by Marty Appel
Ron Swoboda, a local hero as part of the Miracle Mets of 1969, joined the team in midseason. “In Thurman I saw a pretty raw and unconventional catcher,” he recalls. “On a steal he’d throw the ball as fast as he could from any arm slot he happened to find—mostly sidearm. The ball would head to second with this huge tail on it, like a meteor.
“He used an S-44 model bat. It had an uncommonly small barrel but he could center the ball on it. Nobody else liked his choice of bats but they worked for him. Murcer was a better hitter with more pop and more polish. But you would see things from Munson that made you believe he could be something special. He could run for a little fat catcher. He was a better hitter every year I was with him from 1971 to 1973 and he wore out the Twins’ outstanding right-hander Bert Blyleven. Blyleven could bring it with a very nasty curve-ball and Thurman hit everything he threw over the plate, hard and in all directions. He was amazing from my perspective.
“Thurman was a pretty sensitive guy and loved to talk, but we used to joke that no matter where the discussion started he always brought the conversation back around to himself and what was going on with him as a player. The guys liked him, though. I know he had a bumpy relationship with the media. I think he was basically shy and very sensitive.”
Despite his lowly batting average, Munson enjoyed a remarkable season behind the plate. He caught 117 games in 1971, covering 1,019 innings, with 614 chances—and one error. One! And remember, the catching position is one with the potential for many more errors than the chances accepted would indicate, because of all the throws to second on base-stealing attempts and all the pick-off throws that could come at any time.
The one error came on June 18 in a game at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Andy Etchebarren, the Orioles’ barrel-chested receiver, was on first when Paul Blair doubled. Etchebarren had little speed, but Billy Hunter waved him around third and toward home. Murcer had run down the double; now he threw to Gene Michael as the cutoff man, and Michael fired home. Munson had his left leg out to block the plate. The ball and Etchebarren arrived together. Both Munson and his counterpart knew the collision was inevitable; it was the way the game was played.
Thurman took the impact, got knocked backward, blacked out, and dropped the ball. He was unconscious for five minutes before being taken off the field on a stretcher and driven by ambulance to nearby Union Memorial Hospital.
Art Franz, the home plate umpire, had never called Etchebarren safe. He simply waited and then saw the ball lying next to Thurman’s head. At that point, he signaled “safe.”
The official scorer called it an error.
“Even looking back on it almost forty years later, it’s still an error—a tough one, but an error,” says Bill Shannon, the principal scorer at Yankee Stadium and author of Official Scoring in the Big Leagues. “Some errors are heartless, but they are what they are. It wasn’t an unusual call.”
It was not a big deal at the time, although the Yankee players were pretty hot about it. No one could have anticipated that this would be the only error Munson would be charged with all season.
Munson suffered a concussion, but he was back in the Yankee clubhouse before the end of the game, munching on a doughnut.
“He was so mad,” says Fritz Peterson. “He wanted John Ellis to go out and beat up the entire Orioles club (which John could have done!).”
In fact, he pinch-hit the next day and then caught and got three hits the day after. If he needed to enhance his gritty résumé, this was the play that did it.
The one error for the season gave him a .998 fielding percentage for the year. He threw out 23 of 38 base stealers—61 percent where 35 percent is more common. The 38 attempts were also remarkably few over the course of a season, indicative of the respect for Thurman’s throwing arm and quick release. For his first two years, he had thrown out 63 in 107 attempts, or 59 percent. Here, his reputation was made.
“He had the quickest release of any catcher I had ever seen,” says Peterson. “And Gene Michael really helped him when he was at short with his quick tags and good glove.
“I had an understanding with Thurman that whenever I saw a runner break off first I would automatically switch what I was going to deliver to the hitter to a fastball so Thurman could gun him out at second. Most catchers couldn’t react like he could to a quick change like that.”
Because he caught only 117 games, and the record book cites 150 as the standard required for fielding percentage records, his “almost 1.000” season cannot be properly measured. But his .998 percentage tied Elston Howard’s 1964 Yankee catching record.
