by Marty Appel
“It wasn’t long after that incident at Municipal Stadium,” says Darla, “that we were driving to a game there when Thurman and Diana drove up right alongside of us. He was still mad at us and they flipped us off. Well, we went to the ballpark and went to the will-call window, and asked for the Munson tickets. He had left them for someone else, but we claimed them. Ha!”
An example of Thurman’s curmudgeon-like personality is in a tale from Rob Franklin, who served a few years as the Yankees’ traveling secretary early in Thurman’s career.
“One day he opened a present from a fan, and it was a pair of cuff links,” said Rob. “He took one look, grunted, and said, ‘What the fuck would I want these for!’ I was standing nearby, sorting out ticket requests, and he gave them to me. Not because he liked me, but it was the quickest way he could get rid of them. If the wastebasket was closer than I was, it would have won. I still have them; they are the only pair I own.”
Although billing himself as an “absentee owner,” Steinbrenner made his presence known early. He avoided comment on the tabloid-dream wife swap between Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, which was revealed during spring training (he hadn’t been officially approved by the other American League owners yet), but by opening day he was on record as writing down the uniform numbers of the players whose hair was too long. Number 15 made the list. He had Ralph Houk read the list of numbers to the players, the first step toward an awkward relationship between the manager and the owner.
“He was developing his famous Yankee haircut policy,” said Munson, “about ten years behind the times.”
Steinbrenner, though, liked Munson. He saw him—correctly—as a gamer, a guy who played every day to win, just as his own philosophy dictated. And of course they were a couple of Cleveland-area guys, Thurman from the blue-collar background of Canton, and Steinbrenner born on a farm in Rocky River, where he was assigned an egg business as a child and would go on to run the family’s shipping concerns. He had watched Yankees-Indians games at Municipal Stadium and witnessed Thurman’s on-the-field qualities, and knew that the Yankee catching position was in good hands.
As the June 1973 trading deadline approached, the Yankees found themselves again in a pennant race. On June 7, Lee MacPhail engineered a pair of trades that brought two workhorse starting pitchers to pinstripes: Sam McDowell and Pat Dobson. These were unlike the moves that the CBS Yankees would have pulled off, and clearly reflected the new owner’s philosophy of trading youth for veterans and going for the gold at once.
“If we don’t win it all now, we only have ourselves to blame,” said Bobby Murcer, excited that the team made such bold moves and was taking the pennant race seriously.
A win at Kansas City on June 9 moved the Yankees ahead of the Tigers and into first place. Although they were only five games over .500, Steinbrenner was gleeful about this first-year showing. It was the first time the team had been in first place since 1964. And the Yankees remained in first place all through June and all through July, eventually getting to twelve games over .500. Once again, the PR department was spinning into action with postseason publication plans, the ordering of World Series press pins, and a conference with the local Baseball Writers’ Association about ticket allotments and press box seating. The ticket department began to plan for the printing of postseason tickets.
It was shaping up to be a glorious finale for the final year of old Yankee Stadium!
Munson was, of course, a big part of this success. He was hitting over .300, fielding sensationally, and taking charge of a strong pitching rotation with the great Lyle acting as closer. Blomberg was hitting over .400 as July 4 approached and shared a Sports Illustrated cover with Murcer.
The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry was really taking hold this year as both teams battled for the top, led by their tough catchers.
The Yankees went to Fenway Park for a four-game series July 30-August 2, one game up in the division as the series began. Just weeks earlier, Munson had finished second to Fisk in the All-Star voting. He wasn’t happy about it.
The games were not sellouts, something hard to imagine today. But they were thrilling. The first three were all decided in the ninth inning. After splitting the first two, the Yanks were tied 2-2 in the ninth in game three. Munson was on third and his roommate Stick Michael was at bat.
