Munson

by Marty Appel

A game-tying, two-run homer by Roy White, perhaps the team’s most important hit of the year, helped to send the Yanks to a 6-5 win, with Reggie getting the game-winning single in the eleventh. This was where the season began to take fire.

  The Yanks swept that series to move just two games back, continued to enjoy a strong July, and stayed in first or second with the Red Sox for much of the summer. Baltimore got into it as well, and it was a terrific pennant race.

  It was a summer of discontent for Billy Martin, of course, with the threat of being fired constantly upon him. He would have been gone had not third base coach Dick Howser said no to an offer to replace him.

  In Baltimore on July 11, Munson turned to a rare use of the newspapers to advance a cause, telling Murray Chass and Newsday’s Steve Jacobson, “George is calling the shots from upstairs and dictating the lineup to Billy.” He said to attribute it to “a prominent Yankee.”

  “George tells him who to play,” he said. “He doesn’t want competition, he wants a slaughter. To win, you need nine good players, plus some capable utility players and a pitching staff. George wants twenty-five superstars. George doesn’t care about anybody’s feelings. To him, we’re not professionals, we’re all employees. He treats everybody like that. Everybody on the club has experienced it. He’s done something to everybody. He’s destroyed Billy. He’s made him nothing. Not a single guy on the club is happy except Willie [Randolph].”

  Things were getting so heated that Steinbrenner made a rare road trip to meet up with the team in Milwaukee on July 12. This was almost a month after the Fenway Park meltdown, but the Boss was still after Billy for embarrassing the Yankees.

  The pressure on Billy was weighing down the whole club, which at the time was still just one and a half games out of first.

  In Milwaukee, after a night game, Piniella and Munson went to Sally’s, a popular ballplayer gathering spot, to have some drinks and talk about the team’s situation. To them, it felt unlikely that they could win another pennant with this cloud hanging over them. They decided to go to the Pfister Hotel and confront Steinbrenner in his room—telling him to either fire Martin or get off his back.

  Steinbrenner opened the door in his pajamas. For two hours, the three men sat and talked. As bizarre as the incident appeared, it was a sign of leadership that these two respected players—one the team captain, the other a future manager of great success—would decide to take this fight on.

  Martin’s suite was on the same floor. Arriving back at the hotel well past the start of the secret meeting, he heard voices and knocked. Piniella and Munson, trapped like lovers when the husband returns from a business trip a day early, dove into the shower and pulled the curtain closed. They didn’t want Martin to see that they had gone over his head to solve the team’s problems.

  Martin knew he had heard voices and helped himself to a tour. He found them.

  It was a ridiculous moment at two o’clock in the morning. And it didn’t really clear the air, or if it did, it cleared it for a few days, at best.

  Meanwhile, the story with quotes from the “prominent Yankee” ran in all the New York papers. Seemingly wishing to make the story go away, as though insignificant, Steinbrenner decided that the prominent Yankee was Carlos May, who played sixty-five games that year for the team, mostly as a designated hitter. (I liked Carlos because a year earlier, Steinbrenner had actually sought out my opinion on whether to get him, and I said he was a good gap hitter.)

  If the use of May’s name was a ruse to get the real player to reveal himself, it worked. Munson went to Steinbrenner and told him that it was he who was the “prominent Yankee” quoted in the story. But he didn’t apologize for it. He just wanted him to know it wasn’t May.

  At the Sheraton Royal Hotel in Kansas City the next day, Steinbrenner called a team meeting—most unusual for an owner—and delivered a pep talk to pump up the team for the second half of the season. It wasn’t a lovefest. He cajoled the players to live up to their high salaries, and then jumped on anonymous players who leaked things to the press.

  “The one funny note in it,” recalled Fran Healy, “was that Ted Turner had recently worn a uniform and taken over as manager of the Braves for a day. Steinbrenner threatened that he would do the same thing if necessary. The thought of that was pretty funny.”

  The reference to players who leak to the press really angered Thurman, who had let his teammates know that it was he, and that he had told Steinbrenner it was he. But the Boss’s comments made Munson look like a liar—that he had said he had taken responsibility but in fact hadn’t.

