April 22, 1971: Castoff Luis Tiant loses frigid Triple-A home opener

The Triple-A Rochester Red Wings’ home opener against the Richmond Braves on April 22, 1971, brought together some baseball names on their way up, others on their way out – and one caught intriguingly in the middle.

The future stars on the rise included Rochester’s Don Baylor and Bobby Grich and Richmond’s Darrell Evans, who made a combined nine All-Star Game appearances and played on World Series champions.1 Red Wings manager Joe Altobelli might also be included in this group. Winning his first game as Red Wings skipper on this day, Altobelli went on to win the 1983 World Series as manager of the Wings’ parent club, the Baltimore Orioles.2

Richmond starting pitcher Pedro Ramos, six days shy of 36, headlined the group whose best big-league days were behind them. The four games Ramos had pitched for the Washington Senators in 1970 proved to be the last of his 15-season major-league career. Others at or near the end of the major-league line included Richmond’s Tommie Aaron, Van Kelly, and Shaun Fitzmaurice and Rochester’s Mike Adamson.

And then there was the 30-year-old right-hander who took the loss for Richmond in an inning of relief. He’d been a 20-game winner and ERA champion in the American League just three seasons before, then been injured. In another team’s uniform, he recovered his effectiveness and returned to the heights of big-league success. But on April 22, 1971, that bright future was not yet visible for struggling castoff Luis Tiant.

Rochester has a history of strongly supporting minor-league baseball and hockey,3 and the Red Wings played their home opener in great hockey weather, with temperatures in the upper 40s and wind gusts of up to 35 miles an hour blowing out to right field.4 Some 7,275 winter-hardened fans turned out at Silver Stadium anyway. It was the International League’s largest home-opener crowd that season, beating Louisville’s Opening Day attendance by a single fan.5

Although the Red Wings had lost five straight on the road to open the season,6 the chilled Opening Day fans might have known that the team was going to be special. A preseason column in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle predicted that the new manager’s respected leadership would take the team over the top: “Altobelli should blend the team together so that Rochester will pop its first pennant champagne since 1966.”7

For his part, Altobelli forecast: “Pitching will be the deciding factor. We’re definitely a contender. If we get the good pitching, we should be a winner.”8 He was right. Following a third-place finish in 1970 under Cal Ripken Sr., the 1971 team won the regular-season title with an 86-54 record, then won the Governors’ Cup playoffs.9

Richmond, an Atlanta Braves farm team, had finished in fifth place in 1970, missing the playoffs by a single game.10 Like the Red Wings, the “R-Braves” had a new manager in 1971. Clyde King managed in Rochester from 1959 through 1962 and had also led the San Francisco Giants in 1969 and the first 42 games of 1970 before being fired.11 The 1971 Richmond team went on to miss the playoffs again, finishing sixth at 69-71, 17 games out of first place.

Ramos and Rochester starter John Montague swapped frosty zeroes for the first four innings. Montague, a 23-year-old righty from Old Dominion University, had not reached the majors as of 1971. He got there two years later and pitched parts of seven seasons, most notably as a staff bulwark on the first-year 1977 Seattle Mariners.

The Braves scored first in the top of the fifth, when lefty-swinging first baseman Jim Breazeale drove a ball into the prevailing wind and over the right-field fence.12

In the bottom half, a series of plays one reporter called “bizarre” led to Rochester scoring three runs without a hit.13 Second baseman Art Miranda started the inning by making contact with his own batted ball, an automatic out. Pitcher Montague drew a walk. Baylor grounded to third baseman Aaron, who threw wildly to first; Baylor was safe and Montague took second. Ramos hit shortstop Grich in the back with a pitch, then walked third baseman Mike Ferraro on a full count to force in a run.14

Lefty reliever Tom House, about two months away from his big-league debut, took over from Ramos. First baseman Terry Crowley grounded into a run-scoring force out at second base to make the score 2-1, Rochester. As House tried to hold Crowley close by throwing to first, plate umpire John Grimsley15 called a balk, and Grich jogged home with the Red Wings’ third run. King argued long and loud to no avail, and later claimed that Grimsley had allowed House to make two identical throws to first before calling a balk on the third. “It was a bad time. A real bad time. It cost us the game,” King lamented.16