Houk called for a suicide bunt, and Michael missed it. Here came Munson. Fisk, holding the ball tightly, had to first shove Michael out of the way and then tag the charging Munson. Munson went into him hard and flattened him, but Fisk held on to the ball. The Boston catcher then flipped Munson over to get himself free, causing Munson to retaliate with a punch. Michael then jumped over Munson and began hitting Fisk. Both dugouts and both bullpens emptied, and the fight lasted fifteen minutes before the umpires could restore order. Munson and Fisk were both ejected.
“There was no question I threw the first punch,” said Thurman after the game. “But he started it and then my roomie got into it. Fisk was lucky he didn’t get into a fight last night the way he blocked the plate on Roy White.”
For the Yankees, it all collapsed in late August and September. The team just didn’t have what it took to go the distance. From August 20 until the end of the season, the Yanks went 12-23, and fell back to their now familiar fourth place. While they had been leading the league on the morning of August 1, they managed to finish seventeen games out of first by season’s end.
And the end was really ugly. The Mets were winning the National League East, and patience had worn out in the Bronx. The fans were very tough on Houk, who was loudly booed every time he went to the mound to change pitchers. Banners were displayed demanding his ouster. The promise of a pennant evaporated into an 80-82 season, embarrassing everyone associated with the team.
“The final month was one of the worst I’ve lived through,” said Munson. “The fans were on us every day, especially on Ralph. They were never worse than they were during the last game. It pained me when Ralph was forced to come out and make a pitching change late in the game. He got a terrible booing and walked back to the dugout like a beaten man.”
He was a beaten man, but a beaten man with a secret. He had informed MacPhail and Bob Fishel before the game that he would be resigning after the game. He told them he couldn’t manage for Steinbrenner; couldn’t deal with his meddling.
Of course, the team’s collapse and the fan reaction made the meddling seem irrelevant. A change was needed, and perhaps Houk had become too complacent anyway, working for the benign leadership of Burke and MacPhail. Besides, he already had another job lined up, and would soon be announced as the Tigers’ manager. Ralph was a good baseball politician and engineered his move perfectly.
Still, his resignation after the game, announced in the press room about two hundred feet from the Yankee clubhouse, was a shocker. It ended a thirty-five-year affiliation with the Yankee organization, including three World Series appearances as manager. And as a former catcher, he was a wonderful mentor to Munson, whom he had brought along rapidly by showing enormous confidence in him even when his first two seasons had started out so poorly.
The final game at the old stadium drew only 32,238, most determined to leave with their seats, no matter how much they had to twist them out of the concrete and break their iron legs in the process. Everyone in attendance got an LP of The Sounds of 50 Years at Yankee Stadium (which I had helped to produce), but since a family of four got four records, three would wind up being scaled onto the field, disrupting play on several occasions.
The wrecking ball would arrive the very next morning, with Mrs. Babe Ruth receiving home plate, Mrs. Lou Gehrig getting first base, and most of the active players heading home on Monday flights.
Thurman hit .301 for the season with 20 homers, which would be a career high. Thirteen of them were on the road, as old Yankee Stadium still proved too much for this right-handed hitter to conquer. The new stadium would have more reasonable distances and would do away with the so-called Death Valley
of left-center. To his credit, Thurman worked with the ballpark, never tried to hit home runs, and never lost that smooth swing that sent line drives down the line or into the power alleys. He was a skilled hitter who accepted the geometry of his home park (he had no choice, of course), and worked within its limitations.
He hit only .261 in September, so he was as responsible as any of his teammates for the collapse, and he did not go home feeling very good about the season. But he did feel good about what he saw in the owner and in his will to win. It mirrored what Munson wanted to accomplish.
Thurman didn’t play in the final “lost weekend” of the old stadium. Duke Sims, a journeyman acquired only on September 24, was not only the catcher but had the dubious distinction of hitting the last home run in the old park; Babe Ruth had hit the first. It said a lot about the 1923 Yankees and the 1973 Yankees.
A few weeks after the World Series, Steinbrenner would be placed on suspension by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for his involvement in illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign—a link to the overall scandal known as Watergate. For the franchise, it would be a major setback. Not only would they be heading to Shea Stadium for two years while Yankee Stadium was remodeled, but their new win-at-all-costs owner was going to be sidelined.
