by Marty Appel
The Chambliss blast sent the Yankees to their first World Series in a dozen years, and as Chris raised his arms in triumph, steps from home plate, Munson, in his chest protector and shin guards, could be seen leaping from the dugout with the shriek of youthful delight that you’d hope would go with such a historic moment. The losing years were over. The Yankees were American League champions and going to their thirtieth World Series.
The Series opened in Cincinnati, all too quickly. The Reds were better rested and had their rotation in order. The Yanks had to fight and claw to win the pennant late on Thursday evening, October 14. The celebration followed on into the morning, when the exhausted team got on the bus for the airport and flew to Cincinnati. On Saturday, October 16, it all began. The Yankees had to start Doyle Alexander because neither Hunter, Figueroa, nor Ellis was rested, and Martin had chosen to ignore Ken Holtzman for reasons that remain a mystery.
The Big Red Machine, one of the great dynasties in baseball history, was simply too strong for the Yankees. They won 5-1 and 6-2 over the weekend at Riverfront Stadium. Back in New York, the Yankees quietly went down 6-2 and 7-2 before home crowds that had little to cheer about. Seven runs in four quick games. The players were pressing, Martin was tense and frustrated, Steinbrenner was angry, and the joy of the pennant was quickly forgotten.
Munson, however, was having a great time. He was busy collecting nine hits in the four games, batting .435, chatting up the Reds players as they came to the plate, and totally in love with the experience of being in the World Series. Four of his hits came in the final game, tying a World Series record for hits in a game. He wasn’t happy about losing, of course, but he was enjoying the competition and the thrill of being in the Fall Classic. At one point, when Reds manager Sparky Anderson went to the mound to confer with his pitcher, the official World Series film captured Pete Rose saying of Munson, “Man, he can flat out hit.”
He had the highest batting average of any player on a losing World Series team. Ever. And then the experience turned bad.
In the postgame interview room down the right field line and under the stadium stands, Series MVP Johnny Bench, who twice homered in the final game, spoke to the press. His manager Sparky Anderson was there as well.
Bob Fishel, my old Yankee boss and now the American League’s PR director, asked Munson to come to the interview room to represent the Yanks. Martin wouldn’t come. Thurman took the responsibility to represent his teammates and went to the room.
As he entered, Anderson was speaking. He was talking about how the Reds had “the most class” of any team in sports.
Someone asked Sparky to compare the two great catchers who had just played in the Series.
“Munson is an outstanding ballplayer and he would hit .300 in the National League, but don’t ever compare anybody to Johnny Bench, don’t never embarrass nobody by comparing them to Johnny Bench,” he said.
If you read the quote over and over, you could take the position that he was just lauding it on Bench and almost begging off the question of comparison. But Munson, in the room and hearing this, grew livid. Bench had batted .234 in the regular season with 16 homers and 74 RBIs. Thurman had a right to consider himself the best catcher in baseball, at least for 1976.
Anderson exited.
When Munson got to the mike, he was bitter.
“For me to be belittled after the season I had and after the game I had … it’s bad enough to lose, but worse to be belittled like that. To win four in a row and rub it in, that’s class. To rub it in my face.”
Some writers were confused by this tirade by Thurman, which was not in answer to any question. One said, “Are you talking about what Sparky said?”
Munson responded, “No, I’m talking about Mickey Mouse. They’re a good ball club, but I don’t believe that stuff about how good their pitching is. They outplayed us in every way, but I’m a realistic person too. When you lose four in a row, any team’s embarrassed. But to be belittled on top of the embarrassment is not nice to hear, especially when you’re standing next to somebody. But I don’t know if he knew I was standing there or not. I never compared myself to Johnny Bench, but if I played in the National League, I might be the best offensive player in the league.”
Someone took the bait and asked him to compare Billy Martin to Sparky Anderson.
“I never played for Sparky, but they both talk a lot.”
Bench was now in the room. Munson left the mike and shook hands with him. “Nice going, J.B.,” he could be heard saying. “Super.”
Billy Martin was crying in the training room and didn’t attend the press conference, as a manager is expected to. He’d been ejected from the final game for rolling a ball in disgust and frustration at the home plate umpire. Steinbrenner entered the training room and let him have it for the way the Yankees played, accusing him of not having the team ready.
After the glory of the pennant just days before, this was one miserable night in the Bronx.
Three weeks later, Anderson sent a letter of apology to Munson, which was released to the press by the Reds. It said:
Dear Thurman:
First or all, I hope you will accept my sincere apology. I had no intention of trying to belittle you or any other catcher. What I said about comparing Bench to another catcher, I have said not only this year, but in other years.
Thurman, I might be at fault for speaking so strongly on Bench, but that is the way I feel. I sure hope I will never purposely try to belittle anyone.
I only hope you will know how sincere I am about this letter.
Sincerely,
Sparky
Thurman said he never got the letter. If it was sent through the PR office, I never got it either. It may still be sitting somewhere in the clubhouse.
