We’ve had a couple of Readers Posts lately about Thurman Munson, the Hall of Fame, and Graig Nettles recently, and I didn’t really have much to contribute there, beyond my anti-Yankee bias which no one including me is interested in, but I did have an anecdote to share about Munson that necessarily uses language that Readers Posts doesn’t permit, and a more general observation about sitting in the good seats.
What were the best seats at the ballpark you ever sat in? I’m from the old school (specifically cutting classes at the old junior-high to subway out to Shea), getting into the ballpark on seats earned by saving Borden’s milk cartons and the like, the worst seats in the house by far, and because I was a kid in my milk-carton days, sneaking lower and lower until maybe by the 8th inning being allowed by permissive ushers to sit in the abandoned box seats, especially in blowouts where who cares where kids are sitting for the last few outs? As I got older, but before I got disgustingly old, I would buy decent seats around the mezzanine level in Shea. Sometimes I would sit at field level, if they had relatively cheap seats available there, and occasionally I would sit in the nosebleed section or the bleacher seats if that’s all I could afford, but I stopped trying to sneak into the good seats after a certain age—doesn’t look good for a grown man to sit in seats he doesn’t hold a ticket to.
Although one time as an adult I did sneak into the good seats, with one of my daughters when she was around 12, at a Mets game (making this around 1998 or ’99): I was an active poster on a Mets’ fan-site where another poster used to brag how he had box seats he’d be eager to share with other regulars on the site. One day, I took him up on the offer, so he told me and my daughter to meet him at a certain gate at a certain time. When we showed up, he asked us to buy cheap tickets. A little bit puzzled (why would we have to buy tickets at all if he had a box?), I did so, and he took us into the stadium, where he bribed an usher to let us into the good-seat area and then asked me to reimburse him for the bribe. The combined cost of cheap tickets + bribe money pushed the price up to where I could have just bought us pretty decent seats in the first place, but I was with my kid and didn’t want to get into an argument with our "host," so I ponied up the twenty or thirty bucks, and then we sat in okay seats for a few innings, moving up (like when I was 12 and cutting school) to better seats later in the game. I wrote up the experience afterwards on the website, embarrassing the guy "with box seats" somewhat, and he never spoke to me again, but I felt that warning others what "with box seats" really meant was a public service, and felt at least a little bit better about participating in his little scam by publishing my exposé.
But on a couple of other occasions I got to sit in the boxes close up to the field, and each time I had a star ballplayer, during the game, yell at someone sitting next to me. One of these stars was Munson.
This was 1977, when the Yankees were a hot team and a hot ticket. It felt like September, but a little research reveals that it was August 31, 1977 https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA197708310.shtml when my fiancée, working as an editor in Manhattan, got a pair of tickets from her boss. I wasn’t a Yankee fan, then or ever, but the Mets stunk that year, stunk really bad, and I was reading articles about the Bronx Zoo every day on the back pages of the Post and News—besides which, who’s going to turn down a pair of box-seat tickets?
The tickets were to great seats, as I it turned out, three or four rows behind the Yankees’ dugout, and it was a terrific game. Forty years later, all I had to go on was that it was
1) A night game
2) In early September,
3) a game that Nettles had a really good night on, one HR for sure, maybe two,
4) while Munson had a terrible night at the plate, and
5) was replaced in mid-game
which made it easy to look up, once I figured out that "early September" might refer to the time we got home to Brooklyn Heights, after midnight.
I remembered Munson’s terrible night as hitting into two inning-ending DPs, because the incident I remember took place as Munson was walking into the dugout with his teammates running out onto the field, but I was remembering wrong: Munson’s first AB was a strikeout, his second AB was just a vanilla 5-3 (following a Nettles HR), and his third and last was just an inning-ending groundout to the second baseman. It was a weak groundball, and Munson was an easy out at first, so the Yankee fans near me were ragging him pretty hard, 0-for-3 at that point and not getting a ball past the infield. One meathead, sitting right behind my fiancée, was yelling all sorts of abusive stuff at Munson, as he disgustedly walked into the dugout for his catcher’s gear, starting with "Why don’t you…" as in "Why don’t you hit another dribbler?" or maybe "Why don’t you retire, Munson?" Stuff like that.
Most of the way from the first-base line to the dugout, Munson just took it, scowling, staring at the grass, but when he got close, and the verbal abuse got louder, he lost it. He looked the guy straight in the eye (meaning just above my fiancee’s hairline) and yelled, clear as day, "Why don’t you suck my cock?"