“Nobody could call a game the way he could,” said Mel Stottlemyre. “From the day he arrived it was as though he had been somehow studying the hitters throughout the league. He knew what to call, and we had immediate confidence in him.”
When Tommy John later came to the Yankees, he made five spring training starts but never happened to pitch to Munson. Then in the opening series against Baltimore, Munson was finally behind the plate. “When we came back to the dugout after the first inning, Munson said, ‘You didn’t throw a lot of curveballs to these guys in the spring, so we’re going to throw a lot of first-pitch curves.’”
John said, “How do you know? You didn’t even catch me all spring!” And Munson responded, “What do you think, I wasn’t watching?”
8
Sparky Lyle arrived on the scene in 1972, a tremendous addition to the team. While the term “closer” had not yet become part of the baseball lexicon, it came to mean the man whose bulldog determination and daily success over one inning of work could essentially shorten a game to eight innings, with the opponents knowing they had little chance in the ninth.
Lyle embodied the personality of a closer, although he would usually be asked to work two or three innings. He had the arm for it.
He was a fun-loving character with an infectious laugh, and he knew how to have a great time. If he hadn’t been a baseball “fireman,” he might have been a real-life fireman. He was a Pennsylvania guy with a blue-collar attitude and a wonderful approach to life.
“When I was with the Red Sox I always enjoyed playing against Munson,” recalls Lyle. “It was because he was a ballplayer. And you like to compete against guys like that.
“He called the game based on who the batter and pitcher were, not what he might be looking for if he was the hitter.
“I loved to have him back there when I was pitching. He was like me in that we were successful because neither of us was afraid to fail. That was just who we were.
“I’d throw him a slider in the dirt on an 0-2 count with a runner on third and the guy would strike out. It would be a tough pitch to handle because the guy was swinging and the ball was bouncing, all at once. But he’d catch it. And he’d hold the ball and walk out to the mound with this shit-eating grin and say, ‘You didn’t think I was gonna catch that, did you!’ And we’d laugh because we were competing at the highest level and we were also having fun.”
When I worked for the Yankees during that time, I played a little role in the Sparky Lyle mystique. His entrance was always dramatic at Yankee Stadium. He’d arrive in the Datsun bullpen car (our sponsor), throw open the door, jump out of it with fire in his eyes, throw his warm-up jacket to the waiting batboy, and storm to the mound. A few quick warm-ups and then he’d stare in to Munson, waiting for the batter to dare to step up.
I thought, This is great, this needs a theme song.
So I asked a friend in the music business to suggest a song, and he said, “‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ It’s about the end, the culmination.”
Also known as the “Graduation March,” it worked. Toby Wright was our stadium organist and the drill was for me to look into the bullpen with binoculars to make sure Lyle was getting into the car, then phone Toby in the organist’s booth over first base and say, “It’s Lyle.” And he’d hit that first chord as the gate from the bullpen opened. The fans picked up on this quickly and at the sound of the first note, they would
begin cheering. By the time Lyle emerged from the car, the place was going crazy.
Today, every closer seems to have a theme song, and Lyle has told me on more than one occasion that my choreography of his entrance really made me the creator of “The Closer.” It isn’t true. Dick Radatz had a great act in Boston in the 1960s. But I love it when he throws me that compliment, even if he did say, “Let’s not do it” the following year.
“Too much pressure,” he said, and this from the man who thrived on it. Oh well.
The 1972 season, when Lyle saved thirty-five games, many in highly dramatic fashion, was really great fun, although it began with the first players’ strike in history. Although future strikes would be longer, this was very painful to all of us in the game. It was unimaginable that the industry could shut down. But it did. For those of us who lived through all the work stoppages baseball has thrown at us, 1972 was the worst because it was so unthinkable.
Although the Yankees were never in first place—not even for a day—the race was so tight that we had to prepare for a possible World Series, printing tickets, designing a program, setting up a postseason media operation. The team had not had to go through this exercise since 1964.
