by Marty Appel
Murcer had been scouted and signed by Tom Greenwade, just as Mantle had. He came from Oklahoma, just like Mantle. He was an infielder who was moved to the outfield, just like Mantle. So the Yankees gave him Mantle’s locker and Bobby Richardson’s uniform number 1, and built him up to be the successor to Ruth-Gehrig-DiMaggio-Mantle.
Bobby wasn’t going to be a Hall of Famer and wouldn’t live up to that sort of buildup, but such pressure never bothered him. He was a quality player who lost two years to the service that could have been spent sharpening his tools. Still just twenty-three after rejoining the team (he’d been with them briefly in both ’65 and ’66, time enough to be a teammate to Mantle and Maris), he hit 49 homers in 1969–70. He became an immediate fan favorite to a fan base desperate to have someone to cheer. And the fans were good with him: They didn’t boo him for not being Mantle, whereas Mantle was booed for not being DiMaggio.
1969 would see the departures of Tresh, Pepitone, and Downing, leaving only Stottlemyre and reliever Steve Hamilton from the pennant-winning era that ended in ’64. Hamilton, the team’s and the league’s player rep and a very effective left-hander, developed a crowd-pleasing blooper pitch called the Folly Floater, which he threw perhaps a dozen times with generally good results. Tresh stayed in the lineup despite a four-year slump after beginning with such promise. Loose cartilage in his knee, suffered during a ’67 exhibition game, turned the Gold Glover into an “old man” quickly. Pepitone returned to first base after Mantle’s retirement, and, after he rebounded to 27 homers in ’69 (from a combined 28 in ’67–’68), the Yankees seized on a chance to get something of value for him. For all his troubles, he was lovable and popular and famous for being the first Yankee to require an outlet in his locker for a hair dryer. Unfortunately, MacPhail miscalculated and got ex-Yankee farmhand Curt Blefary from Houston, who added little to the team and complained about Houk. Tresh went to Detroit for outfielder Ron Woods, whose career would be brief, and Downing was part of a deal with Oakland that brought Danny Cater to play first base.
Cater, it was said, could calculate his batting average to the fourth decimal point while running to first, which said a great deal about both his speed and his focus.
But if you were a baseball fan in New York in 1969, there was really only one story, and it was happening ten miles away at Shea Stadium. The Mets, a thorn in the side of the Yankees since the moment they hired Stengel in ’61, won the National League East in the first season of division play, the National League pennant, and then the World Series. All three clinchers came at home, bringing delirium to their fans and amazement to just about everyone. Gil Hodges had led the Miracle Mets from ninth place in ’68 to the top of the baseball universe in ’69.
A telegram went to M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets, after the pennant was clinched: CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING NUMBER ONE—AM ROOTING FOR YOU TO HANG IN THERE AND TAKE ALL THE MARBLES. AS A NEW YORKER I AM ECSTATIC, AS A BASEBALL PERSON I AM IMMENSELY PLEASED AND AS A YANKEE I CONSIDER SUICIDE THE EASY OPTION. MICHAEL BURKE, NEW YORK YANKEES, INC.
THE KEY NEW face of 1970 was catcher Thurman Munson, twenty-three, who took command of the position after just 99 minor league games. An All-American at Kent State near his native Canton, Ohio, Munson was signed by scout Gene Woodling.
Thurman would enjoy an unusual relationship with Yankee fans. Grumpy and contentious with the press, he was no media darling. But the fans saw beyond that. They loved his commanding presence on the field and his aggressive play. He would get cheered no matter what the papers wrote. He even got cheered once when he gave the fans the finger.
Munson overcame a 1-for-30 start and wound up hitting .302 and impressing everyone with his defense and pitch-calling. He was the first AL catcher to win the Rookie of the Year Award. Although Stottlemyre, White, and Murcer were established big leaguers, Munson was the first building block on the road back to the World Series. It was still six years away and would require much more, but the feeling of having an All-Star catcher in place, indeed a likely successor to the Dickey-Berra-Howard tradition, made the front office breathe easier. This was a number-one draft pick that was right on the money.