  “So as the All-Star Game arrived,” he said for our book, “I was in a bad frame of mind. Jackson’s magazine story bugged me, I felt deceived over my contract, and I felt I’d been made to look like a fool in Kansas City.”

  The All-Star Game was played in Yankee Stadium. Fisk outpolled Munson again to be the starting catcher, another embarrassment for Thurman for the game in his own home ballpark. He was getting grumpier by the day.

  And then there came “the beard episode.”

  Steinbrenner’s no-beard policy was to be enforced, of course, by Martin. Munson happened to be a guy who liked growing a beard and often did so in the off-season. Now, on top of all that was going on around them, Munson decided not to shave for eleven days, starting in late July.

  “Let this walrus off at Sea World,” said Piniella to the team’s bus driver. It was funny, but everyone knew it was actually growing into a political issue. Would Martin order it shaved? Would Steinbrenner order Martin to order Munson? Or would he just explode on Billy for having lost control of the team?

  The drama, as well as the beard, was growing. Never mind how uncomfortable it must have been to wear a catcher’s mask with the beard. Now it was the George-Billy-Thurman Show.

  When Murray Chass called Steinbrenner to ask him point-blank about Munson’s beard, Steinbrenner said, “Beard? What beard? I didn’t even know about it. What do you mean, Thurman’s beard? Does he have a beard?”

  With the press now fueling the “crisis,” Thurman quietly shaved it off before an exhibition game in Syracuse on August 8. The Yankees were there to play their Triple-A farm team, and Don Ross, a well-liked restaurateur and friend to many players who had played for the Chiefs, went to Munson’s room at the Sheraton armed with a pizza, a razor, and cream, and stood by for the “historic” shave.

  Apparently Martin had quietly spoken with Munson the day before. Diana had cried on the phone over stories of Thurman creating tension between Martin and Steinbrenner.

  It became a nonissue in the bathroom of Munson’s hotel room around 1:15 in the afternoon. Another crisis passed. But the very act of his shaving was a huge story in New York and even made the national wires. The Yankees were now giving papers all over the country game stories and off-the-field stories, and journalists were jumping over one another to be the first with the latest.

  “I was more determined than ever to get out of New York,” he said for the book. “The problems at the ballpark made me feel closer to Diane and the children, and seek more gratification from my business interests. It all added up to my wanting to go home, where I could play ball in peace and attend to the things in life that matter to me.”

  Distractions aside, there was a pennant race to be fought. On August 23 in Chicago, Mike Torrez beat Wilbur Wood and the Yanks went into first place to stay. They wound up with one hundred wins, three more than in 1976, and won by two and a half games. It took a lot out of everybody.

  Coming off his MVP season, Munson had another big year at the plate, hitting .308 with 18 homers and 100 RBIs. He was seventh in the MVP voting.

  Again facing the Royals, Billy Martin defied conventional wisdom by benching Jackson in the fifth and deciding game; one last effort to show the Boss who was boss, even if it meant he was managing his last game.

  In the eighth inning, Jackson pinch-hit a run-scoring single, the Yanks went on to take the lead, and Sparky Lyle, who would win the C
y Young Award, nailed it down to give the Yanks another pennant. In the clubhouse, Martin poured champagne over Steinbrenner’s head and said, “That’s for trying to fire me.”

  Thurman hit .286 in the Championship Series with a home run, and then .320 in the World Series against the Dodgers with a home run in the fifth game. As Munson rounded the bases after the homer, Dodger pitcher Don Sutton shouted, “Is that as hard as you can hit it?” Thurman laughed.

  Between games two and three of the Series, Munson broke his silence with the press and let out a lot of frustration. “I’ve been in the middle of controversy all year that I didn’t cause,” he told the assembled press corps. “There was the magazine article where Reggie put me down. Then I’m told by Steinbrenner if I don’t get along with Reggie they’re going to fire the manager … You’ll never read an article that I haven’t stuck up for Billy. I’ve got five more games at the most to put up with this crap. All year I’ve been trying to live down the image I was jealous of somebody making more money. Somebody asked me, ‘Did you bury your pride?’ No, I postponed it.

