Me and Thurman

I meant to post this on the actual date but did not have the time to sit and write a reasonable blog about Thurman.

Two days ago, on August 2nd, it was the anniversary of the death of Thurman Munson. Thurman was the great New York Yankee catcher who died at age 32 in an airplane crash.

I take a lot of flack here in TO (Toronto) for being a Yankee fan. I endure comments like "you traitor, you should be supporting the Toronto Blue Jays", "you are just on the Yankee bandwagon" or my favorite "Sure, you just like the Yankees cause Derek Jeter is cute" The last comment always makes me laugh because ya, you got me, because the only reason a woman could POSSIBLY watch baseball is because of one cute player.

My sister and I being born in the mid to late 1960's grew up as children without a Toronto Blue Jays. We did not have a baseball team in Toronto when we were kids. Being less than 2 hours from the New York State border, we watched Yankee game feeds. My sister had her black NY Yankees baseball cap and we would love to watch the play off games with our Dad. Dad would explain the rules of the game, helped us appreciate the sport and respect the history of the game. My Dad would tell us about the great players of the 1940's and 1950's and about the struggles of the black players and the wonderful history of Baseball. He read a lot about baseball history and would tell us all the funny road trip stories he had read about from the 1920's onward.

My Dad was a Thurman fan,and a Yankee fan for years. To me, Thurman just looked like a baseball player. When you watched him play you knew he was focused on nothing else but wining that game for his team.

Thurman Munson was a member of the New York Yankees for 11 years and has been called one of the greatest catchers of the 1970s. He joined the Yankees in 1968 and a year later he was their starting catcher. The '69 season was a dark spot in an otherwise glorious history for the Yankees. It was the year following the retirement of Yankee legend Mickey Mantle whose skills, along with the Yankees performance as a team, were in a steady decline. That decline hit rock bottom in the summer of '69 as the Yankees were without a true superstar for the first time in their existence. When Babe Ruth slowed down, Lou Gehrig was there to carry the torch, who passed it on to Joe DiMaggio, who had subsequently passed it on to Mantle. There did not seem to be an heir to the torch until a stocky young catcher from Canton, Ohio was called up from the minors during the tail end of that terrible season.

He started his career by winning the 1970 American League Rookie of the Year award when he batted a .302. His intense attitude, sharp thinking and leadership soon earned him the position of team captain. The first captain of the team since Lou Gehrig had passed away in 1941. He also earned three Gold Gloves due to his defensive playing abilities behind home plate. In 1976 he won the Most Valuable Player award for hitting .302 and 105 RBI's. During his span with the Yankees he led them to three American League pennants and two World Championships. Thurman Munson had many uncomplimentary nicknames reflecting his unimpressive physique rather than his baseball skills, among them "Squatty Boy" and "Jelly Belly." He was supposedly insecure, often irascible man noted for being difficult with umpires and media. He felt he was unfairly overshadowed by star catchers like Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk (their rift was well known), he once dropped three third strikes in a game so he could throw to first base and pad his assists total. Brash and cocky, Munson was a most untypical rookie. Once he told veteran second baseman Willie Randolph, "Relax, I like you."

By 1979, however, the strain of catching was taking its toll on Munson's body. In constant pain, he sometimes found it difficult to crouch behind the plate. Yet he remained a superb catcher whose mere presence and tenacity got the best out of his pitchers. Yankees ace Ron Guidry always insisted Munson deserved half the credit for the left-hander's Cy Young Award season of 1978 (25-3, 1.74 ERA, nine shutouts). "I went the whole year never shaking him off one time," Guidry once recalled. "He always knew exactly when to say something and when to shut up. I don't remember him ever chewing [teammates out] and pointing fingers [during a slump]. He'd just say, 'We're not playing as a team we're better than this.' "

From 1975 through 1977, Munson hit over .300 and drove in at least 100 runs a season while averaging just 16 homers-and catching 387 games. By 1976, the Yankees were back in the World Series, swept by the Reds. New York got 30 hits. Munson had nine of them. But in 1977 and 1978, Munson Yankees won it all. Rewarded both with triumph and gold, Munson bought a small airplane. Thurman always wanted to be close to the town he grew up in, Canton, Ohio. He wanted his family to live there. In an effort to get himself home faster during off time he decided to purchase the Cessna and learn how to fly. His love for piloting always made Yankee owner George Steinbrenner nervous. Munson was still a rookie pilot and the day he died he was practising landings and take offs in his Cessna. He had spent less than 40 hours in the air with his new jet. On August 2nd, the Cessna plane stalled while landing, scraped some trees and crashed into a cornfield with its wings shorn off. Two other passengers, a friend and a flight instructor, survived and began attempting to drag Munson from the wreckage. He was calling for help when jet fuel leaked and the plane exploded. Munson's body was so badly burned that he had to be identified by dental records. He had a broken jaw, a broken rib, a bloody nose and a bruised heart among other injuries.

