by Marty Appel
Third-base coach Dick Howser managed for one game, and then Lemon took over what appeared to be a doomed season.
For days, Steinbrenner fretted over what had happened. On the one hand, he had little choice but to dismiss Martin for insubordination. On the other hand, the fans loved Martin and rallied around him most when he was down. He was a very sympathetic figure.
Finally, he decided on a dramatic plan, one that he didn’t even share with Rosen. He decided to sneak Martin back to the stadium on Saturday—Old-Timers’ Day—and introduce him as Lemon’s successor, effective in 1980, when Lemon would become general manager. Lem, in his fifth day as manager, wasn’t in on this either, and he and Rosen were shocked as they stood side by side in Indian uniforms during the ceremonies.
So three years after his Old-Timers’ Day hiring, Billy was squirreled into the stadium and hidden until the moment when Bob Sheppard stunned everyone in the house by reading the announcement about the changes. Billy would be back, Lemon would be “kicked upstairs,” and Rosen would be left wondering how he’d fallen out of the loop. The active players, sitting in the dugout, looked anything but thrilled. Billy took his bows and left.
For days afterward, the media wanted to interview Martin. Morabito finally went to Steinbrenner to plead for a luncheon—anything—to meet their needs in a controlled environment.
Steinbrenner reluctantly agreed. “But if anything goes wrong, it’s on your head,” he told Morabito.
Something went wrong. Martin needed little prodding to start attacking Jackson all over again. The reporters couldn’t wait to call Steinbrenner, read Martin’s quotes, and get his reaction.
Steinbrenner confronted Morabito. “If this Reggie stuff gets in the paper tomorrow, you’re fired,” he told him. Mickey, knowing it would make the papers, stopped at the mail room, picked up some cartons, and headed back to his office to begin packing.
That night, the New York newspapers went on strike. There would be no coverage of Billy’s remarks except in the suburban papers, and Steinbrenner didn’t care about them. A miracle had saved Morabito’s job.
Not only that: Without the pressure of the daily newspapers chronicling every controversy, the Yankees began to win. It may have been coincidental, but it was hard to ignore. By September 7, as the Yankees arrived in Boston for a four-game series, the Red Sox lead had slipped to four games. Lemon had brought calm to a talented team, and was also manipulating the bench very well. Rivers, Randolph, and Dent were injured and out of the lineup; Munson was playing hurt.
A procedure by team physician Dr. Maurice Cowan somehow brought Catfish Hunter back to health, and he won six straight. The Red Sox, while not in free fall, felt the Yankees breathing down their backs.
In what came to be called the Boston Massacre, the Yankees won all four games of the series, 15–3, 13–2, 7–0, and 7–4. The shutout by Guidry in the Saturday game made him 21–2.
“This is,” said NBC broadcaster Tony Kubek, “the first time I’ve seen a first-place team chasing a second-place team.”
On September 13 the Yankees moved into first, but the Red Sox wouldn’t die. With one game left in the season for each team and the Yankees up by a game, Boston won and the Yankees lost. There would need to be a one-game playoff to decide the division, the first time in their history the Yankees needed to play a tiebreaker.
Earlier in the month, Rosen lost a coin toss at the American League office, meaning if a tiebreaker was necessary, it would be played in Fenway Park. Steinbrenner couldn’t believe Rosen could lose a coin toss. As Rosen recounted later to Bill Madden for his Steinbrenner biography, Steinbrenner shouted, “What did you call?” Told it was heads, he screamed, “Heads! You [expletive] idiot! Everyone knows it comes up tails seventy percent of the time!”
As the Yanks were losing the season finale, Steinbrenner summoned traveling secretary Bill Kane to his darkened office and asked him about the flight to Boston. “Where’s the plane?” he asked. “Newark,” responded Kane, “same as all season.”
“Newark! No good. Move it to LaGuardia,” said the Boss.
Angry words led to Kane’s quitting—or being fired—at that very moment. After calling on Gerry Murphy, a former traveling secretary now in the ticket office, to take over, cooler heads eventually prevailed. The team went to Boston from Newark, under Kane’s watch.
