If you rooted for the Yankees during that time — it’s been called the “Horace Clarke era” because the second baseman, fairly or unfairly, epitomized the dog days of baseball in the Bronx — Munson was the working class guy you wanted to lead your team.
I was a teenager during the early part of the 1970s and a Yankees fan, so I was not spoiled by the dominance New York enjoyed between 1921 and 1964 — 29 pennants, 20 World Series titles — so even getting close to the playoffs was a big deal.
But we know the facts: Munson was a seven-time All-Star and the American League’s Most Valuable player in 1976. But Munson’s shocking and untimely death in an Aug. 2, 1979, plane crash as he was practicing takeoffs and landings at an airport near his home in Canton, Ohio, cut short what should have been a Hall of Fame career.
We don’t know what Munson was like away from the field, but former Yankees player and teammate Ron Blomberg, along with author Dan Epstein, provide some much-needed perspective about the Yankees team captain. The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson (Triumph Books; $28; hardback; 284 pages) is a warm, funny, sentimental and honest look at a player who was misunderstood and underappreciated by many baseball fans outside of New York.
The cover of the book is a clever adaptation of a 1970 Topps baseball rookie card, the year Munson won the American League Rookie of the Year award. The book’s title comes from a 1973 album of the same name by the Doobie Brothers, a favorite group of Munson’s and the year Blomberg made history in Boston by becoming major league baseball’s first designated hitter.
This book is more like a conversation with Blomberg at the old Stage Deli in Manhattan, which had a sandwich named for him – a triple-decker combination of corned beef, pastrami and chopped liver, topped with a Bermuda onion (“I always thought chopped liver was disgusting, so I could never actually eat it,” he writes). Blomberg’s eating exploits may have been more prodigious than his sweet left-handed swing that was tailor-made for old Yankee Stadium’s 296-foot porch in right field.
nterestingly enough, Blomberg hit 34 home runs from 1969 to 1973 at the original Yankee Stadium. Blomberg hit 17 at home and 16 on the road.
Blomberg, 72, opens The Captain & Me with a food anecdote on the day he debuted as a DH. Blomberg was devouring deviled eggs at a rapid clip in the clubhouse, and Munson was not pleased. The two were first-round draft choices of the Yankees — Blomberg was the No. 1 overall pick in 1967, and Munson was No. 4 overall in 1968.
Blomberg could see right away that Munson was all-business about baseball. “Once he was on the field, he was deadly serious about playing and winning,” Blomberg writes.
“Tough and gruff as he seemed on the surface, he was really over the moon about becoming a dad,” Blomberg writes. “It was like he would visibly soften into a giant teddy bear whenever the subject came up.”
Blomberg, meanwhile, peppers the reader with baseball anecdotes, and his legendary eating habits are usually part of the stew. By hitting the buffet too many times at the Chateau Madrid in Fort Lauderdale during spring training, Blomberg caused the team to be banned from the restaurant. Teammates were upset at management, but “they were really upset at me for ruining such a good dining situation,” he writes.
Epstein’s job in The Captain & Me is to provide historical context and a timeline, and he does it well. He is uniquely positioned to write about 1970s baseball, with two excellent books to his credit — Big Hair and Plastic Grass: Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s in 2010, and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Season of 1976 in 2014. Epstein breaks up Blomberg’s narrative with good information and statistics.
Munson “had no patience with doing interviews, and no trust in most of the writers,” Blomberg writes. “When you are in the clubhouse, this is my house,” Munson once explained to Blomberg. “I do what I want to do, and I talk to who I want to talk to. And if I want to get in someone’s face, I get in someone’s face.”
As a sportswriter, I’ve been on the receiving end of that. Telling an athlete that while the clubhouse may be his home, it is my office, does not get a warm reaction.
But Munson was generous with young pitchers and knew how to call a game. If pitchers trusted him, invariably they would become more effective. He was a quiet prankster, too, and loved to fish and play golf.
Munson also had a soft spot for children with medical issues or veterans and would take the time to autograph baseballs and chat with them, Blomberg writes. Munson and Blomberg would often make unannounced and unpublicized visits to children’s hospitals.
“You should have seen how great Thurman was with these kids,” Blomberg writes. “His whole attitude would change, because he loved to see kids laughing and playing, and he would whatever he could to get them to smile.”
Blomberg admits that the public and the media never saw that side of Munson, noting that “the writers probably wouldn’t have even recognized the guy he was around those kids.”
Blomberg also writes about Munson’s trickery on the field and how he was able to scuff baseballs without the home plate umpires catching him in the act. Or how he would spit to signal the first baseman that a snap throw was coming. Blomberg also reveals how Munson would slip him a “greenie” — an amphetamine that was “really like a No Doz” — “just something to wake you up.”
“All of a sudden I felt like I was in ‘The Jetsons!’ Blomberg writes. “I felt great and ready to play. But when I got up to the plate, I was so hyper my hands were shaking, and the ball looked like three balls coming at me.”
That was a one-off for Blomberg, who points out that Munson did not take drugs and was more of a “natural high guy.”
Blomberg’s stories about record producer Nat Tarnopol are interesting, and the relationship was “like a fantasy for me and Thurman.” As president of Brunswick Records, Tarnopol oversaw 19 top-10 hits on the Billboard charts between 1970 and 1975. He would introduce Blomberg and Munson to some “heavy hitters” in the business world — and the underworld, too.
“I was really naïve about these guys, to be honest; I didn’t realize until years later that they were gangsters,” Blomberg writes. “But they were big-hearted guys who treated Thurman and I like we were their long-lost brothers, and they’d do anything for us.”
Tarnopol bought cars for both players, and they never had to wait for a table or buy a meal when they were his guests. The record executive even considered buying the Yankees from CBS, but the network would not sell to him, Blomberg writes.
Blomberg and Munson also mingled with singers like Frankie Valli, Tommy James and Jay Black.
“I think that had Thurman lived, he would still hate Fisk today,” Blomberg writes. “And if Fisk died tomorrow, him and Thurman would have a fight up in heaven.”
Left unsaid, but probably true, is that Munson probably would have done a slow burn after Fisk was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2000. Blomberg believes Munson belongs in Cooperstown, but the catcher never received more than 15.5% during the 15 years he was eligible in for election by tenured members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He did not fare well in later voting by the Veterans Committee.
Put Blomberg in the “pros” category.
“In my view, his skills, his accomplishments, his leadership, and what he did for baseball” qualify him for enshrinement, Blomberg writes.
That remains to be seen. As memories dim, so do achievements. Munson had plenty of intangibles that made him great, but number crunchers may not be impressed by his career marks. Munson led the Yankees to three consecutive World Series (1976-1978) and had the wild-card format been around during the 1970s, New York would have made the postseason in 1970 and 1974.
The Captain & Me is a wonderful tribute and is full of stories — funny, touching and sad. Injuries shortened Blomberg’s career, and he left New York and finished his career with the Chicago White Sox in 1978. There are great stories about Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, Sam McDowell and Mickey Rivers. And even a few about Horace Clarke.
As it turns out, that era wasn’t so bad after all.