by Marty Appel
In his first nine games, he managed a single and seven walks in thirty-seven trips to the plate. By going 1 for 30, he was the owner of an .033 batting average, and naturally, talk was afloat that perhaps more seasoning in the minors was necessary. He had, after all, played only twenty-eight games at Syracuse the year before.
“It shook him,” says his roommate Gene Michael. “I remember him sitting on the bed in our room at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, really despondent. He didn’t even want to go to eat. I was trying to encourage him. At the end of the year he outhit me by eighty points.”
Ralph Houk knew better, and not only that, he knew how to deal with such a situation.
“Thurman, don’t give a thought to your hitting. You’re my catcher, you’re going to win a lot more games for me catching than hitting, and the hits will come. Don’t worry about it. Just relax and go out there and play the way we both know you can.”
He managed to maintain both his confidence and his normally cocky personality.
“Thurman was ‘cocky’ in the good sense, very confident,” says pitcher Fritz Peterson. “He was so talented he could get away with it. He also had quite a sense of humor. All the players liked him from the beginning. And he was such a team man. He did all the things a Yankee of old would have done to win games. Run, hit, throw, and break up double plays.”
Maybe there were other things on his mind. Diana gave birth to their first child, Tracy Lynn Munson, on Friday, April 10, 1970, and Thurman was not able to be in Canton for the birth, being of course at Yankee Stadium. He was just twenty-two, a married father, a regular on the fabled New York Yankees, and seemingly holding on to more responsibility than one might throw at such a young man.
He was also courteous and responsive to fans, something the vast public and media couldn’t see. After Tracy was born, a fan sent a homemade knit vest and skirt as a baby gift to him at Yankee Stadium. Thurman wrote a thank-you note on Yankee stationery.
Tracy and her mother and I all thank you for knitting the little vest and skirt. Some time during the season we’ll take a picture of her in the outfit and send it to you.
It’s nice to know that fans still think of you and your family, especially when you’re not having a particularly good year. I just hope I can make you as happy on the field as people like you make me feel off.
Thanks again,
Thurman Munson
After the Sunday doubleheader in which he went zero for seven, he flew home to see Tracy and Diana, and later said, “I was about the happiest I’d ever been.”
Thurman didn’t have to rejoin the team until Tuesday night in Boston. So, in the first week of his rookie season, he got that little break in the schedule that allowed him a quick trip home—the same circumstances that would allow him to go home in that fateful, final week of his career.
The real problem with going 1 for 30 at the start of the season is that you spend the rest of the year digging out of it. A lot of players will have slumps during the season, maybe not 1 for 30, but when you’re hitting .288 and you have your slump in July and drop to .272, it’s just not as glaring as starting off hitting .033.
On April 20, Munson went 3 for 4 with a double and two singles, and he never had another slump all season. He didn’t hit a home run until June 28, but no one questioned his hitting from April 20 on through for the rest of his career.
The 1970 Yankees had only two players remaining from their last World Series in 1964—Mel Stottlemyre and Steve Hamilton. There were a few players who had been teammates on the Mantle-era Yankees, notably Roy White and Bobby Murcer. But essentially, the rise of Thurman Munson in 1970 was the first building block toward the three championships that awaited the team later in the decade. Each year, one or two new additions would enhance the roster, until the team was ready to return to an elite status.
Munson wasn’t especially patient with that plan. A battler, a winner, a guy who took every game as a challenge, he appreciated that the 1970 Yanks were having a good year, but he wanted a pennant, not just a good year. He took little pleasure in the team doing well so long as the Orioles were doing better. He wanted to be those guys, and he’d pump his fist at the pitchers in key situations and want more.
“Even as a rookie, he had a confidence and a maturity back there,” says Stottlemyre. “We in turn had confidence in him. He was a kid, but he was very mature as a major league player. We loved pitching to him.”
The fans felt that spirit and liked to see a guy come along who didn’t give in to complacency and mediocrity. The fans were in love with Munson early on, embracing him as New York fans can do—quickly.
A prime example of this came in August 1970, when he was on Reserve duty at Fort Dix and not expected back in time to play at all on Sunday in a doubleheader against Baltimore. However, he drove impetuously and made it to Yankee Stadium—eighty-six miles—in a little over an hour, in time for the sixth inning of the second game. He listened to the game on WMCA radio as he rushed up the Jersey Turnpike. He went straight to the clubhouse and got into his uniform, emerging into the dugout, where Houk and his teammates greeted him warmly. “Grab a bat and pinch-hit,” said Houk.
Out of the dugout popped Munson. In the press box, Bob Fishel tapped me on the arm with his pencil and pointed toward the on-deck circle. He was smiling. The fans did not expect to see him and his appearance on the field brought a tremendous roar from the crowd. To have been there at that moment was to see Thurman appreciated at a new level—our guy, and our hero.
He lined out to Brooks Robinson at third, but that wasn’t the point. The response to his arrival signaled a bond between him and the fans that would never fade. If you could define the moment the fans fell in love with the future captain of this franchise, that was it.
Munson had arrived with a flourish, very much a part of the team, already emerging as a leader, and surely as “one of the guys.”
“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 t
hing 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.
7
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 Yankee
s’ 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.