Monday, October 2, a day game in sunny Fenway Park, found Guidry, 24–3, on three days’ rest, taking on ex-teammate Mike Torrez, who had gone to the Red Sox as a free agent after winning the final game of the ’77 World Series. It would be a watershed moment in the Yankee–Red Sox rivalry. A full house in historic Fenway Park; the greatest rivalry in sports; a last-minute game with a pennant on the line. And it delivered.
Boston held a 2–0 lead through six. In the top of the seventh, with Chambliss and White on, Dent, hitting ninth in the lineup, fouled a pitch off his foot, cracking his bat. In pain, he borrowed a Roy White model bat from on-deck hitter Mickey Rivers. On the next pitch, as Bill White described it from the broadcast booth: “Deep to left! Yastrzemski … will not get it! It’s a home run! A three-run homer by Bucky Dent! And the Yankees now lead by a score of three to two!”
Dent had hit 22 home runs in his career to that point, four that season. It’s interesting to recall Rosen’s coin toss at this moment: Had the game been in Yankee Stadium, the ball might not have gone out. It might have been an Al Gionfriddo moment. Now Fenway fell silent as the most unlikely man in the Yankee lineup rounded the bases.
The Red Sox would still rally, Jackson would homer, and Gossage would save the game, aided by a “blind catch” in the impossible sunlight by Piniella in right. Yastrzemski popped out to Nettles to end it, a 5–4 Yankee win.
The win made Guidry 25–3, the best winning percentage (.893) by a 20-game winner in history. His 1.74 ERA was the lowest by a lefty since Koufax’s 1.73 in 1966, and the second lowest by an American League left-hander in history, Dutch Leonard having had a 0.96 ERA in 1914. For the season, in which the league batted only .193 against him, Guidry fanned 248, breaking Jack Chesbro’s 1904 team record, and threw nine shutouts, a team mark and the most for an American League left-hander since Ruth had nine for the Red Sox in 1916. He was the unanimous winner of the Cy Young Award, won the Sporting News Man of the Year and the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year—but not the MVP, won by Jim Rice with twenty first-place votes to Guidry’s eight.
The Yankee franchise, blessed as it was over the decades with elite hitters, never did possess a Young, a Mathewson, a Johnson, an Alexander, a Grove, a Feller, a Spahn, or a Koufax. But for one season, Guidry outdid them all.
He never approached this performance again, but he would remain a beloved figure in Yankee history and would ultimately have his number-49 uniform retired and a plaque in Monument Park. Without the intervention of his wife just two years earlier, it never would have happened.
The Yankees beat Kansas City for the third year in a row in the LCS, doing it in four games with Guidry winning the decider. Munson found previously undiscovered power in game three and belted a homer off Doug Bird that landed by the Babe Ruth monument, about 475 feet away. It was the Yanks’ thirty-second pennant.
For the second year in a row, the Yankees faced the Dodgers in the World Series. Randolph, injured, was replaced by Brian Doyle at second base, who batted .438. Dent hit .417 and was the Series MVP as the Yankees claimed their twenty-second world championship in six games, with Hunter winning in the finale at Dodger Stadium and two more Series home runs from Jackson. Nettles’s brilliant fielding at third was a highlight, as was a base-running maneuver by Jackson, deflecting a throw with his right hip while running to second. Gossage was on the mound for the final out in the play-off game at Fenway, the pennant clincher against the Royals, and the world championship against the Dodgers.
It was an especially sweet triumph for Lemon, fired in midseason by the White Sox and now able to enjoy a wonderful coda to his Hall of Fame pitching
career as a world champion manager.
It wasn’t a happy time for Sparky Lyle, however. Lyle did not appear in the World Series at all, and his time as a Yankee came to a close on November 10, when he went to Texas in a deal that brought Dave Righetti to the Yankees.
Chapter Thirty-Four
WHEN THE PHONE RANG AT Joe Garagiola’s Phoenix home ten days after the ’78 World Series, it marked the beginning of a horrible stretch for the Yankees that found the joy of a hard-earned championship transformed to ongoing grief.
“Joe, it’s Lem,” said the Yankee manager to the onetime Yankee broadcaster. “It’s the worst, Joe … my son Jerry’s been killed in a car accident near you. Can you go to the hospital and be there for me until Jane and I can get there?”
Jerry Lemon was twenty-six, their youngest of three sons. To Lem, it rendered meaningless the great triumph of just weeks before. But few in baseball were as well liked as Bob Lemon, and the friendship and support of the baseball community held him up.
