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

that wasn’t the point. The response to his arrival signaled a bond between him and the fans that would never fade. If you could define the moment the fans fell in love with the future captain of this franchise, that was it.
    Munson had arrived with a flourish, very much a part of the team, already emerging as a leader, and surely as “one of the guys.”
    “Thurm wanted so much to be included in the little ‘side trips’ that I would arrange on off days,” recalls Fritz Peterson. “The routine was ‘okay Tugs,’ or ‘okay, Beer Can’ (nicknames I’d given him), ‘you just wait out in the hallway [of the hotel] and we’ll pick you up when we get up and you can come along,’ when we would go to a lake or motorbiking, or whatever. He was great to have along.
    “Once we went riding motorized trail bikes—Stottlemyre, Bahnsen, Munson, and me. All of a sudden he made a sharp curve and we all followed. He was going too fast. He missed the curve, went straight, and disappeared. He had driven right off the road into a deep ravine. The bike turned over twice, the headlights and tail-lights were smashed, and Thurman was cut and bruised all over. He had so much pride in not getting hurt that when we reached him and saw that he was alive, he just said, ‘Let’s go.’”

    Munson kept lifting his average day by day until, on September 17, he went two for five against the Red Sox and reached the .300 mark. He never looked back and finished at .302 for the season, tops on the team. After the 1-for-30 start, he hit .322. After July 21, he hit .370. And he led all the league’s catchers with 80 assists, half of them nailing would-be base stealers.
    The line drives kept coming off his bat, and the team was playing very well. The Yankees had moved into second place on August 1—rarefied air for this team—and never relinquished it. The Orioles were so good that their ultimate margin was fourteen and a half games over New York, but the Yanks won ninety-three games, certainly their best season since 1964, with Lindy McDaniel recording 29 saves and Peterson winning 20. Although it was embarrassing to those who remembered the Yankees winning pennants every year, the team celebrated the clinching of second place with a modest champagne celebration in the clubhouse.
    “I know old Yankee purists must have been thinking that celebrating second place was really bush,” said Munson, “but we enjoyed it.”
    The Baseball Writers’ Association named him first on twenty-three of twenty-four ballots as he easily won the Rookie of the Year Award. The only strange thing about it was that The Sporting News Rookie of the Year Award, voted on by players, somehow went to Cleveland outfielder Roy Foster, who hit 23 homers to Munson’s 6. (Foster would hit 45 in a three-season career.)
    Players always like to think they are the best judges of other players, and while it is hard to dispute that intellectually, they have occasionally cast some really dumb votes when given the opportunity. Most notably, they awarded a Gold Glove for fielding prowess to Rafael Palmeiro in 1999 when he only played twenty-eight games at first base all season.
    Thurman was the first catcher to win Rookie of the Year honors in the American League since the award was created in 1947, and the sixth Yankee to win the honor in that time. The only other catcher to win the award was Johnny Bench of the Reds, who had won it in the National League two years earlier. Here, then, you had the beginnings of a decade in which Munson and Bench would be the two premier catchers in their respective leagues, perennial all-stars, World Series rivals, and admirers of each other.
    Bench would ultimately come to be thought of as perhaps the greatest catcher in the game’s history. Prior to him, there had been no clear-cut winner. The debate would include Gabby Hartnett, Mickey Cochrane, Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, and Roy Campanella, with a nod to Josh Gibson of the Negro Leagues.