Munson

by Marty Appel

  Munson was more actively in the midst of swirling clubhouse controversies in 1977 than he was in ’78, when he seemed to keep his head low and stay out of the news as best he could. Inwardly, he was still pouting over what he felt had been a betrayal over Steinbrenner’s not raising his salary to match Jackson’s.

  He skipped the mandatory Yankees “Welcome Home Luncheon” in April (along with Nettles, Lyle, and Rivers) and was fined five hundred dollars. Little was asked of him as team captain; his skipping the event no doubt infuriated Steinbrenner.

  For Thurman, small nagging injuries began to take their toll. His arm (technically his hand and shoulder) had improved to the best it had felt since before the 1974 backswing injury. He was back there when Guidry fanned eighteen in June for a Yankee record, the day the fans began to rise on two strikes to help encourage a strikeout. It still happens to this day.

  But his knees and legs were starting to betray him. The idea of his being behind the plate for 125 games or more seemed to stretch reality.

  In the 1978 season, he would play thirteen games in right field, and actually hit .351 in the games he started there, as opposed to .289 when he caught. He got by in right field, but in one game he made a costly error when he dropped a fly ball. It wasn’t the best situation, but the Yankees wanted him hitting third in the lineup, and they recognized that he might be a defensive liability from time to time. Mike Heath and Cliff Johnson caught when he wasn’t available.

  The growing pain in his knees made him less potent at bat, where he hit only 6 homers for the season, just two of them at home. His .297 average and just 71 RBIs ended the streak of three consecutive .300-average, 100-RBI seasons.

  Without Munson central to the mix, the season’s controversies fell on Martin and Jackson and the continuing power struggle between Martin and Steinbrenner over how to use Reggie in the lineup.

  On July 17, Martin ordered Jackson to bunt. No one could believe it. Baseball just wasn’t played that way any longer. The team had thirty-seven sacrifices all season.

  The bunt sign was removed, but Jackson continued to attempt to lay one down, eventually striking out on a foul as he sought to show up his manager. The incident passed but the Yankees lost in eleven innings, partly on the fly ball dropped by Thurman in right field.

  Martin went crazy in his office after the game and called Al Rosen, the team president, to demand that Jackson be suspended for the season. Rosen suspended his superstar for five games for defying the manager’s order once the bunt sign was removed. The team was now fourteen games behind Boston and sinking quickly.

  This was the beginning of the end for Martin. He was drinking heavily and had a self-destructive gene within him anyway. He was about to throw away the best job he ever had.

  The suspension over and Jackson back with the team, comments were being made by both Martin and Jackson to select media. Finally came the fatal line. Referring to Jackson and Steinbrenner, Martin said, “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar, and the other’s convicted,” the latter comment referring to Steinbrenner’s conviction for illegal campaign contributions.

  It essentially resulted in Billy’s first firing as manager, although conversations with his agent turned it into a tear-filled resignation. I had nothing but compassion for my young successor as PR director, Mickey Morabito, who was trying to maintain some Yankee dignity through all of this, and trying to keep up with the news as it happened.

  In came Bob Lemon to succeed Martin. Lem had been fired as manager of the White Sox on June 30.

  Everyone in baseball loved the affable Lemon, who had been the Yankees pitching coach in 1976, the year he was elected to the Hall of Fame. He was such a good baseball man, and so admired, it was actually hard to figure why he had to wait until 1970, with Kansas City, to get his first managing job—and then, after three seasons, to wait another six years for another chance. Probably it was because pitchers don’t get sufficient respect as managing prospects, and because he was such a mild-mannered, easygoing guy. Once asked if he ever took a loss home with him, he said, “No, I usually leave it at a bar on the way.”

  In any case, after the turmoil of the season’s first four months, it was a good tonic to bring in someone as much fun as Lem. That, combined with a New York newspaper strike that removed irritant journalists from the clubhouse, brought a level of calm to the ball club.

  Another moment of drama occurred before July ended. On Old-Timers’ Day, July 29, just days after Martin’s “resignation,” at the same event at which he had been hired in 1975, fans were shocked to see Billy introduced on the field as “the manager for 1980 and hopefully for many years to come.” There were a lot of stone-cold faces in the Yankee dugout. Not everyone was pleased with the news. Lemon was to become general manager.

