Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (20 page)

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.

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 season 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 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.