The old scorebook doesn’t lie. Right there, for the game the Yankees played against the Chicago White Sox May 28, 1974, it has Elliott Maddox playing center field and Bobby Murcer playing right field. The game marked Bill Virdon’s shocking switch of Murcer, the successor to Mickey Mantle, from center field to right.
Murcer had received no warning or even a hint that the change was coming. The manager had not said anything about it that day or before that day. Murcer learned of it when he walked into the Yankees clubhouse at Shea Stadium and looked at the lineup card posted on the door. He had been the Yankees center fielder for five years and was nearly a third of the way through his sixth season in that hallowed spot in the Yankees defensive alignment.
But Virdon, an old center fielder himself now in his first season as Yankees manager, decided Maddox was a better center fielder and was not bound by the team’s tradition.
“That was different to him,” Lou Piniella said of the change for Murcer. “It really was. They put Maddox in center field and Bobby played right and I played left. He wasn’t happy about it, but he respected Virdon’s wishes.”
Piniella, a teammate and close friend, was talking about Murcer a few days after he died at the age of 62 as the result of a deadly brain tumor. All brain tumors are bad, but Murcer’s was the worst kind, a glioblastoma multiforme, the kind that also killed Dan Quisenberry, Dick Howser, Johnny Oates, Tug McGraw and John Vukovich.
Until Murcer’s tumor was discovered in December 2006, his worst year was 1974. The unceremonious eviction was not the first event to shatter his calm existence that year. His year began poorly and ominously April 6 when the Yankees opened the season at Shea Stadium.
Murcer was a Yankee Stadium hitter, taking advantage of the close right field fence. It was only 296 feet down the right field line to the low fence. But when the 1974 season began Yankee Stadium was closed for two years for renovation. The Yankees played their home games at Shea Stadium, sharing it with the regular tenants, the Mets.
Murcer quickly discovered he could not hit at Shea and let it psych him out completely; He never tried to hide his disdain for the place. “I hated Shea Stadium from the first pitch. Still do,” he wrote in his recent autobiography, “Yankee for Life.”
“He was used to the short porch at Yankee Stadium and all of a sudden the balls at Shea were going to the warning track,” Piniella recalled. “He tried different things. Crowd the plate a little more so he could pull it. He started to swing a little harder and created little problems with his swing. He just didn’t like it. With the airplanes flying and the winds gusting, it was an adjustment for him. He just didn’t like Shea Stadium.”
As if playing at Shea weren’t bad enough, Murcer soon had to play right field at Shea. The move was nothing his fellow Oklahoman, Mickey Mantle, had to make. It was embarrassing and insulting for the player the Yankees had touted as the next Mantle.
To digress, Bob Fishel, the Yankees’ classy and gentlemanly public relations man when Murcer joined the Yankees, subsequently took the blame for putting that kind of pressure on Murcer. It was unfair to him, Fishel acknowledged, creating a burden he should never have had.
But the fact that Murcer was always being compared to Mantle made his move rightward even worse. Virdon, a straight-shooting, no-nonsense manager, didn’t help as far as Murcer was concerned.
What annoyed him the most, he wrote, was Virdon’s failure to tell him in advance of his plan. “But you’d think he would have learned in Management 101 to tell your star player beforehand if you’re going to do something like change his job title…”
Playing at Shea Stadium was bad enough. Playing right field was more than bad enough. But the event of Oct. 22 of that awful year was worst of all. The Yankees traded Murcer to the San Francisco Giants for Bobby Bonds.
“I felt devastated, stunned and betrayed,” Murcer wrote.
In the end, though, Murcer would have gladly accepted all of the ills of 1974 for not learning on Christmas Eve 2006 that he had a deadly brain tumor.
Nobody has ever figured out why people get brain tumors. They simply grow quietly and insidiously until symptoms develop that tell their carriers something is wrong. In Murcer’s case, it was headaches and a loss of energy.
Tumors also develop differently. Larry Dierker, former pitcher and manager of the Houston Astros, had a brain tumor, and it was benign. Murcer, Quisenberry, Howser, Oates, McGraw and Vukovich had a different experience.
But even within the context of malignant brain tumors, differences exist. That is why I am sitting here writing this column.
Following his operation Murcer qualified for an experimental clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston. He got monthly shots of a vaccine designed to boost his immune system to fight off the return of cancerous cells. A year into the trial, Murcer was having success with it.
Things were going so well that his hair, which he had lost during radiation and chemotherapy treatments, began growing back. “I have to get haircuts now,” he said about a year after the operation.
But several months later Murcer began having trouble with his immune system, and on July 12 he died.
“He was a fun-loving guy, a very considerate man,” Piniella said. “He loved the game of baseball. He was a really good teammate and friend. He always had a smile and a good word. I never saw Bobby upset much at all. Just a wonderful human being.”