  Steinbrenner had spoken with Martin, had felt the emotional pull that Billy had on people, felt sorry for him, and couldn’t resist the temptation to bring him back. It was a bold and dramatic move, but the team was now taking on an attitude of “1980 is a long way off; a lot can happen, stay tuned.”

  Meanwhile, they began to play like the defending world champions that they were. Fourteen games out on July 19 would be the biggest deficit. Then they began to creep forward. They won ten of twelve in early August, then ten of eleven in late August and early September. They arrived in Boston on September 7 having won five of six and having cut the deficit to four games. Picking up ten games in seven weeks was a great feat, but now they had to face the Red Sox four times in Fenway Park.

  When the Yanks played in Boston, Thurman liked to go to Wonderland Greyhound Track in Revere with his teammates. Roy White, Ken Holtzman, Gullett, Rivers, and Piniella were familiar travel companions on the trip. The track probably had more of Rivers’s money than his many wives did, not to mention his bank account. Thurman came to know one of the dog trainers, twenty-year-old Phil Castinetti, a big Yankee fan with a major Boston accent.

  “Because of my knowledge of the dogs, I was able to give the guys tips,” says Phil. “There was nothing improper about it, and it wasn’t like I was always right. But when I was right they loved it. Thurm was always generous in giving me some cash from his winnings and buying me dinner. I ate with him on maybe six occasions and he knew me by name and thought of me as a friend. He just treated me great. He signed a lot of stuff for me too, but I only saved the first track program he signed, the night I first met him. I gave away a lot of stuff.

  “You’d see all sides of him there. He could be great, as he was to me. Or there was the time a guy threw a program in front of his face for an autograph just as he was preparing to cut into his chopped sirloin. The guy said, ‘Munson, sign this.’ He gave him a ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ that was for sure.

  “During that big ’78 ‘massacre’ series, he asked me if I knew who was pitching the next day and I said, ‘Yeah, Bobby Sprowl; Bill Lee is in Zimmer’s doghouse.’ And he said, ‘Who the fuck is Bobby Sprowl!!!’ and he laughed and laughed.”

  Castinetti owns Sportsworld in Saugus, Massachusetts, today. He sells autographed goods but keeps his special Yankee collection at home, for himself.

  “A single signed baseball from Munson is worth about $17,000 today,” he says, shaking his head. “You know how many I had and gave away? What they would be worth! He just didn’t sign very many.”

  The games came to be known as the Boston Massacre. The Yanks swept, winning 15-3, 13-2, 7-0, and 7-4. They would have been happy with a split; this was nirvana. Munson went 8 for 16 in the series, but it was a total team effort, a historic annihilation, and a series that lives forever in the history of the Yankee-Boston rivalry, just as the 2004 ALCS will forever be “the answer” for the long-suffering Red Sox Nation.

  During the 1978 series, Thurman was hit in the head with a pitch from Dick Drago and had to be replaced.

  “When he came to, he started looking around for his catching gear,” recalls Willie Randolph. “He thought we were in the field.”
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  A few days later in Detroit, he was experiencing terrible headaches, and was sent for a brain scan to a local hospital.

  “My first reaction was that I didn’t want to die,” he said. “I never experienced anything like that. This wasn’t a headache, it was tremendous pain.”

  But he would be okay.

  People who think of 1978 forget that the Red Sox did not roll over and die after those games. The Yankees couldn’t shake them, even after winning two of three back in New York a week later. The Yanks played inspired baseball, Guidry was on fire, and everything was clicking. The team won seven of their last eight games. But Boston wouldn’t die; wouldn’t go away.

  On Sunday, October 1, the final day of the regular season, a Yankee victory would have clinched the division. The team was playing the Indians at home. In the first inning, Thurman singled and Piniella doubled him to third. When Jackson grounded out, Munson scored, a gritty, “money” run. Had it been a 1-0 game, his bulldog trip around the bases on bad knees would have been a Yankee play for the ages—a bit like Joe Girardi’s big triple in the deciding game of the 1996 World Series.

