COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – This is one way to understand what the Yankees mean to the people, and to the sport, by coming to the Hall of Fame, by walking its corridors, by absorbing its displays and reading the plaques and shopping in the neighboring stores, where every other item is decorated by pinstripes and interlocking “NY.”
For the last four decades, this was another way you could do that: You could spend a couple of minutes in the company of Bobby Murcer as he walked among the fans at Yankee Stadium, as he drank in every second of his time there, as he tried to prove, with every step he took, just how many people a single life can touch.
That life came to a quiet end yesterday, Bobby Murcer passing at age 62, ending a dignified battle that began when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor two winters ago.
Murcer will never earn a plaque here, and none of the Yankees teams he played on from 1966-74 or from 1979-82 will ever be celebrated with a display here. If Don Mattingly is the Yankee for whom most of the fans’ empathy is reserved, then Murcer is a close second, since he did get a peek at the 1981 Series, even if he was far closer to the end of his career by then than the beginning.
But Murcer was every bit the Yankee that any of the Yankees crystallized in Cooperstown were. Because Murcer was forced to do what no other Yankee had ever been forced to do: He was the singular reason why a lot of Yankees fans bothered to come to The Bronx in the dark, desultory days of the last 1960s and early 1970s. Before him, Yankees had always danced on stardust. He was forced to trudge through the ashes of a fallen dynasty.
When the Yankees’ kingdom collapsed, there was Murcer, and there was little else. There was Murcer, who’d come out of Oklahoma just like Mickey Mantle, who’d come up as a shortstop just like The Mick, then shifted to center field. He wore uniform No. 1, and he was the No. 1 attraction for some awful Yankees teams, playing a terrific center field, conforming his stroke to the Stadium’s short porch.
A little piece of Murcer’s soul was stolen forever when Gabe Paul shipped him west in exchange for Bobby Bonds. A few spring trainings ago, when Barry Bonds was doing something or other to aggravate or agitate, Murcer smiled and said: “I may be the only guy in the country who has a bigger problem with the father than the son. He’s the guy who helped send me into exile.”
It was an exile that ended on June 26, 1979, when the Cubs sent him back to The Bronx, and because baseball is a cruel game, that meant he missed out on a pair of Yankees championships. But it did allow him to spend a few more weeks around his closest baseball friend, Thurman Munson, a gift that became painfully poignant when Munson died in a plane crash in August.
It allowed Murcer his grandest moment as a Yankee, a bittersweet juxtaposition for which he will forever be remembered. The Monday following the accident he delivered a eulogy for his friend in Canton, Ohio, in the morning, and that night, after convincing Billy Martin (who, by then, had reclaimed No. 1, forcing Murcer to wear 2) to play him, he hit a home run and then drilled the game-winning RBI in the ninth inning to beat the first-place Orioles.
It was easy to forget that Murcer did have a fine career as a Yankee, highlighted by a 1971 season in which he hit .331 with 25 homers and 94 RBIs and an otherworldly on-base percentage of .427. He was a five-time All-Star. And he did get those innings in the 1981 Series.
He was admired for that. He became beloved later on, as an announcer, as an ambassador, as a humble messenger of all that’s supposed to be right about baseball, and about human beings. We lose a terrific Yankee. But more important, we lose a tremendous person.