The day before the 1976 American League MVP announcement would be made, Steinbrenner sent off a letter to Munson, addressed to his New Jersey home. This one reached him:
November 15, 1976
Mr. Thurman Munson
315 15th Street
Norwood, New Jersey
Dear Thurm:
A short note to say that Whitey Ford has been lined up to receive your award from Cue Magazine, but more importantly, to tell you how proud I am of all the honors that you’ve accumulated this year.
While I know the Series was somewhat of a bitter pill, you had a great Series and we did win the American League Championship—our first Pennant in 12 years, so I think that’s plenty enough this year. I just know that you’re going to win the Most Valuable Player Award in the American League, but the fact that in the Major League All Star Team you pulled more votes than any player is indeed a tribute to the kind of year you had.
Sometimes in the haste of everyday business we don’t take time to say “Nice Going!” to others, and I just remembered after talking to you the other day that I had failed to add that.
Best regards,
George
Munson felt he had earned the MVP award, but he wasn’t sure he’d get it, since he often didn’t speak to the media, and it was the writers who voted.
On November 16, Thurman was in New Jersey when his phone rang at three p.m. It was Jack Lang, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA). As a beat writer for the Mets, he was not well known by Munson, so the conversation was formal.
“You’ve been elected MVP in the American League,” said Lang. “Congratulations.”
Munson asked him about the voting. He had received eighteen of the twenty-four first-place votes for a huge margin of victory over George Brett, who had two. One each went to Rivers, Rod Carew, Amos Otis, and rookie pitching sensation Mark Fidrych. Thurman was the first Yankee to win the award since Elston Howard in 1963. He became the first catcher to win both the Rookie of the Year Award and the MVP in the American League.
A press conference would be held in a few hours at the Americana Hotel in New York (now the Sheraton Centre). Lang asked me to preside, claiming he had another
commitment. It was rare for the BBWAA to pass on an opportunity like this, but of course I agreed.
The turnout on the short notice was small. Thurman, the king of polyester, wore a plaid sports jacket with a tie and sweater.
“I’m proud that I won,” he said of the MVP. “I know it wasn’t politics. I won this on my ability.”
Both Steinbrenner and Paul were in the room. It caught them by surprise when Thurman made mention of “a new contract.” With free agency looming, he was preparing for the Yankees’ signing some big free agents—maybe Don Gullett and Bobby Grich—and for his salary to be adjusted to meet theirs, and to include a World Series adjustment. At least that was what he believed.
I was asked about this the next day by the press and said, “I’m sure it is something that Mr. Steinbrenner and Thurman will talk through.” I was trying to diffuse what I thought would be a mild controversy that was interfering with the big news about the award.
Steinbrenner didn’t like my response at all. Even in the afterglow of the MVP award, he was ready to issue a statement putting Thurman in his place in terms of a possible renegotiation.
This would not be a quiet off-season. Those days were gone.
11
As Thurman’s—and the Yankees’—successes on the field grew, his relationship with the media kept getting worse. Those who covered him early in his career, like Vic Ziegel, remembered him as “always cooperative and friendly,” but now a darkness was forming over those relationships, leading many to wonder what had gone wrong.
After the 1976 season, Hillerich & Bradsby, the Louisville Slugger bat people, asked Thurman if he would contribute an essay on hitting to their Famous Slugger Yearbook annual. Thurman was fine with it and asked Murray Chass of the Times to help him.
“If I could draw a line between good Thurman and bad Thurman with the media, it would be around there,” recalls Chass, later inducted into the Writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
He was basically a good guy, and easygoing with the media. I remember him and me playing tennis together in Dallas in ’75 after the All-Star Game. You could pal around with him; there wasn’t a division between him and the writers. But over the next couple of years, that began to change, and I think he was edged away from us by Nettles and maybe some others. They didn’t like to see him too close to the writers, and however they did it, they pushed him so far that he’d have the batboy bring his clothes into the training room after a game so he didn’t have to spend time at his locker with us.
Nettles could be funny and give us a sarcastic line, and even if he hated us, we were still drawn to him and he was okay with us. But when he pushed Thurman against us, Thurm didn’t have that light touch, couldn’t deliver the one-liner, and just became a grouchy guy. There were times I’d pull him back by just saying, “Thurman, don’t be a jerk,” and maybe he’d pause and give me a moment. But there was no single incident that set him off; nothing that we ever wrote that caused him to say, “I’m through with you.” It was a shame because basically, he was just a good, regular guy to be with.
I was sorry that I never had a long talk with him about the place of the media in the industry of baseball. It might have shown him a different side. Since the game had begun, baseball had enjoyed so much free publicity in the sports pages of newspapers and in the sports segments of TV and radio reports. That free advertising for the product was really the lifeblood of the game. Without it, the teams could never afford the kind of ad campaign that would give the fans all they needed to know and keep them coming to the games. Movies and TV shows get one review, and if they are really huge, maybe one additional feature story. And that’s it—the rest is up to their advertising departments. Baseball has that flow of daily coverage that simply makes the game work as a professional business. Players need to be told that.
Of course, baseball has helped to sell a lot of newspapers too. It’s a two-way street.