I don’t know how the guy responded, exactly, to this invitation. For my part, and my fiancee’s part, we were kind of astounded that Munson had been listening that closely to the abuse (literally hundreds of fans had been screaming at him, though this one guy did have a pretty distinct bullhorn of a voice) or that he bothered to respond. As I recall, the whole place quieted down quickly, and Munson’s teammates, maybe including his manager, Billy Martin, grabbed Munson and escorted him into the dugout before he could get into a whole back-and-forth with this fan behind the dugout.
My memory has it that Munson was taken out of the game at that point but, again, my memory is wrong: that second groundout ended the bottom of the fifth inning, and Fran Healy didn’t replace Munson until the top of the seventh. Still, I’m sure this was the game I remember. The Yankees had a lead over the Red Sox and the Orioles, not a commanding lead (four games with a month to go), and Mike Torrez, leading 2-0, gave up three runs in Munson’s final inning behind the plate, so replacing Munson at that point with the weak-hitting Healy was a strange move for Martin to make. Normally, behind by a run in a pennant race, Martin would want his MVP to get another AB or two.
My feeling was that Martin felt he had no choice other than to take Munson out—his MVP clearly was upset, screaming at fans, and he felt Munson needed to leave the game at that point to cool off.
The other reason I’m sure this was the game that I remember is that Nettles did have a great night, maybe his best offensive game ever: he drove in the Yankees’ first run on a single in the first inning, drove in their second run on a solo HR in the third inning, and ended the game with a walkoff HR in the bottom of the ninth. Hard to do much better than that.
We had a lot to talk about on the subway ride home, but the thing that stuck with us, of course, was Munson cursing at a fan, who richly deserved it. We were both a little shocked by the vulgar language, which we heard, and used, ourselves, all the time, of course, but coming from a professional ballplayer? That was unusual. As I said, it was a little shocking to me that a professional would pay any attention to fans screaming at them, much less that he would respond at all in kind to one fan in particular. It was interesting to see such clear evidence of a major leaguer getting rattled by a fan.
The next time I got similarly excellent seats was a few decades later, when I was dating a woman whose company owned box seats at Shea (having married and divorced the afore-mentioned fiancée)—she wasn’t a baseball fan either, but soon discovered that I was, and that I’d appreciate the company seats, which were almost the exact equivalent of my Yankee seats two decades earlier, a few rows behind the Mets’ dugout. By this time, the Mets had gotten good again. Again this was late in the season, and I’m guessing it was this game https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN199910020.shtml, on October 2, 1999. The Mets had been eliminated from the NL East, but were still in the hunt for the wild card, in a tight race with the Reds and the Astros for the sole wild-card spot, so tight it ended up needing a 163rd regular-season playoff game to be scheduled between the Reds and the Mets, a few nights later, in Cincinnati.
I’m not positive this was the game I remember, but I was definitely at this game (I abused the hell out of this woman’s company box seats, going to several home games that September and October) and Rickey Henderson definitely grounded out to shortstop, a la Thurman Munson, in this game. It was leading off the bottom of the third, scored tied 0-0, when Henderson hit a sharp grounder to short, and was thrown out by five steps.
If Henderson had hustled, he might have been able to cut that down to four or even three steps, but 40 years old at the time (and having a terrific year), Henderson obviously decided that he had no shot at beating the throw, and jogged the last few steps to first, which got some of the fans around me pretty agitated. They took out their disapproval on Henderson, again as he was returning to the dugout. Most of it was just booing (I won’t swear an oath that I didn’t boo a little), but one guy, again right behind me, called out "You’re supposed to run everything out, Rickey!"
Since we were no more than ten or twelve feet from the dugout, he obviously heard the guy. To everyone’s surprise, though, Rickey stopped running to the dugout and looked up at the guy who criticized his baserunning.
Not angrily at all, nothing like Munson’s pissed-off invitation to perform an act of unusual intimacy on him, almost I would say amused at the idea that there was a good reason to hustle on an easy 6-3, Rickey stopped in his tracks and asked the guy "What for?"
Total silence. A ballplayer, a sure-shot HoFer, no less, getting into a conversation with a fan, in the middle of an inning of a close, crucial game? Rickey waited patiently for an answer.
After a second or two, the fan said, lamely, "You just gotta."
Rickey looked at him disapprovingly, as if to say "That’s not a reason," and sort of shrugged. He walked into the dugout with a little smile on his face. To me, that smile said "Dumb fan. Rickey could pull a hamstring running out groundballs that have Rickey out by a mile," but maybe that’s just my imagination working overtime.
Those are my experiences the few times I’ve had really excellent seats at the ballpark. Looking back, maybe having those kind of seats is worth the extra expense—I’ve certainly gotten a few memories and a few stories out of those occasions, involving Hall of Famers and Hall of Fame candidates, and I’m glad I got this chance to revisit those times. Thanks for reading, and looking forward to hearing some of your stories about sitting in the good seats or your interactions with players.