Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain by Marty Appel Read Free Book Online

know what? He was the second-fastest runner on our team, despite that body he was trapped inside of. He could really run.
    “I’ll tell you this, you could not shake that confidence. He and I used to play pool all the time. I was better than he was. We played maybe twenty-five times. I beat him every single time. And yet, after every game, he swore that he’d beat me next time, and he meant it. He never lost that edge. And he was never a good loser.
    “When he played in the Eastern League in 1968, he was hitting something like .360 through the first few months, and that has always been a real pitcher’s league. It was amazing. I caught up with him one day and said, ‘You’re really doing well,’ and he said, ‘Wait until you see my stats at the end of the season.’ Well, he didn’t maintain it, but he led the league and he really believed the .360 was going to go up.”
    Playing freshman baseball in 1966, Thurman got into only three of the team’s eleven games, the season shortened by terrible weather. He fared much better with playing time back in the Canton City Baseball League during that summer. He came to understand why the game’s real prospects liked to play ball in the South, like Florida, Texas, Arizona, or Southern California.
    In his sophomore baseball season, 1967, his first on varsity, the Golden Flashes were only 11-12, but Thurman hit .367 with 4 doubles, 5 triples, 3 homers, 16 RBIs, and 23 runs scored in his twenty-three games. He was named third team, all-district, and all-region.
    “Oh, he was some catcher,” recalls Stone. “He could throw you out from any point where he caught the ball, like a quarterback hurrying a pass. If he caught the pitch knee high and away, he could throw a guy out from there. Especially with a curveball pitcher like I was, you need to have confidence that your catcher is going to be able to catch the ones in the dirt. I had that total confidence in him.
    “We had a trick play too, and with no advance scouting in theleague, we pulled this off eight times in one year. It involved wasting two pitches, putting me in a 2-0 hole, but we’d get an out out of it. After the first one, a fastball away, the third baseman would back up and I’d work from a full windup. The runner would take a bigger lead and I’d throw the pitch high and tight, backing a right-handed hitter off the plate. Munson would fire to third and get the runner. Eight straight games we pulled this off. The scouts took notice of his arm with this play, that’s for sure.”
    In the summer of 1967, he returned to the Canton City League and was working part-time as a house painter when someone asked if he’d like to play in the Cape Cod League, a rather fast league for college players. The Chatham A’s needed a quick replacement for their injured catcher. Thurman went.
    In his first game, he tugged on his mask (a sign) and fired to first baseman Glen Lautzenhiser for a neat pickoff. He was primed and ready.
    This was a league of strong competition. He played for Joe “Skip” Lewis, who later managed in the Detroit Tigers organization, and also earned seventy-five dollars a week working for the Chatham parks department. (“I slept on the lawn while other guys cut it,” Thurman told Bobby Valentine, who was playing for Yarmouth.) His baseball summer was a lot better than his parks department summer. “Oh, he got fired three or four times from that job,” laughs Ed Baird, a Chatham pitcher. “The supervisor, a guy named Slippery Slade, had a glass eye. Thurman would always talk to him on the side he couldn’t see, and then when he’d turn around, Thurman would circle around him so he’d stay on the glass side. Drove him nuts.”
    He wound up winning the league’s MVP award with a .420 average, sixty-five points higher than the runner-up, Glenn Adams, who later played for the Twins.
    “I was in center field for Yarmouth the first time I ever faced him,” says Valentine. “They had a player