Maury Allen of the New York Post never warmed up to Thurman’s personality. “He was sour by nature,” says Maury. “There was no single incident that I can recall. When he first came up I walked over and introduced myself and congratulated him for becoming a member of the Yankees. He said, ‘What took them so long?’”
It was probably just Thurman’s attempt at humor, and some might have found it funny. His teammates always loved his needling sense of humor. He had said pretty much the same thing to Gene Michael when he came up for the Binghamton game in 1968.
Rick Gentile, later a sports executive for CBS, was a UPI reporter back then. “He was a very intimidating presence in the clubhouse for a young guy like me. My most vivid memory is of asking him about a game-winning double that he laced to right-center with two out and two on in the ninth. I asked him if he was looking for a particular pitch in that situation or just for something he could drive. His response: ‘Fuck you.’ I guess he was having a bad week with the press.”
“When I was a rookie reporter in spring training, he saw me waiting forlornly at the ballpark for a taxi,” says Marty Noble, then of the Bergen Record. “So he offered me a ride to my hotel, which was out of his way. He didn’t make a big deal of it. It didn’t matter that I was a writer. He had an inherently good side.”
The infectiously likable Phil Pepe of the Daily News was covering the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale when Thurman casually asked him, “How’s it going?” Pepe responded that he missed his family, but it was too costly to bring them all down, so it was just part of the spring training routine of a beat reporter.
Barely missing a beat, Thurman said, “I’ll pay for them to come down.” Pepe, in need of no charity, wouldn’t hear of it but was blown away by the gesture. And Thurman stuck to it—he wouldn’t let his ledger show that he’d made a generous offer and then got off the hook. He insisted.
“I know he never wanted me to tell anyone,” admitted Pepe. “It would have ruined his image. But he really made that offer and I did tell it to people over the years. He deserved to be seen as not always cranky and cantankerous.”
Pepe once asked Munson for his home number in Canton during the off-season in case something came up for which he needed comment. Most writers undertook this sort of exercise as September wound down. Few bothered to ask Munson. They wouldn’t have gotten it.
And sure enough, Munson wouldn’t give his number to Pepe. But he said to him, “Here, call Tote.” That would have been his father-in-law, Tony Dominick. “Tell him who you are and why you’re calling. He’ll call me and if I feel like calling you back, I will. If I don’t, I won’t.”
Fair enough.
And so one day, Pepe needed to call. He left his number at the Daily News with Tote, and said Thurman should call back, collect.
Collect calls were a big deal in the days before telephone deregulation, phone cards, and cell phones. People would go through a time-consuming process to follow the “collect” procedure to save a buck.
But Pepe’s phone rang and it was Thurman’s voice, not an operator asking if he’d accept a collect call.
“Why didn’t you call me collect?” asked Pepe.
“If I do that, I get some operator or someone in your office, I have to give my name, and then they know I’m calling a sportswriter and it would ruin my image!”
Of course, Thurman restored his image by not talking to Pepe for a year after Phil wrote about the secret clubhouse meeting in 1975.
Maybe Sparky Lyle had it down best. “Thurman’s not moody,” he laughed. “Moody means sometimes you’re nice.”
The Yankees signed former Reds pitcher Don Gullett as their first-ever free agent (apart from Hunter) the day after Munson’s MVP announcement, so with Munson still in town, he came to the press conference, again at the Americana, and helped welcome his new battery mate to the team. Then attention turned to signing Bobby Grich, who could play shortstop for them.
Reggie Jackson loomed large out there as the glamour star of the first free agent class. Some on the team wanted no part of
him. “His ego was too large, he wasn’t a team player, he wasn’t that good in the field, and was no longer a great base runner,” ran the comments.
And although he could hit the ball a mile, even there he was inconsistent throughout his career. People are amazed to discover that in his twenty-one-year, 563-home run career, he never hit 30 homers two years in a row. There was good Reggie and bad Reggie, on and off the field.
Munson was an advocate for getting Jackson. He knew in his heart that the team could use a big bat in the middle of the lineup. At a winter sports banquet in Syracuse that year, he encouraged Steinbrenner to sign him. “Go get the big man,” he said to his absent boss. “The hell with what you hear about him. He’s the only guy in baseball who can carry a club for a month. He hustles every minute on the field.”
Perhaps spurred on by his captain’s words, Steinbrenner became obsessed with getting Jackson. He knew stars were important in New York. He knew Reggie put “asses in the seats.”
He seduced him with a big contract and talk of owning New York. And on the morning of November 29, 1976, he got Jackson to sign a five-year contract at the Americana, after which we all went to a press conference in the same room, the Versailles Terrace, that had served as the venue for Munson’s MVP announcement earlier in the month.
Munson flew in from Ohio for this press conference, having been told the day before that it was likely. For him, it was more than a press conference; it was, he thought, a salary boost for himself. Roy White, the senior Yankee, was there, along with coach Elston Howard, the first African-American Yankee, and Yogi Berra, also a coach. Reggie’s father, Martinez Jackson, a tailor, was present, as well as his mother. His parents were divorced.
At the mike, Thurman said, “I felt we needed a left-handed power hitter and an outfielder who could throw. Jackson fits the bill. I’m thinking of the team.”