By Pete Sabatini
Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain, by Marty Appel
Doubleday, 2009
Rating: 7* (out of 10), *8 for Yankee fans
August 2, 2009, marks 30 years since the tragic death of Yankee captain Thurman Munson. An empty locker with the burly catcher’s uniform still sits in Yankee Stadium and his legend grows as the stories of this larger than life figure are passed from generation to generation.
Marty Appel, former Yankee PR man and Munson autobiographer, sought to put those stories around the legend on paper, and in July published his second and most definitive work on the man, the captain, the legend of Thurman Munson.
Munson was a famously gruff and private man, keeping outsiders at arm’s length with his grunts and blunt rebuffs. His teammates and fans loved his heart and many reporters hated him for his disregard for them, but Appel finds a way through to the heart of this complex personality in Yankee lore.
Appel’s circumstance uniquely qualified him for this difficult task. The author began his PR career with the Yankees the same year Munson was drafted and was charged with bringing this blue-collar Ohio ballplayer into the pin-striped fold.
Appel saw firsthand how this poised rookie moved into the captain’s chair in the Yankee clubhouse and as PR director was forced to view this face of the Yankees from both a teammate and press perspective.
From trying to defuse feuds with Reggie Jackson to helping with the logistics of Munson’s funeral, Appel was in the middle of the Munson tornado and was side-by-side with all of the important characters in Munson’s life.
The book is ripe with first- and secondhand 70’s era insider stories about the men who were the Bronx Zoo. This is no salacious tell-all, but rather a sober discussion of a hard-working unlikely hero and all the men who made up his world.
Lou Piniella, Bobby Murcer, Billy Martin, Jackson, and even George Steinbrenner himself feature prominently in the story. They are painted as men forced to develop relationships as they fought together in the trenches bringing the Yankee team to respectability on the field while trying not to destroy it all off the field.
Laced with optimism and hope, this human story brings out the heart of the 1970’s Yankees and helps to find real people in the legend of that generation’s team.
More information on Munson here at AppelPR.com and here at Amazon.com:
http://www.appelpr.com/munson.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Munson-Life-Death-Yankee-Captain/dp/0385522312
More information about Munson online here at Examiner.com and here at Wikipedia:
http://www.examiner.com/x-650-New-York-Yankees-Examiner~topic307493-Thurman-Munson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurman_Munson#Life_and_career
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He was a gritty player that was a wonderful symbol of the Yankees in the early 70’s. I hated seeing him up there at the plate in crucial situations against my team. Did he ever not come through? I’ll be looking for this book…love the cover.
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