With Cater hitting .301, White .296, Murcer belting homers in four consecutive at-bats, a 20-win season from Fritz Peterson, and 29 saves from veteran Lindy McDaniel, the Yankees won 93 games in 1970, good for second place, although fifteen games behind the Orioles. It had been so long since the team had anything to celebrate that they uncharacteristically doused each other with champagne after clinching second, an event that surely would have invited a stern look from Joe McCarthy.
Stengel? Well, he was back in good graces and might have been okay with it. Casey had broken his decade-long exile from the Yankees by agreeing to attend the team’s Old-Timers’ Day—at which his uniform number 37 would be retired—and he put on the Yankee uniform and trotted out at age eighty to the roar of the crowd. (Since all guests received small gifts, I was personally thrilled to get a postcard from Casey when he returned to California, saying, “Mrs. Stengel and I had a marvelous time and thank you for my prize.”)
THE YANKEES LURED Mickey Mantle back as a coach for the final month of the season. Mick had been broadcasting for NBC’s Game of the Week, wasn’t enjoying it, and thought it would be fun to suit up again and travel with the guys. His assignment was to coach first base in the three middle innings, relieving Howard of his duties each day for that interlude.
It bothered Mickey that the arrangement was a little embarrassing for Elston, and he realized that he didn’t really have much of a role. The experiment lasted to the end of that season, but we decided to reshoot the team photo so that he was included.
Of course, there were his annual Old-Timers’ Day appearances, which continued uninterrupted until Bowie Kuhn banned him from the game for representing an Atlantic City casino in 1983. Kuhn had done the same with Mays, seeking to distance baseball from gambling. The ban didn’t extend to Old-Timers’ Days, only to employment with the team, but Mick chose to make a statement by not returning for the ceremonies during the time of his ban. (Commissioner Peter Ueberroth lifted the ban in 1985, and Mick immediately became a broadcaster for the Yanks for four seasons and once again an Old-Timers’ Day fixture.)
Meanwhile, a controversy of sorts arose over the order of introduction at Old-Timers’ Days. Joe DiMaggio had been introduced last since his first one in 1952.
In the first years after Mantle retired, his popularity was so high and his fans so much more youthful, that the cheers for him were louder than those for DiMaggio. So Fishel (with me in agreement), decided to reverse the order so that DiMaggio’s “greatest living” introduction was heard clearly.
Bad call. DiMaggio, always easy to offend, considered it a slight and threatened never to return again. Assured that he would be introduced last, he returned again and again.
Mantle couldn’t have cared less. The gatherings were just fun for him, like the time I encouraged him to play center field one last time, or the time he forgot to bring his number 7 uniform with him (and we put a piece of tape over the 1 in Gene Michael’s 17), or the time he emerged from the clubhouse with a dangling earring, poking fun at Barry Bonds’s fashion statement and at his own wholesome image.
THERE WERE NO major additions to the team in 1971, but the Yankees sadly parted with Bill Robinson. He never found his groove with the Yankees, and for his four years in pinstripes batted only .206 with 16 homers. As the Yankees believed, he would go on to play another twelve years and would shine for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and earn a World Series ring in 1979. It would forever be a mystery as to what went wrong with Bill Robinson in New York and why that promise wasn’t fulfilled.
The ’71 team was led by Murcer’s .331 season—second to Tony Oliva’s .337—but the gains of ’70 were erased in an 82–80 year, fourth place, in which the bullpen managed only 12 saves. The only thing that put them over .500 was a forfeit victory in the season finale in Washington, when most of th
e 14,460 bitter fans stormed the field in anger over owner Bob Short’s decision to move the Senators to Texas. The umpires declared a Yankee victory in a game they were losing 7–5.
DESPERATE TO PULL off a big trade and reverse the team’s sliding fortunes, Lee MacPhail decided that Stan Bahnsen was his best player to offer as trade bait to bring some punch to the lineup for 1972. Teams always sought quality starters, and in four full injury-free seasons with the Yanks, Bahnsen had won 55 games with a 3.10 ERA.
MacPhail got a second baseman from the White Sox—Rich McKinney, who had batted .271 with eight homers in 114 games. He’d looked good against the Yanks. The plan was to move him to third base, where Kenney had failed to impress.