9
While the years spent at Shea weren’t a physical burden on the players, the 1974 and 1975 seasons felt like a long road trip just the same.
The Yankee players used the New York Jets locker room, which was not the first-class facility a home team likes to use. It was so cramped it was hard to imagine a full roster of big football players in pads changing there. The incentive was to get dressed quickly and get on the field and out of there.
There were missteps en route. The Yankees tried to hire Dick Williams to manage the team, fresh from his world championships with Oakland. Although Steinbrenner was suspended, it was clearly an early “George move,” going for the glamour of the man who had just won the 1973 Series, and who had then left Charley Finley’s employ in a huff.
The intermediary in getting Williams to the table was Nat Tarnopol, Munson’s friend and also a good friend of Williams. Gabe Paul, now running the Yankees with Steinbrenner’s absence and Lee MacPhail’s departure for the American League presidency, had called on Nat to make the connection. And so Nat had emerged as an important outside power broker, a nice development for Thurman.
Outgoing AL president Joe Cronin, in his final act, vetoed the deal. He said that even though Williams had quit, he was still under contract to the Athletics, and compensation would be required to move him to New York. The proposed compensation from the wily Finley was pitcher Scott McGregor and outfielder Otto Velez, “our crown jewels,” according to Paul.
And so although a press conference was held to introduce Williams to the New York media and photograph him in his Yankee jersey, the deal was off. It was a shame for Munson, because the Tarnopol connection had already made him feel like family with Williams.
“Plan B,” which included a far less lavish press conference, was the strong silent type, Bill Virdon, best known as a Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder and later as the Pirates’ manager. He had a lot going for him: he was available and he would work cheap. Tal Smith, the brilliant baseball man who now held the GM title but who reported to Paul, was a big Virdon advocate. Munson was out of the loop on that one.
So 1974 had all the earmarks of a loony season. The owner was suspended, the stadium was being remodeled, and the manager was a second choice.
The big new off-season acquisition was lovable Lou Piniella, obtained from Kansas City so that the Royals could break in the rather ordinary Jim Wohlford. Piniella, being both hot-tempered and a good sport all at once, would never hear the end of his new teammates’ teasing him about “Jim Fucking Wohlford” taking his job away. Lou was a great baseball mind, had the best smile in the game, and could go from raving lunatic on the field after a bad umpire call to laughter and a smoke and a cold beer in the clubhouse three minutes later. No one who ever played with or for Piniella could ever forget him. Players always got on him about being a big guy and hitting few homers. Piniella and Munson hit it off and remained close to the end.
For Thurman, sadly, there would be a spring training injury in 1974 that never quite healed, and it ruined his reputation for throwing out runners. He would make 22 errors in 1974 while fielding .974 and then 23 errors with a .972 mark in 1975. These were the worst fielding stats for any catcher since World War II, and remained so more than three decades later. How ironic that the records would land on the back of the man who had tied the Yankee fielding percentage record by making only one error in 1971. Almost all the errors were on throws to second that wound up in center field. (Despite this, he won Gold Gloves in 1974 and 1975, a tribute to his reputation for signal calling and general handling of the game behind the plate.)
The injury went back to April 2, an exhibition game between the Yankees and the Mets in Columbia, South Carolina, where ex-Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson was the head coach at the University of South Carolina, and had persuaded the team to play an exhibition there on their way north. Early in the game, a Mets outfielder named Dave Schneck, a left-handed hitter, swung through a pitch, and his backswing made contact with Munson’s throwing hand, right where the thumb and the forefinger come together. Thurman dropped to his knees in pain, but played four more innings.
While at bat later in the game, he was jammed with a pitch and the very act of holding the bat hurt. X-rays failed to reveal anything at that time, and Thurman played opening day and then caught 144 games that season.