At the request of Munson's widow, Diane, the Yankees played the Orioles the next night as scheduled. It was probably the most emotional occasion at Yankee Stadium since the fatally stricken Gehrig's famed farewell ("I am the luckiest man on the face of the Earth") July 4, 1939. The Yankees lost 1-0, but probably most of the crowd of 51,151 didn't care or even notice. Before the game, the Yankees stood at attention as a portrait of Munson appeared on the video screen. Players had their heads bowed, and they were crying. It was horrible. To this day I remember watching that game. It was heartbreaking to watch Munson's best friend Lou Piniella standing weeping on the field. I was crying, my Father was crying and my Mother was crying.

Three days later, on Aug. 6, the Yankees chartered a plane to attend Munson's funeral in Ohio, where Munson's best friends and team mates Bobby Murcer and Lou Piniella delivered eulogies. "The league told us if we didn't get back for that night´s game, we'd have to forfeit it," Steinbrenner said. "I told them to stick it." The Yankees did return in time and defeated Baltimore 5-4. Murcer drove in four runs and had a game-wining homer.



I keep this photo of Thurman on one of the walls of my office. I bought an official MLB copy on E Bay. I just love the look on Thurman's face, the focus, the look of a team player as he walks back to the dugout to prepare to get up at bat. It reminds me of my time as a kid, my time watching baseball with my Dad and my sister.

To this day, Thurman Munson's locker has remained empty ever since his death. It serves as a small, silent tribute to this much-missed Yankee ballplayer.

I have included the following moving tribute to Thurman, written by Michael Paterniti in 1999:

The House That Thurman Munson Built

by Michael Paterniti
September 1999, Volume 132 Issue 3

Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson's death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss-and a nation of former boys-still aren't over it.

I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he's taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.

I give you Thurman Munson getting beaned in the head by a Nolan Ryan fastball and then beaned in the head by a Dick Drago fastball-and then spiked for good measure at home plate by a 250-pound colossus named George Scott, as he's been spiked before, blood spurting everywhere, and the mustachioed catcher they call Squatty Body/Jelly Belly/Bulldog/Pigpen refusing to leave the game, hunching in the runway to the dugout at Yankee Stadium in full battle gear, being stitched up and then hauling himself back on the field again.

I give you Thurman Munson in the hostile cities of America-in Detroit and Oakland, Chicago and Kansas City, Boston and Baltimore-on the radio, on television, in the newspapers, in person, his body scarred and pale, bones broken and healed, arms and legs flickering with bruises that come and go like purple lights under his skin, a man crouched behind home plate or swinging on-deck, jabbering incessantly, playing a game.

I give you a man and a boy, a father and a son, twenty years earlier, on the green expanse of a 1950s Canton, Ohio, lawn, in front of a stone house, playing ball. The father is a long-distance truck driver, disappears for weeks at a time, heading west over the plains, into the desert, to the Pacific Ocean, and then magically reappears with his hardfisted rules, his maniacal demand for perfection, and a photographic memory for the poetry he recites... . No fate, / can circumvent or hinder or control / the firm resolve of a determined soul.

Now the father is slapping grounders at the son and the boy fields the balls. It is the end of the day and sunlight fizzes through the trees like sparklers. As the boy makes each play, the balls come harder. Again and again, until finally it's not a game anymore. Even when a ball takes a bad hop and catches the boy's nose and he's bleeding, the truck driver won't stop. It's already a thing between this father and son. To see who will break first. They go on until dusk, the bat smashing the ball, the ball crashing into the glove, the glove hiding the palm, which is red and raw, until the blood has dried in the boy's nose.

I give you the same bloody-nosed boy, Thurman Munson, in a batting cage now before his rookie year, taking his waggles, and a lithe future Hall of Famer named Roberto Clemente looking on. Clemente squints in the orange sun, analyzing the kid's swing, amazed by his hand speed, by the way he seems to beat each pitch into a line drive. If you ever bat .280 in the big leagues, he says to Thurman Munson by way of a compliment, consider it a bad year.

When the Yankees bring Thurman Munson to New York after only ninety-nine games in the minors-after playing in Binghamton and Syracuse-he just says to anyone who will listen: What took them so long? He's not mouthing off. He means it, is truly perplexed. What took them so goddamn long? Time is short, and the Yankees need a player, a real honest-to-God player who wants to win as much as blood needs oxygen or a wave needs water. It's that elemental.



Quotes of the Day:

"I'm a little too belligerent. I cuss and swear at people. I yell at umpires and maybe I'm a little too tough at home sometimes. I don't sign as many autographs as I should and I haven't always been very good with writes."

"I like hitting fourth and I like the good batting average. But what I do everyday behind the plate is a lot more important because it touches so many more people and so many more aspects of the game."

Thurman Munson

**thanks to the Official and Un-Official Thurman Munson web sites for some of the stats and quotes**