Spring training would go on—Tommy John and Luis Tiant were exciting new free-agent additions to this world championship club—but this was not a team that was going to run on all cylinders.
Tommy John, four years removed from the career-saving elbow surgery that would come to bear his name, was at this point a fifteen-year veteran with 169 victories. Few thought that he had eleven years and 119 more victories left, but he would go 21–9 and 22–9 in his first two Yankee seasons. He would win more games for the Yanks—91—than for any other team he played for.
Tiant, the first Cuban Yankee since Pedro Ramos, was an almost mythical figure in Boston, one of the most popular and emotional players in Red Sox history. Defecting to the Yanks was huge. But El Tiante, who was at least thirty-eight at the time, would repeat his 13–8 ’78 season by going 13–8 again. These were the bright spots.26
Catfish Hunter, in the final year of his five-year deal, would have the deaths of his father and Clyde Kluttz to deal with as he wound down the clock with a very unproductive 2–9 showing.
Was Lemon’s heart no longer in his assignment? Now fifty-eight, he had come at Al Rosen’s request to hurriedly take over for Martin the year before. Now, his son’s death was a tough one to get through. Some felt the listless play of the Yankees under his watch was because he was distracted. He never really said, and no one asked.
The old gang was beginning to leave. Tidrow was traded to the Cubs in May, having done a fine job as a starter and reliever over five seasons. He’d later go on to a long career as a player personnel executive with the Giants.
Elite pinch hitter Cliff Johnson had a foolish tussle with Gossage in April, causing Goose to injure his thumb and miss three months. Johnson was traded to the Indians, almost certainly as a punishment.
Ron Davis, 14–2 with nine saves, filled in as a closer, but settled back into the role of a setup man; he was one of the first to be identified as such. Davis was a good find, and his Yankee career might have gone longer than three years had he not made an unwise speech during a winter appearance in New England following the 1981 season in which he criticized interference by Steinbrenner. When someone faxed the local newspaper carrying his remarks to the Boss, Davis was gone, hustled off to the Minnesota Twins. (His son Ike would later play for the Mets.)
Mickey Rivers went to Texas, which brought back Oscar Gamble for a second tour of duty and ended all too soon a wonderful Yankee stay for Mick the Quick, whose drive and desire seemed to have waned. Perhaps being the subject of trade rumors for much of the season was the cause.
On June 18, with the Yanks 34–31, Steinbrenner decided to relieve Lemon of his managerial duties and bring back Martin a year early. This was viewed as a necessary move, done with more kindness than most managerial firings. Lemon, in uniform, even stood with Martin at the press conference. The American League quickly moved to allow Lemon to manage the All-Star team a month later, despite his dismissal. No one could say enough about Lemon, who remained on the Yankee payroll for the rest of his life.
Martin was back for Billy II, despite an off-season fight in Reno with sportswriter Ray Hager. Billy’s scrappy nature, often alcohol-induced, had a certain appeal to Steinbrenner, who liked his managers feisty. This time he was taking on a floundering team with many question marks and a roster in transition. Reggie Jackson asked to be traded, but agreed to stay on. Al Rosen himself quit a few weeks later.
On June 26, Bobby Murcer returned to the Yankees after four and a half years in exile with the Giants and Cubs. Bobby, thirty-three, was not the player he had been when he left, but his popularity was as strong as ever, and he’d give the Yankees six more seasons of limited role-playing, largely as a DH. His return was especially welcomed by his pal Thurman Munson.
Munson, thirty-two, was also not the player he had been. Never having spent a day on the disabled list, he was banged and bruised and carried the wounds of a ten-year veteran who played his heart out each day at the toughest position. Now, his knees shot, and bothered by other ailments, he was playing first, the outfield, DH, and talking openly about wishing to go to Cleveland to be close to his family and his business interests. He would have frank talks with Steinbrenner, into whose office he’d traipse after batting practice to talk business. “Get something for me before I leave as a free agent,” he’d say. But Steinbrenner didn’t want to lose his captain, and most felt that in his heart, Munson didn’t really want to leave either.