“It was the worst trade of my career,” MacPhail wrote in his memoir, My Nine Innings. “I did not know McKinney well enough … We figured he could make the switch to third. That should not be an automatic assumption. But more important than that, for us, he simply did not have the aggressive bear-down temperament that we had thought he had.”
And so in one bad moment, the Yankees were out a starting pitcher with eleven years left in his career, and still had a big hole at third base. The deal was so bad, MacPhail wrote a poem about his mistake and read it at the baseball writers’ annual “pre-dinner dinner.”
After committing four errors in one game at Fenway Park, McKinney was essentially written off. It did not help McKinney that he had injured his thumb participating in roughhouse hockey games, in which players used bats as hockey sticks, in the Yankee clubhouse. The Yankees dug into the Mexican League on a tip by Tomas Morales, a Mexican sportswriter, and found a likeable guy named Celerino Sanchez. He had a tenacious approach to the hot corner, taking the toughest shots off his chest and rifling them to first. He had a winning smile and was the anti-McKinney, winning him immediate fan acceptance. He bought the Yankees some time.
One trade that did work, and that took a lot of pressure off MacPhail’s blunder, was Cater for Sparky Lyle. Ralph Houk had coveted Boston’s lefty reliever, twenty-seven, a free spirit who had ice water in his veins in pressure situations. With only days remaining in spring training, I rushed to Winter Haven, the Boston training camp, to get Lyle photographed for the Yankee yearbook, which was going to press in twenty-four hours. We had only the number 28 uniform available among lower numbers, because Ron Hansen had recently been released. Sparky had been 28 with Boston. It was perfect.
With Lyle in place, the veteran Felipe Alou aboard to share first with the colorful Ron Blomberg, and (it was thought), an able third baseman in McKinney, the Yanks couldn’t wait for the season to begin.
And then the players went on strike, the first strike in the history of baseball. No one knew what to make of it because it was a new experience for everyone. The most important thing to come out of it was the solidarity of the players. The ’72 strike was brief, but it established the union as the real deal, with the players prepared to lose money and stick together. That formula would see them through all the work stoppages to come.
Compounding the confusion was the shocking death of Mets manager Gil Hodges, only forty-seven, who, in the absence of spring training games, was playing golf with his coaches. Such were the logistics of the strike disruptions that the Yankees’ plane, due to fly north to New York, would bring Gil’s body back home for his funeral, since the Mets were to open on the road. (After the funeral, Yogi Berra was named Mets manager.)
The lost games, seven or eight per team, were not made up. It meant that Billy Martin’s Tigers would win the AL East by half a game over Boston, since they didn’t play an equal number of games.18
After having to cancel a four-game opening homestand against Baltimore, which included opening day and a Sunday Cap Day, the Yankees’ home attendance for the year would be 966,328, ending a run of twenty-six straight seasons in which they had topped a million at a time when such a figure was worthy of an annual press release.
When play began in ’72, the Yankees looked good. With Lyle wowing the crowds with heart-stopping saves, Murcer hitting 33 homers, and Stottlemyre, Peterson, and Steve Kline winning 49 games, there were positive signs. The role of the fourth starter came to be shared by the free-spirited Mike Kekich and Rob Gardner, who won 18 between them.
There was much drama to Lyle’s appearances, and at one point I asked a musician friend if he might suggest a “theme” to accompany Lyle’s dramatic entrances. The Datsun bullpen car would emerge from the bullpen, drive down the first-base running track, then Sparky would fling open the door and fire his warm-up jacket at the waiting batboy and stomp to the mound. My friend thought that since it foretold the culmination of the game—the save!—“Pomp and Circumstance,” aka the graduation march, might work.
It caught on almost immediately. Toby Wright on the organ (Toby came back in 1971 when Eddie Layton had a full soap-opera schedule) would take my signal, and on his first chord the fans would respond with thunderous cheers. The music became synonymous with Lyle. Sparky asked me not to play it after that season, citing “too much added pressure,” but he later came to say that the music had played a big part in creating the concept of the closer, and of course in having theme music for particular players. It was a prelude to “Enter Sandman” for Mariano Rivera in later years.
(The Datsun would be succeeded by Toyota; the idea of vehicles delivering relief pitchers lasted about ten years.)