  But it wasn’t to be, as Catfish, the starter, didn’t have it that day and the Yankees lost 9-2. To Hunter, a great kidder who could give as well as he could take, it recalled an earlier exchange with Piniella on a team bus (naturally) in Boston, when the driver got lost and wound up giving the players a historic tour of the city.

  “This is a Revolutionary War cemetery,” he said at one point.

  “That’s where Catfish’s arm is buried,” announced Piniella.

  Boston won on that fateful Sunday, and the two teams, perhaps destined for this all year long, wound up tied for first. A playoff game needed to be held the following day in Boston to decide who would play the Royals for the pennant.

  It was not hard to find 32,925 Red Sox fans to fill Fenway Park on Monday afternoon on short notice for one of those “games for the ages.” The Yanks got to town on Sunday night, with Munson, Piniella, Lyle, Nettles, and Gossage heading for Daisy Buchanan’s saloon near the Sheraton. They were confident and relaxed. Lemon had created a tone of peace over this franchise. They had come this far, and they intended to finish the Sox—again—in a few hours.

  It would be Guidry, 24–3, against their old teammate Mike Torrez. Everything was perfect about baseball on this day. The weather—cool, crisp, October baseball—the ballpark, the rivalry, and the fact that two elite teams were about to go at each other with this great historic rivalry at its zenith.

  Munson batted second and went 1 for 5 with three strikeouts. But he and Guidry were in a good rhythm, and even though the Sox jumped to an early lead, the confidence didn’t wane. And Thurman’s one hit would be a big one.

  In the historic seventh inning, with the Yanks down 2-0, Chambliss and White both singled. With two out, Bucky Dent came to bat and we can still hear Bill White saying, “Deep to left… Yastrzemskiiii’s … not going to get it… It’s a home run!” and the Yankees took a 3-2 lead. Kind of a highlight moment in Bucky’s career.

  What followed was important as well. Rivers walked, and Bob Stanley replaced Torrez. Rivers stole second, and then Munson laced a double to drive in Rivers and make it a 4-2 game. A big RBI, lost in the memories of the Dent homer, in perhaps the most famous game he ever appeared in.

  Jackson homered in the eighth to make it 5-2, and that would prove to be the winning run, as the Red Sox, noble to the end, scored twice in the eighth, and the Yanks needed Gossage to save it in the ninth for the 5-4 victory. Yastrzemski, with two on, could have won it with a double, or maybe even a long single off the wall. Memories of the Impossible Dream of 1967?

  Gossage got Yaz to foul out to Nettles and the Yankees won.

  The Red Sox went home; the Yankees went on to face the Royals for the pennant.

  The Royals, well, the poor Royals found it their destiny to face the Yankees again, and although this was a top-rate club with a fine manager in Whitey Herzog and first-rate players throughout the lineup and on the pitching staff, the Yanks just had their number in the 1970s.

  The Yanks won this one in four games, but for Munson, everything about his gifts as a major league baseball player came together in game three in Yankee Stadium. Not only did he call another fine game for Hunter and Gossage, but when he came to bat against reliever Doug Bird, the series was tied at a game apiece and the Royals were winning 5-4 in the last of the eighth, prepared to take a two-to-one lead in games. George Brett was prepared to take his place in playoff history with a three-home run game.

  Munson, who had hit just two home runs in Yankee Stadium all season, tore into a fastball and sent it soaring deep, deep, way deep to the Babe Ruth monument in left-center field’s Monument Park area, measured to be 475 feet. Very few balls had been hit there. Tape-measure home runs were not part of Munson’s game. The unexpected nature of this titanic clout, and the fact that it set up a 6– 5 playoff victory and a two-games-to-one Yankee lead, made it the most important home run of his career.

  Where did that power come from!? On replays of the shot, the swing looks like a normal Munson swing. The power was always there; he was a very strong man. He simply didn’t swing with an arc that lifted it as that one was lifted. He had a very disciplined swing and didn’t give in to temptation, not even in Fenway. But here, for a moment at least, he let it all out.

  Everyone must have one “longest ever” in them, leaving you wondering why it is never duplicated. Why did Mickey Mantle never again hit one 565 feet as he did that afternoon in Washington, D.C., when he was twenty-one years old?