Although he was a wounded warrior, the affection that showered down on him from the stands didn’t fade. The fans had really connected with Munson over the years. He grumbled to the press, talked about leaving town, but they loved his game and they accepted him as the fourth great Yankee catcher, following in the tradition of Dickey, Berra, and Howard. He certainly seemed to be on a path for the Hall of Fame, if he could build his lifetime stats with five or six more productive seasons.
Thurman had begun flying propeller-driven planes during spring training of 1978. A small executive airport bordered Fort Lauderdale Stadium, making flying lessons convenient during spring training. Few among the media or the fans knew that Munson was flying home to Canton after games while other players were simply driving to their homes in Bergen or Westchester counties. Occasionally, he might mention it in an interview—he wasn’t trying to hide it—but he did so few interviews, it was generally not known.
Munson would go home, spend time with his wife and three children, and then return to Teterboro Airport the next day and drive to the stadium. He loved the adventure of flying. When it came time to renegotiate a new deal with the Yankees in ’79, he had the “no flying” clause removed from his contract. Steinbrenner reluctantly took it out, feeling it would stop Munson from dwelling on going to the Indians. Martin was very concerned that Munson was flying with team permission. “Does George know you’re flying?” he demanded.
In late July, Munson and Piniella slept at Murcer’s Chicago apartment during a series with the White Sox. Bobby and Kay Murcer then drove Thurman to small Palwaukee Airport north of Chicago after the August 1 series finale, in which Thurman played first base. Munson left after midnight and flew home to Canton, where, on just a few hours’ sleep, he had breakfast with his kids, lunch with his father-in-law, and prepared to discuss a street naming in his honor with city officials.
Finishing lunch early, he went to Akron-Canton Airport to check on his newest plane—a Cessna Citation jet. He had moved up to an executive jet just three weeks before. He took it to the West Coast, with Reggie Jackson as a passenger. Martin and Nettles also went up with him. Many of his teammates, including Murcer, refused to go.
At the airport, Munson bumped into his business partner and fellow flying enthusiast Jerry Anderson, along with an instructor he knew, David Hall. He was anxious to show off the new jet to them, and as they walked around, Thurman said, “Let me show you how it performs,” and offered to take them up. They agreed.
This was a Thursday off-day, and Munson didn’t have to be
back to Yankee Stadium until the following night. It was a carefree, blissful day for Munson, resting his sore body, being with his family, showing off his jet. He was in a good place.
Munson, with his two passengers, made three successful take-offs and touch-and-go landings, then took off for a fourth, turning right instead of left at the air traffic controller’s direction. So things were different. And errors were being made. Both Anderson and Hall could sense it. Now they were coming in toward the runway, too low and too fast, and they sensed an imminent crash. Thurman knew it too, but despite his errors, he reacted quickly enough to save them from a crash. He brought it down hard into an adjacent field facing the runway, and fought to slow it down as it moved at high speed across the acreage.
“My God,” thought Anderson. “We’re all going to survive a plane crash.”
“You guys okay?” Thurman managed to say.
But suddenly, the left wing hit a tree stump and jolted the aircraft to a halt. The force of the jolt tore Thurman’s seat from its running track. His shoulder harness hadn’t been fastened, and that caused his body to thrust forward, breaking his neck.
Hall and Anderson were determined to get him out. But Munson was paralyzed and unable to assist with his own rescue. The plane burst into flames, and Anderson and Hall had to make the horrible decision to flee for their lives and leave Thurman behind. Munson died in the wreckage. He, with Ed Delahanty and Ray Chapman, was the most prominent baseball player to ever die midseason. He was the captain of the defending world champions, a former MVP, a Yankee hero. He left a wife and three children.
It was late in the afternoon when the phone rang in George Steinbrenner’s Yankee Stadium office. He absorbed the tragic news from the airport manager. He summoned his staff.
In his grief, his shock, and, yes, his anger, he took full control, barking directions and instructions. Almost in one breath, he said, “Call Cardinal Cooke—we’ll have a memorial service before the game tomorrow … I’ll write something for the message board—it will alternate with his photo … get black armbands for the players’ uniforms … we’re retiring his number … we’ll put a plaque in Monument Park … we’ll retire his locker … we’ll take the team to the funeral … the wives … [Larry] Wahl, [Gerry] Murphy, you get the next plane to Canton and do whatever needs to be done there, go go go … Butterfield,27 who are we bringing up from the minors to catch?”