Richmond left fielder Evans, who had played briefly with Atlanta in 1969 and 1970, brought the Braves within one run in the seventh inning by hitting a titanic homer to right field. The Democrat and Chronicle estimated its distance at 450 feet; a Richmond reporter wrote that the ball soared about 420 feet and then bounced into the open door of a garage adjoining the ballpark.17 The parent club beckoned Evans for good about a month later, and he hit 12 homers in 89 games with Atlanta in 1971. He went on to hit 414 round-trippers in 21 big-league seasons.

Montague then yielded consecutive – but not run-scoring – doubles to Breazeale and Kelly and was replaced by reliever Dick Baney.18 With runners on second and third and one out, catcher Freddie Velázquez19 hit a high pop in front of the plate and failed to run it out, believing it was foul. The wind blew it back into fair territory, and Velázquez was an easy out at first as the runners stayed put. Baney got the next batter, Leo Foster, on a bang-bang groundout to end the inning.20

Richmond tied the game in the eighth on another solo homer – a 380-foot job, once again to right field – by Fitzmaurice, pinch-hitting for reliever David Gourieux. Fitzmaurice, 28, had had a cup of coffee with the 1966 New York Mets and continued in the minors until 1973.

Tiant, signed by Atlanta just six days earlier after the Minnesota Twins had released him during spring training, came on in the eighth. Right fielder Jim Hutto led off with a single to right. Center fielder Rich Coggins sacrificed him to second. Tiant intentionally walked catcher Johnny Oates to get to Miranda, who was 0-for-3 in the game and had hit just .172 in 48 games at Triple A the year before.

Altobelli sent 25-year-old Larry Johnson, usually a first baseman,21 to hit for Miranda. Johnson swung at a slider outside the strike zone, then took a curveball to fall into an 0-and-2 hole. Tiant’s next pitch was “a fastball, I guess,” Johnson said later, in a telling choice of words. Johnson drove it down the left-field line for a double, scoring Hutto to put Rochester back on top, 4-3.22

For the ninth, utilityman Hutto moved to second base,23 while lefty Mickey Scott took over pitching duties. Scott posted a 9-1 record and 3.38 ERA in 54 games with Rochester in 1971 – not enough to receive a call-up to Baltimore, although he got there the following season.24

Scott worked a perfect ninth inning, striking out one batter, to nail down the Red Wings’ 4-3 victory. Baney earned the win, Scott earned a save, and Tiant was saddled with the loss. It was one of only five games Tiant pitched in the Atlanta organization before the Braves released him on May 15. He had a 1-3 record and a 6.26 ERA.25

The Red Sox signed Tiant two days later, assigning him first to Louisville, then bringing him up to the majors for a June 11 start. After mixed-to-poor results in 1971, Tiant rebounded in 1972, winning 15 games, leading the AL in ERA for the second time, and becoming a Boston hero beloved for his outsized personality and trick-bag pitching style.

All told, Tiant won 122 regular-season games – including three 20-win seasons – and three postseason games in his eight seasons with the Red Sox. The Braves, whose team ERA hovered at or near the bottom of the NL for most of the 1970s, could have used him.26

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team, and season data.

Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet provides box scores of minor-league games, but the April 23, 1971, editions of the Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle and Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch published box scores.

Photo of 1971 Topps card #95 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Grich’s World Series championship was already behind him in April 1971: He’d played 30 games for the 1970 champion Orioles, though he did not play in the postseason. Evans played for the 1984 Detroit Tigers and Baylor for the 1987 Minnesota Twins.

2 Entering the 1971 season, Altobelli had spent five seasons as a minor-league manager in the Orioles chain, the prior two at Double-A Dallas-Fort Worth. He managed the Red Wings through the 1976 season, winning the IL Manager of the Year award in 1971 and 1976. Altobelli had previously played with the Red Wings, later served as the team’s general manager, and even lived in Rochester in the offseason, where he was a locally beloved figure.