“He suffered a deep bruise of the thumb/forefinger junction in his hand and a deep bruise of his thumb’s thenar eminence,” said Gene Monahan, the Yankees’ athletic trainer. The thenar eminence is the large muscular base of the thumb on the palm side.
This would later be compounded by a wear-and-tear shoulder injury that eventually required surgery. According to Monahan, “He injured the distal end of his clavicle, the collarbone. It was injured at the end where it meets the acromion. The cartilage there was torn up and the actual tip of the clavicle deteriorated. He had to have it resected, shaved down. He ended up throwing sidearm for that reason.”
“I wish I had rested more,” Munson said. “I played every game in pain and pushed myself too hard. I definitely would have had better numbers in ’74 if it wasn’t for the hand. I’m not trying to make excuses, but I really couldn’t grip the bat properly and my whole defensive game was hurting. It’s disappointing to me because I felt I could have helped the club a lot more. Maybe if I didn’t hurt the hand we would have come out on top.”
Not until 1977 would he feel that he was back at full strength.
Pain or not, his pitchers wanted him out there.
Not everyone felt this way, of course. There was Rick Dempsey, a catcher who came to the Yankees in 1973 and stayed until 1976. He was what Houk was to Yogi—the backup. But he also had terrific defensive skills in his own right, including an accurate rifle of an arm.
Dempsey loved Munson as a teammate, but it would drive him crazy that his managers (Bill Virdon and Billy Martin) couldn’t see the logic of having him catch and just finding another place for Munson. It killed him to see all those throws drift into the outfield, as they curved away from whoever was covering the base.
Despite this natural in-house rivalry, Dempsey and Munson had a special affinity for each other, even a special sign of friendship between them, where Munson would tuck in his three middle fingers and wiggle the thumb and pinky. In 1973 Munson told the rookie, “You’re the kid who’s gonna try to take my job, aren’t you?”
Dempsey replied, “Yeah, if I can.”
“Well, nice to have you around,” said Thurman, and he put his arm around his shoulder.
“From that day on Thurman was my idol,” Rick says. “He was always reassuring me, telling me that someday I would get my chance. He was never afraid to tel
l me how I could go about taking his job.”
Later, when Dempsey was with Baltimore, he stole second and scored on a close play in the ninth. “Thurman was really mad ’cause he thought I was out,” says Rick. “But in the bottom of the inning, he smiled at me from the dugout and flashed our sign, meaning, ‘Nice going, kid.’”
“Rick did go on to be a first-rate big-league catcher,” says Tippy Martinez, his Yankee teammate who wound up going with him to the Orioles in the big 1976 trade. “And if you’re a big leaguer, you have to feel that you’re good enough to be a regular, and he did. He loved Munson, like we all did, but sure, it would frustrate him to see all those errors, knowing he had such a great arm.
“But the part about calling the game and working the whole dynamics—Rick just wasn’t there yet at that stage of his career. There is so much you have to learn about that. Like the way Thurman would work his pitchers with the umpires, how he’d quietly argue on their behalf with the umps when nobody but he and the batter and the umpire knew about it. We didn’t even know about it on the mound sometimes. But he was always there pulling for us.
“The other thing he taught me was about respecting rookies. They were full teammates, he’d tell me, just like anyone else. Usually, rookies were kind of ignored. But he’d call me for breakfast or for coffee and he’d tell me what a great future I had and I never forgot that. In my fourteen-year career, I always thought about Thurman whenever a rookie would show up.”
Rick Manning was a rookie outfielder with the Indians in 1975. “I was tagging up to try and score on a fly ball and I went into home headfirst,” he recalls. “Thurman was waiting for me and knocked me silly. As I walked away he said, ‘Hey Rook, don’t do that again.’
“I told him not to worry; I wouldn’t. But he was always playing mind games with you.
“He’d talk a lot behind the plate and tell me what pitch was coming. I wouldn’t believe him, and sure enough, they’d throw that pitch. I’d take it and Thurman would shake his head and say, ‘I told you it was going to be a fastball.’”