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To: Skip Ripley

Did get inducted into the Hall? Thurman should be there also.


13 posted on 07/26/2011 8:01:10 AM PDT by angcat (DEAR GOD PLEASE SAVE US!)
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To: angcat
Did get inducted into the Hall? Thurman should be there also.
Assuming you mean Thurman Munson . . . no, he shouldn't. He had, really, only four seasons which could be described as Hall of Fame-caliber seasons in a career that lasted only ten full seasons (binding his 1969 introduction and his aborted 1979 as one), and his career was on a definite downslope, a downslope in its second season when he was killed in that plane crash.

If you should come upon an anthology called Top of the Heap: A Yankees Collection (edited by Glenn Stout), turn to a very eye-opening profile of Munson, "The House That Thurman Munson Built," originally published in Esquire in 1999, and written splendidly by Michael Paterniti. Paterniti revealed sides of Munson nobody, perhaps even his teammates, knew of the man, my very favourite of which was this passage:

There were five, six, seven Thurman Munsons, not counting his soul, and the one who mattered most was the private one, the one who came walking down a long hall like the one at the beginning of Get Smart!, with doors and walls closing behind him. When he walked over the threshold after a long road trip, he'd hug his wife and say I love you in German. Ich liebe dich. He wrote poetry to her. He scribbled philosophical aphorisms. He loved Neil Diamond---"Cracklin' Rosie," "I Am . . . I Said"---played the guy's music nonstop, incessantly, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, carried it with him on a big boom box. Thurman Munson, the grim captain, identifying with picaresque songs about being on the road, lost and along against the world, having something to prove, falling in love.

And the kids went bananas every time he came home, hanging off him like he was some kind of jungle gym. Two doe-eyed girls and a young, red-headed son who was afraid of the dark. Thurman Munson would sit at the kitchen table and eat an entire pack of marshmallow cookies with them. He'd take barrettes and elastic bands and disappear and do up his hair and then leap out of nowhere, Hi-yahing! from around a corner, wielding a baseball bat like a sword, doing his version of John Belushi's samurai. After the girls took a bath, Thurman Munson did the blow-drying. Then he combed out their hair. He never hurt us, remembers Kelly, the second daughter. I mean, our mom would kill us with that stupid blow dry and brush, and he said, I don't want to hurt you. And he took so much time and our hair would be so smooth and he'd take the brush and make it go under and comb it out. >When Michael, the youngest, couldn't sleep, his father went to him. As a kid, Thurman Munson was afraid of the dark, too, but in his father's world, Thurman Munson would lie there alone; you were humiliated for your fear, and you learned to be humiliated---often. On the day Yankee general manager Lee MacPhail came to sign Thurman Munson, the boy's father, Darrell, the truck driver, lay in his underwear on the couch, never once got up, never came into the kitchen to introduce himself. At one point, he just yelled, I sure do hope you know what you're doing! He ain't too good on the popups!

But Thurman Munson would sit with his own boy in the wee hours---at two, three, four a.m. Often he couldn't sleep himself, lying heavily next to Diana, his body half black and blue, his swollen knees and inflamed shoulders and staph infections hounding him awake. So he'd just go down the hall and be with Michael awhile. Just stretch out on the boy's bed. It's all right, he'd say. There's nothing to be afraid of.

Munson's father was even stupid enough to keep up the abuse even in his son's death. At Munson's burial, the old man not only told reporters his son wasn't a great ballplayer and the old man had the real talent but not the breaks. Then, he went up to Munson's coffin and said to it, "You always thought you were too big for this world. Well, look who's still standing, you son of a bitch." The old man had to be removed from the cemetery physically by police.

A good man. A solid ballplayer for a good while. If he wasn't really a Hall of Fame player, Thurman Munson turned out to be the Hall of Fame man we never really knew.

14 posted on 07/26/2011 3:06:53 PM PDT by BluesDuke (Another brief interlude from the small apartment halfway up in the middle of nowhere in particular)
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