Best Books of July: "Munson" by Marty Appel

For Yankee fans, catcher Thurman Munson remains a sentimental standout among the storied lineup of George Steinbrenner’s late '70s Bronx Zoo dynasty of Yankee baseball, when the team made it to three consecutive World Series, winning in '77 and '78. I was an 8-year-old boy in Central New York in '77 and one of my highlights that year (second only to the release of Star Wars) was when the Yankees came upstate to to play the Syracuse Chiefs, their AAA farm club. While Munson was one of my favorite players, But I was also pretty starstruck by the flash and dazzle of Reggie Jackson (44 remains by lucky number). My father was an airline mechanic at Hancock Airport and he would arrange for one of his colleagues who commuted from NYC to Syracuse to do a bootleg candy run and bring me back a 36-count box of Reggie! bars, the short-lived confection of turtle-like disks of "chocolately covered caramel and peanuts" in a bright orange wrapper. (Along with those now collectible candy bars I also had a baseball emblazoned with Yankee signatures--Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, Lou Pinella, Catfish Hunter, Graig Nettles--that sadly remains MIA, probably lost in a family yard sale.)

Three decades after Munson's death, former Yankee Public Relations Director Marty Appel brings baseball fans Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain. As a Yankee insider, Appel keeps Munson, "the heart and soul of a world championship team," in a mostly positive light, though he does reveal more sensational elements of Munson's troubled childhood in Canton, Ohio, where his emotionally abusive father criticized him right up to the end of his short life, even chewing out the casket at Munson's funeral.

Appel documents Munson's career as a scholarship athlete at Kent State, his time in the Cape Cod league, and his quick ascension to the major leagues and the Yankees, where he won Rookie of the Year in 1970 and was eventually made team captain, the first player to hold the title since Lou Gehrig. His blue-collar work ethic and gruff but lovable demeanor made him an instant fan favorite (a shot of him making a tag at home plate was the first action photo used in a Topps baseball card). And during that Bronx Zoo era, gloriously depicted in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, it was the down-to-earth Munson who balanced out (and butted heads with) his flashy teammate Reggie Jackson. After Jackson made his infamous "I'm the straw that stirs the drink" comments in a Sport magazine interview, Munson was asked if Jackson was quoted out of context. Munson's reply: "For three pages?"

Munson was only 32 when he was killed after the plane he was piloting crashed in Canton, Ohio, on August 2, 1979. At the home-opener the day after his death, when No. 15 was retired, there was a ten-minute standing ovation in memory of the Yankee catcher. Munson was never inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but Marty Appel's biography remains a fitting tribute.

--BTP