  “We have a chance to win a Series ring, and a guy is second-guessing the manager. If I was hitting .111 I wouldn’t be second-guessing the goddamned manager. And I’m going to stop talking because the more I talk the madder I get.”

  The .111 remark was directed at Jackson, who was fuming over Billy sitting him down against Kansas City. And with sarcasm, Thurman inadvertently coined a name that would live on for decades, would appear on Reggie’s Hall of Fame plaque, and would be copyrighted by Jackson for marketing purposes. Said Munson: “Billy probably just doesn’t realize Reggie is Mr. October.”

  A nickname born out of sarcasm. It’s even part of Reggie’s e-mail address today.

  That is the Series that is best remembered for Jackson’s remarkable game six, in which he hit home runs on three consecutive pitches, putting his name in the record books with five homers in a World Series and three in one game. He thrived in the big spotlight, and he proved that he was indeed the missing link, the cure for what had been the Yanks’ failings the year before.

  After the third home run, Thurman had a huge smile on his face, visible to all watching TV or seeing still photos. The smile said it all: Big guy, you may have been a pain in the ass to have around, but you gave us what we needed, and I tip my hat to you. You are a money ballplayer.

  This was it, this was the dream fulfilled. Tuesday night, October 18, 1977, Yankee Stadium. The Yankees beat their historic rivals and won their twenty-first World Series. In his eighth full season in the major leagues, Thurman Munson was the captain of a world championship club. He had played every day of every year as though that was the goal, and now it was realized. He was exhausted, exhilarated, and energized all at once.

  The usually camera-shy Munson did go on TV with Bill White during the clubhouse celebration on ABC. White, uncomfortable but being pressed by ABC to ask tough questions, tried to get Thurman to talk about whether he wanted to play in New York the following year, but Munson would have none of it. He didn’t dislike being a Yankee, but his flirtation with playing for the Indians or retiring would have to be dealt with on another day, in another place.

  12

  After the 1977 season, Thurman had surgery on his right shoulder to alleviate friction in the acromioclavicular joint. He had it done in Los Angeles, and George Steinbrenner flew out to visit him and lend support at the hospital. The surgery was deemed to be successful, and it left him feeling good about his throwing again. He would be at his physical best since 1973.

  Then he did his first television commercial.

  Yes, the grouchy, reclusive, scruffy ragamuffin that was Munson, actually did a TV commercial. Not that many active baseball players did commercials—Rose, Bench, Seaver, Jackson; that was about it.

  The product was Williams’s Lectric Shave preshave lotion, of all things, and the thirty-second spot was a surprise to everyone who had listened to him for years about not getting respect, not getting opportunities like this. He had fun doing it and showed some personality and sparkle with his delivery. And it did recall his adventure with his beard.

  In a mock office of George Steinbrenner, not unlike the set we came to see in the later Seinfeld programs, Munson, in uniform, tells his boss, “I wanna use Lectric Shave and I’ll be the best-looking catcher in the game …” Then, exiting, he looks over his shoulder and with a nice smile says, “Well, one of the best.”

  “That commercial captured him,” said Scott Davis, an old family friend from Canton. “He had a good sense of humor and he didn’t take himself too seriously.”

  He groused and pouted, sometimes admitting that retirement was an option, sometimes saying Cleveland was the only solution, and sometimes acknowledging that New York was the only place to play.

  As much as he might have complained about playing in New York, there was no way the Yankees were about to trade him to Cleveland—or anywhere. He was the heart and soul of a world championship team—irreplaceable, really.

  So he went to spring training in 1978 and shut off the media. He was in the third year of a four-year contract he had signed in 1976, and it continued to gnaw at him, knowing, as he felt certain, that Jackson was making more than he was. Finally, peace on this issue would come to him during spring training, when without announcement he signed a new four-year contract, good through 1981, that would peak at just under $387,000 a year, guaranteed. He was satisfied, but still bitter over his pay from the preceding years.

  He turned his attention to the Beechcraft Duke parked next door at Fort Lauderdale’s Executive Airport. There, he took flying lessons and got away from the ballpark and the writers. Sometimes Piniella flew with him.