Lyle’s season produced a record 35 saves and nine victories, with a 1.92 ERA. Responding to his heart-stopping moments, like a nine-pitch, three-strikeout save against Detroit, the Yanks were only a half game out of first on Labor Day, and we were making postseason plans. Tickets, programs, press pins—lots of preparations had to be made, and most of us had not been there in ’64, the last time the team went through this.
But soon after, the Yanks lost six of seven and retreated in the standings. Mike Burke coveted Billy Martin as manager and was prepared to dump Houk, maybe even “trade” him to the Tigers for Martin. But MacPhail wouldn’t go for it.
When they lost their last five games of the season, they fell back into fourth again, this time 79–76 in the shortened season. Some were able to see progress, but for the fans it was just another disappointment, and patience with Houk was running thin.
THE FIRST SIGN that there might be structural problems with Yankee Stadium came on a Bat Day. Young fans would pound their bats on the concrete flooring to try and stimulate a rally. What they were stimulating, in fact, was the need for an upgrade of the aging ballpark. Mayor John V. Lindsay and Burke had first discussed it in general terms while sitting together at the 1970 Mayor’s Trophy game.
The pounding of the bats was resulting in chunks of concrete falling. No one was hurt, but the maintenance crews were making the Yankees aware of the problem. Burke, Berk, Fishel, and MacPhail came to the conclusion that safety was going to be an ever-increasing issue with the current structure. Besides, people were expecting more amenities from their facilities—safer passageways, better lighting, escalators, and certainly unobstructed views. The concept of luxury suites was also emerging.
The stadium and its land was owned by Rice University and the Knights of Columbus, but as the City of New York had provided a new facility for the Mets, so too did the Yankees hope that the city might step up and do the same for them. No threats were made, but small notices would appear about offers from New Orleans, which was seeking a major league team for its new Superdome—or perhaps from New Jersey. I was part of a small contingent that inspected the Superdome during the Winter Meetings to determine its usage for baseball. (Bad sight lines).
Mayor Lindsay was no baseball fan, but he knew that he didn’t want the Yankees leaving the Bronx on his watch, as the Dodgers and Giants had left under his predecessor, Robert Wagner. He especially didn’t want them suggesting a departure while he was running for president, since he was going to seek the Democratic nomination in 1972. Lindsay and Burke were similar in manner and got along well from their first
introduction. It did not take a lot of persuasion to get Lindsay on board with a plan to renovate Yankee Stadium, and in the process save the South Bronx.
The first cost estimate for the renovation was $24 million—the cost of building Shea Stadium a decade earlier. With inflation, and with this being less than a ground-up operation, $24 million was a figure people could “hang their hat on.”
Fishel used to organize a winter “caravan” on which a band of Yankee front-office people, a broadcaster, Houk, and a new player to showcase would visit five outlying areas in five days to meet the media in towns like Albany, Cheshire and Stamford, Connecticut, White Plains, and Trenton. It began in 1961 and continued until the gasoline shortage of 1974. In January 1972, we made the trip with McKinney (who asked me where in New York he could buy good marijuana. Hello? I work here). At each of these stops, the show-stopping announcement was the plan to renovate Yankee Stadium.
The idea was for the city to acquire the land and the ballpark through condemnation proceedings, paying Rice and the Knights of Columbus a fair market price for the property and taking on ownership, just as they owned Shea. The renovation would include removal of all the pillars in the ballpark that caused obstructed views, a matter of removing the existing roof and creating a new configuration for the seating. The city would improve access roads and make the subway station safer. There would be new lighting, new parking garages, about a dozen luxury suites, and a great new scoreboard. The Yankees would sign a thirty-year lease, ending all talk of moving elsewhere.
The work would begin the day after the 1973 season ended and the stadium was to be ready in time for opening day of 1976. In the meantime, the Yankees and Mets would share Shea Stadium for two seasons.
Burke insisted that the new design not lose the facade that ringed the current ballpark. He wouldn’t sign off on anything that didn’t include it. The architects, Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury, placed a replica facade above the billboards at the rear of the bleachers. Burke had recognized the facade as almost a fourth logo for the team—apart from the interlocking NY, the pinstripes, and the top hat.