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

from UConn named GeorgeGreer (later the longtime Wake Forest baseball coach), and in the first inning, I ran down a long drive by Greer over my head and made a nice catch. When I came to bat, Thurman was catching. He was very talkative back there; I wasn’t used to that. He said, ‘That was a pretty good catch, kid,’ and I thanked him. Then he said, ‘When I come up next inning, you should stand by the fence, because I’m going to hit one over your head.’
    “Well, I didn’t stand by the fence, but he was the cleanup hitter and I was playing him deep. And sure enough, he not only hit one over my head, but it went over the fence for a home run. And I remember writing a letter home telling my family about this guy with a strange name and how he called that shot like Babe Ruth.”
    He wasn’t chatty with everyone though. Steve Greenberg, the son of Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg and later himself the deputy commissioner of baseball, was an opponent that summer between semesters at Yale.
    “He was a man among boys when it came to hitting,” Greenberg recalls, “and the flat-out best hitter I ever saw. But he was a mean cuss. I must have batted against Chatham twenty times that summer, and I couldn’t get Munson to even acknowledge me, let alone have a conversation with me. I’d say hello, and Thurman would just spit tobacco juice, and put down the signs. He didn’t even grunt. He was one great but grumpy hitter.”
    John Frobose, who pitched against Thurman in the MAC conference for Bowling Green, was a teammate on the A’s and remained a friend through adulthood.
    “A bunch of us called him ‘Nate’ for some reason, I never knew why,” says Frobose. “But he was such a kick to have around. One day we were driving in my Chevy convertible to a road game in Cape Cod. We approach this overpass, and Thurman throws a ball over the overpass from about a hundred feet back. Steve Saradnik and Ed Baird were in the car too. One of them says, ‘Speed up! Let’s try tocatch it on the other end!’ And we race through the underpass and damned if Nate doesn’t catch the ball on the other side! You couldn’t do that again in a hundred years.”
    His cocky confidence in evidence, he would take infield practice with the A’s wearing his catcher’s mitt at shortstop, according to Billy Bor, who joined the team late and lived with Thurman in the final weeks.
    And he could indeed be a magician with a baseball. Or baseballs! Later on with the Yankees, warming up before the game, he could throw two balls with one motion, both with accuracy. Roy White remembers himself and Graig Nettles being on the receiving end. “We’d be about five feet apart; it’s really not that difficult,” says Nettles. “But his accuracy was the thing; it was amazing. And of course, you needed hands big enough to hold two baseballs firmly.”
    “His most memorable game for the A’s was definitely the ‘crutch’ game,” says Frobose. “He had sprained his ankle on that home run against Bobby Valentine’s team, and he was on crutches. It was an embarrassing injury; he had twisted it hitting home plate funny. Now we’re tied in the ninth inning, one man on, and Skip sends Thurman up to pinch-hit. He goes to the plate with his crutches, tosses them aside, hits a game-winning single, hobbles to first base on the crutches, and that was all that was needed.”
    Chatham won the championship and a lot of big-league scouts watched Thurman play there. One of them was Harry Hesse of the Yankees.
    Hesse, like Al Cuccinello, was a New York area scout. The two likable ol’ baseball guys would seldom produce a prospect because the Northeast just wasn’t turning out many good ballplayers anymore. (Cuccinello had played for the 1935 New York Giants with Mel Ott and Bill Terry.) So despite what might have seemed like “pressure” on Hesse and “Cooch” to occasionally come up with some names, they were both cautious and would rather not recommend