  Everything had come together just right—a moment of baseball perfection. As a hitter, that was Thurman’s moment.

  And the next day, the Yankees won the American League pennant.

  “That home run was the greatest individual baseball feat I ever saw,” says Henry Hecht, who covered the Yankees for the New York Post during the “Bronx Zoo” years, and was often in the middle of controversy himself. “Thurman was physically incapable of hitting a ball like that anymore because he was a broken-down catcher by then. I’m still in awe of what he did—because he couldn’t do it.”

  The World Series rematch with the Dodgers found Thurman batting in five runs in game five, just one short of Bobby Richardson’s World Series record, to help put the Yankees up three games to two. That was longer than Munson wanted the Series to last. As Guidry recalls, “There were a bunch of us in the clubhouse on the day I was scheduled to pitch. Thurman came in steaming. He had just read some more Dodger quotes saying this was going to be their year, and he said, ‘If this was any other team but Los Angeles, I might just say forget it. But the way these guys have been carrying on, mouthing off, I would like nothing better than to kick their asses four straight.’”

  Prior to game six, Hunter learned that his father had lung cancer. He was scheduled to pitch the game, and he did, but he also planned to skip game seven and get home to his dad. So there was a big desire to win it all that night in Los Angeles.

  He wasn’t sharp. He was doubtless distracted. A finesse pitcher like Hunter needed to have his concentration at full strength.

  In the third inning, Munson went to the mound and said, “Well, Catfish, you better make sure you hit my glove exactly where I put it because you ain’t got diddlysquat tonight.”

  The two of them could banter like that. Munson often talked to his pitchers like that. Jim Kaat remembers Munson coming to the mound and saying, “Are you fucking trying to lose this game?”

  Hunter responded to Thurman, “Hey, Captain Bad Body, just get back on behind the plate and catch it after I throw it. I’m in a hurry to get home.”

  He threw a double-play ball to kill the Dodger rally.

  The Yankees won the game 7-2. The last batter, Ron Cey, hit a high foul pop behind the plate. Munson turned and tossed his mask to his right, settled under the ball, and snared it for the world championship out. He turned toward Goose, took a quick glance at
his mask with a momentary thought of retrieving it, but forgot about it and ran for the mound in triumph.

  Lemon’s steady hand and noninterfering approach were just the tonic the Yankees needed. It was their twenty-second world championship—and the last they would win until 1996, a gap of eighteen seasons.

  An emotionally spent Thurman Munson went home to the tranquillity of Canton.

  13

  Over the winter of 1978-79, Thurman, now a mature, 31-year-old veteran ballplayer and businessman, busied himself in Canton with his off-field interests, particularly aviation, as well as with attention to his family, always the priority. A couple of times, he visited his mother at the senior citizens home. He had joined the Congress Lake Club and played golf there and at Prestwick and Tam O’Shanter in Canton when the weather permitted. His roots in the community were deep. Even as a Yankee star, he’d go back to Lehman and talk to the teams.

  “He was always the same guy, he just had more money,” laughs his boyhood battery mate Jerome Pruett. “The same lovable sarcastic Thurman.”

  He’d play racquetball with Jerry Anderson, grab lunch with Tote Dominick at Lucia’s, survey his property holdings, fly his plane, and hang out a lot with Diana and the kids. They were full days.

  In November he was a secret guest speaker for the Plain Local Midget Football League banquet, agreeing to appear only if the press wasn’t informed.

  In February there was a “Munson Roast” in Canton that raised $51,000 for three local charities, which was certainly the only reason he agreed to be honored. Several teammates came, including Roy White, whom he could always count on to show up for him. Reggie Jackson came too, to the surprise of many.

  “He didn’t even hesitate,” said Thurman. “He told me he’d be happy to come in, at no expense. That doesn’t sound like a guy who hates me, does it?”

  He remained loyal to Canton and loyal to its public schools. Bob Henderson, his senior year basketball coach at Lehman, called the Yankees to see if Thurman might come back to visit classes during Right to Read Week. “I never expected he would do this at this stage of his career, but he spent a whole day with us, visiting various schools, talking about the importance of reading and getting an education. It was a wonderful day.”