On September 1 the Yanks were tied for second, just one and a half games behind Baltimore. A Stottlemyre shutout that day over Chicago, and then a 2-1 win by Steve Kline the next day, put the deficit at just a half game. These were truly exciting days, and no one was enjoying them more than Munson, tasting his first pennant race and loving every aspect of the competition. Three-for-four on September 1, he was hitting .292 and enjoying his first season in which he didn’t have to climb up from the depths in the batting department. He started the year with an eight-game hitting streak, was at .338 on May 12, and would wind up with a solid .280. He hit .292 from July 15 to the end of the season. His buddy Murcer had a monster year, belting 33 homers, driving in 96 runs, and leading the league in runs scored and total bases.
Sadly, the hopes and promises of the season went unfulfilled. Detroit wound up winning the Eastern Division over Boston, with Baltimore third and the Yankees once again fourth, six and a half games out, thanks to losses in their final five games, all at home. The Tigers didn’t clinch until the next-to-last day of the season. They won by only a half game, the worst possible result of an uneven schedule, necessitated by the strike and unplayed games never made up.
The lost games cost the Yankees their four-game opening weekend against the Orioles, which included opening day and a Sunday Cap Day, easily 100,000 in total attendance. For the season, the Yankees would draw only 966,328—about 34,000 short of a million. It would be the first time since 1946 that the team failed to crack the million mark, a very unsettling stat.
The truth was, attendance was never great at Yankee Stadium—not for being the glorious Yankees in the nation’s number one population center, playing in a beloved, historic ballpark. The team was capable of drawing two million, as it had done for five straight years after World War II. But then attendance sank toward the 1.5 million mark as people stopped going to the Bronx. When the Dodgers and Giants left for California in 1958, Yankee attendance actually dropped 70,000 for the year. And in 1961—a great team, a great pennant race, and the great home run race with Maris and Mantle—attendance was up only 120,000 from the year before, and still a paltry 1.7 million as the only team in town.
Mantle retired in 1968. The Yankees were prepared to give him another $100,000 to play another year, but he said he couldn’t hit anymore. So they went out there without him—and drew only 57,000 fewer fans, including a full house on Mickey Mantle Day during the summer.
The 1972 attendance number was embarrassing, but in line with what had been going on. All fingers were pointing to the stadium itself.
Those of us who worked there knew the increasing crime numbers in New York made subway travel late at night precarious and trips to the South Bronx scary. We also knew that Yankee Stadium was literally falling down.
Bat Day in 1971, and again in 1972, had the young fans pounding their bats on the concrete to get a rally going. The action caused cracks, chips, and then chunks of the fifty-year-old concrete to fall. Nothing awful happened—no one was hit with debris, and there were no photo ops of the crumbling, but it was a strong message to us that the stadium needed an overhaul.
We also saw that new ballparks in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh had helped attendance spike in those towns.
So, armed with a small threat of considering the Superdome in New Orleans as a possible new home, Mike Burke, the Yankees’ president (on behalf of CBS), and John Lindsay, the city’s mayor, agreed on a plan that would condemn the current stadium, turn the land and the structure over to the city, and have the city pay for a complete remodeling. Lindsay was no baseball fan, but he knew he didn’t want the Yankees leaving on his watch. The process would take two years; the Yankees would share Shea Stadium during those years, and 1973 would be the fiftieth anniversary and final year in the original Yankee Stadium.
Munson, the budding real estate baron, was interested in all of these proceedings and phoned me often in my stadium office with questions. “How long would the lease be for?” he wanted to know. “How did they come up with the $24 million cost? Seems low.”
I had a feeling part of him wanted to be the Yankee catcher and part of him wanted to have a real role in the rebuilding process.
He was right about the $24 million being low. It wound up costing about four times that, prompting howls of protest from budget watchers. The figure had been the cost of Shea Stadium, from the ground up, a decade earlier. It was a number to work with, nothing more. And certainly nothing less.