3 As of April 2023, Rochester’s minor-league hockey team, the Americans (known locally as the Amerks), has been a member of the American Hockey League since the 1956-57 season. Like the Red Wings, the Amerks operate one level below the major leagues. Since 1979, they have most frequently been affiliated with the nearby Buffalo Sabres of the National Hockey League. Rochester has also hosted professional lacrosse and soccer teams, which have established their own niches in the city’s pro sports fandom.

4 By contrast, Opening Day 1970 was marked by 76-degree weather. Jim Castor, “Wings a Winner at Home,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, April 23, 1971: 1D.

5 Castor, “Wings a Winner at Home.” The Louisville Colonels were the Triple-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox.

6 Craig Stolze, “Newcomer the Hero,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 23, 1971: 1D.

7 Jim Castor, “Red Wings the Best,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 16, 1971: 1D.

8 “Wings Strong in Hitting, but Pitching Questionable,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 11, 1971: 5D.

9 Governors’ Cup page, Baseball-Reference BR Bullpen, accessed November 28, 2022. The 1971 Red Wings pitching staff was solid though not spectacular, ranking near the middle or in the upper half of the IL in major statistical categories.

10 The top four teams in the IL qualified for the playoffs that year. The Tidewater Tides finished fourth, 10 games back, with a 74-66 record; Richmond finished fifth, 11 games out, at 73-67.

11 John Czarnecki, “Giants’ Start Too Late for King,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 23, 1971: 3D. King subsequently managed the Atlanta Braves in 1974 and 1975, as well as the New York Yankees for part of the 1982 season.

12 Jerry Lindquist, “R-Braves Charitable in 4-3 Loss to Wings,” Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, April 23, 1971: 1C.

13 Castor, “Wings a Winner at Home.”

14 Lindquist, “R-Braves Charitable in 4-3 Loss to Wings.”

15 Grimsley had made his major-league debut in unusual fashion the previous October. When major-league umpires went on strike at the start of the 1970 playoffs, Grimsley was among the fill-ins who replaced them. He worked home plate for Game One of the National League Championship Series between the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium on October 3. The regular umps returned the following day. As of November 2022, Retrosheet credited Grimsley with working another major-league game on August 25, 1978 – also during a strike by major-league umpires. However, none of the box scores for games played that day mention him. Grimsley’s Sporting News umpire card makes no mention of either his big-league appearance in 1970 or any game in 1978.

16 Czarnecki, “Giants’ Start Too Late for King,”

17 Castor, “Wings a Winner at Home”; Lindquist, “R-Braves Charitable in 4-3 Loss to Wings.”

18 Castor, “Wings a Winner at Home.”

19 Baney and Velázquez had both played for the Seattle Pilots in the only year of the Pilots’ existence, 1969. They were not teammates, however: Baney played in Seattle in July and then again in September and October, while Velázquez played there in late April and early May.

20 Lindquist, “R-Braves Charitable in 4-3 Loss to Wings.”

21 The 1971 Red Wings’ Larry Johnson, whose career peaked at Triple A, should not be confused with Larry Doby Johnson, a catcher and outfielder who spent parts of five seasons in the majors. Larry Doby Johnson also played in Rochester, but not until 1979 and 1980. In 1971 he was playing for Jacksonville in the Double-A Dixie Association.

22 Stolze, “Newcomer the Hero.”

23 In his only full season in the majors, with the 1970 Philadelphia Phillies, Hutto primarily played in the outfield, at first base, and as a catcher. During a 12-season professional career, he appeared at least once at every position except shortstop and center field.

24 History repeated in 1974, when Scott went 8-2 with a microscopic 0.99 ERA in 57 games for the Red Wings – and, again, was not called up to the majors. He pitched parts of five seasons in the majors with the Orioles, Montreal Expos, and California Angels.

25 “Veteran Tiant Given Release by R-Braves,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 16, 1971: E4.

26 In 1974 Atlanta pitchers uncharacteristically placed second in ERA among NL staffs; their 3.05 ERA trailed only the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2.97. Other than that, the team never placed better than third from the bottom between 1971 and 1979, and had the NL’s worst staff ERA five times (1972, 1973, and 1977 through 1979).