  Piniella told Maury Allen, “He enjoyed the freedom. On a few occasions [that spring] I went up with him. A pilot-instructor was at his side. Thurman was at the controls. I would listen to the instructors talk and they all seemed impressed at how well he was doing, how fast he was learning, and how rapidly he was progressing.”

  The first plane he bought was a Beechcraft Duke twin-piston engine, around the time he was licensed, June 11, 1978, after ninety-one hours of flight time, twenty-five of them solo. Four days later he received the FAA multi-engine rating, and by December 22 he had an instrument rating after just under three hundred total flying hours. The instrument rating allowed him to use larger airports, which relied on ground control, and to fly in inclement weather using only his instruments as guidance. It was a big step.

  “He was proud of the possession,” Piniella says. “He didn’t have much as a kid. He kept his cars spotless. Baseball was a means to make his family and his life comfortable and enjoy the material things he had worked hard for. He knew his career wasn’t going to last that much longer.”

  The camp was in its usual disarray anyway. In the never-ending pursuit of glamour players, the Yankees had gone out and signed Goose Gossage, the great relief star, despite the fact that they had one in Sparky Lyle, the reigning Cy Young Award winner.

  “He went from Cy Young to sayonara,” quipped Nettles.

  There is a tendency, thirty years later, to run the 1977 and 1978 seasons together as though they were one. Both had clubhouse tensions, both were world championship seasons, both involved beating Kansas City in the ALCS and then the Dodgers in the World Series. Nineteen seventy-eight was known as the season of The Bronx Zoo, after Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock combined for a best-selling book of that name. Nineteen seventy-seven was featured in The Bronx Is Burning, an eight-hour miniseries on ESPN (shown in 2007), which was first a book by Jonathan Mahler called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, published in 2005.

  The biggest differences were that Billy Martin managed the entire 1977 season, while ’78 was split between Martin and Bob Lemon. Nineteen seventy-seven saw a late-summer course correction that sent the Yankees into the postseason; 1978 needed one of the great comebacks of all time to overcome the deficit they had created. Ron Guidry’s 1978 s
eason was one of the greatest of any starting pitcher in baseball history; Jackson’s 1977 World Series was one of the greatest of any hitter in baseball history. The 1977 season had Lyle as the closer; ’78 had Gossage. Brian Doyle played second base in place of the injured Willie Randolph in the ’78 postseason.

  Gossage’s replacement of Lyle as the “closer” meant Munson had to accept his friend’s demotion and welcome a new friend. The two got along just fine. As Gossage told Bob Cairns for the book Pen Men,

  Munson was a hell of a guy, his own man, but you know, that’s the way the whole team was. There were a lot of those guys. Everybody was a man’s man, did what they wanted to do and said what they wanted to say. If they felt like saying “Fuck you!” they’d tell you, “Fuck you!” Munson was probably even more outspoken than everybody else except Reggie. Munson was smart. Sometimes when I was pitching he’d just throw his hand out and wave for the ball, show me and the hitter exactly where he wanted it, “Come on, bring it up, bring it right here, fastball!” And I’d say, “Damn, Munce, at least do that down so they can’t see it!” And he’d say “Why? You’re not gonna trick anybody!” It wasn’t an argument; it was just a fun thing between us. And I’d say, “At least give me a fuckin’ sign or something.” But he’d just wave it so the whole world could see, here comes the fastball.

  For two months [in 1978] I stunk. I’d come onto the mound and Munson would say, “Hey fuckhead, how are you gonna lose this one?” And I’d say, “I don’t know, can I get back to you? I have a feelin’ we’re gonna find out! You just catch!” It was unbelievable. One time I’m having trouble and I’m getting the sign from Munson. He calls time out and walks out there and says, “Hey shithead, check Rivers out!” I turned around and look out at center field and here’s Rivers in a three-point stance, facing the wall getting ready to run down the next pitch. All I could see was his ass, sticking up in the air. I said, “That son of a bitch!” But we had the greatest senses of humor on that team. Shit happened like that all the time.