.

He was seen by the Yankee front office as a bit of a meddler, but Gabe Paul, who would join the team in 1973, also foresaw the value of his connections, which would in fact one day bear fruit. Nat spoke brashly of one day buying the team. He organized the batboys to raise their pay in accordance with New York state labor laws. (He hired one batboy, known as “Hamhock,” as a Brunswick employee.)