We thought that celebrating the fiftieth anniversary would be our big focal point for the year, with the announcement that it would be the last season of the original “House that Ruth built.” But right after New Year’s came bigger news. The franchise was being sold.
CBS had presided over eight seasons of generally uninspired baseball. It hadn’t been a good business acquisition for them, they hadn’t leveraged the relationship in any meaningful way, and they were happy to get out. In fact, they sold the team at a loss—they paid $13.4 million and sold it for $10 million. It remains, at least as far as public records indicate, the only time a major league team has ever been sold at a loss.
Munson’s attention focused on the Cleveland connection. The purchaser was George M. Steinbrenner III, whose father had started American Ship Building on the Great Lakes, and who was buying the team with Mike Burke as well as thirteen limited partners. Gabe Paul, a part owner of the Cleveland Indians and their general manager, had brokered the deal, introducing Burke to Steinbrenner, who he had known was interested in buying the Indians. Steinbrenner had owned the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League in the 1960s when he was only thirty-one years old. Now, at forty-two, he owned the Yankees.
Steinbrenner rid himself of Burke before April ended, the dashing Burke departing when it was clear their styles could never mesh. Steinbrenner was military school, football discipline, short hair, no beards, win at all costs. Burke was hip New York, a longhair who drove a Datsun 240z, dated starlets, posed for formal pictures without a jacket (oh, did George Steinbrenner hate that in the yearbook photo), and liked poetry and rock music. That the relationship lasted until April was pretty amazing itself.
Still, Burke had pulled off the stadium modernization project, had forced the architects to preserve the stadium’s facade as a design element, and turned over all the protests about cost overruns and the very decision to stay—to Steinbrenner.
In his early press encounters, George swore allegiance to the front office staff he inherited (a loud whew from the PR office, for sure), said he’d leave baseball to his baseball people (meaning mostly Lee MacPhail and Ralph Houk), and promised a return to the World Series within five years.
After finishing just a half game out of first in September 1972, the five-y
ears promise seemed longer than fans wanted to hear, but realistic if you looked at the Yankee farm system. There was not much there.
That was where Gabe Paul came in. Before he left Cleveland, he swapped their star third baseman Graig Nettles (with backup catcher Gerry Moses) to New York in exchange for John Ellis, Charlie Spikes, Rusty Torres, and Jerry Kenney All had won the James P. Dawson Award—a Longines watch—as the top rookie in spring training at one time or another, so between the four of them, it was expected that they would at least arrive at the ballpark on time.
With a left-handed swing designed for Yankee Stadium, Nettles reminded some of the Yankees’ trade for Roger Maris prior to the 1960 season. In fact, with that very thing in mind, I persuaded Pete Sheehy to assign number 9 to Nettles: the only time I had a hand in a uniform number selection. (Nettles would then become the first Yankee since Maris to lead the league in home runs.) And boy, could he ever field third base.
Nettles had been a favorite in Cleveland, and was the favorite player of Darla Munson’s husband, Denny, Thurman’s brother-in-law, an Indians fan. When the Yanks and Indians played at Municipal Stadium, various members of the Munson family would be present.
One day when Nettles was still with the Indians, Thurman left tickets for his two sisters, his brother-in-law, and for Diana and her father.
In this particular game, the Yankees were leading and Nettles came up for Cleveland with the bases loaded. According to Darla, Denny shouted, quite loudly, “Oh God, I hope he gets a home run.” This enraged Diana, who found it in extremely bad taste, and afterward she and Thurman’s sister Janice told Thurman about Denny’s outburst.
Thurman was pissed. He had, after all, been the one who left the free tickets. And right then, he cut off tickets for Denny and damaged the precarious relationship with Darla, who was seen as Denny’s enabler.
Now Nettles was a Yankee teammate, but the Denny-Darla marriage was ending anyway, and family matters were growing more complicated. Thurman further withdrew from the Munsons and drew even closer to the Dominicks.