El Tiante

On June 3, 1971, the Boston Red Sox purchased the contract of Luis Tiant from their minor league affiliate in Louisville. Three years removed from be­ing the best pitcher in the American League, Luis had been released at the end of spring training by the Twins, had spent thirty days with the Richmond Braves, and had been signed by Louisville in mid­ May. The Red Sox could always use more pitching, but did they really think this guy was going to help?

Cuba and Mexico

Luis Tiant was born and grew up in Marianao, Cuba, the son and namesake of a leg­endary pitcher. Luis Tiant Sr. starred in the Cuban Leagues and the Negro Leagues of the United States for twenty years, and was famous for his variety of pitches (including a spitball), his pick-off move, and his exaggerated pirouette motion. As late as 1947, at the age of 41, Luis Sr. put together a 10-0 record for the New York Cubans and pitched in the East-West All-Star Game.

After failing a tryout with the Havana team in the International League, Luis Jr. started his professional career in 1959, at age eighteen, for the Mexico City Tigers. His performance was poor (5-19, 5.92 ERA), but he followed this up with seventeen wins in 1960 and twelve more in 1961, after having been delayed for two months trying to leave his homeland. At the end of the 1961 season, the Cleveland Indians purchased his contract for $35,000.

During these three years playing in Mexico, Luis returned to Havana to play winter ball and be with his family. In August, 1961 he married Maria, a native of Mexico City, and at the close of the season they were planning to return to Luis’ home in Marianao. Unfortunately, the Cuban political situation had worsened, and Fidel Castro’s government was no longer letting anyone leave. Upon the advice of his father, Luis did not return home. He would not see his parents for fourteen years.

Moving up the ladder

In 1962, living in an English­ speaking country for the first time, Luis had a respectable year (7-8, 3.63) for Charleston (West Vir­ginia) in the Class A Eastern League. In 1963, he was probably the best pitcher in the Single A Carolina League, finishing 14-9 for Burlington, North Caro­lina, including a no-hitter, with a 2.56 ERA, and leading the league in complete games, strikeouts, and shutouts. He was twenty-three years old.

The following winter, he was not on the Indians’ 40-man roster and was therefore available in the ma­jor league draft. No team risked $12,000 to claim him. The Indians sent him back co Burlington, but on the eve of the 1964 season an injury opened up a spot for him at Triple-A Portland of the Pacific Coast League. He was one step away from the majors.

The Portland Beavers pitching staff included twenty-year-old phenom Sam McDowell, who had spent parts of the last three seasons with the Indians and was clearly the star of the Portland team. Tiant was not in the rotation.

Luis picked up a relief win on opening day, and another one a week later. His first start was on May 3, his third appearance of the season in the Beavers’ fif­teenth game. McDowell, meanwhile, started hot and got hotter, pitching a one-hitter and a no-hitter in consecutive starts in early May, before finally being called up on May 30. His Portland record was 8-0, with a 1.18 ERA, and 102 strikeouts in 76 innings. Sam also won eleven games with the Indians in 1964. Tiant, meanwhile, was quietly building up his own resume. At the time of McDowell’s promotion, Luis himself was 7-0 with a 2.25 ERA. After losing, 2-0, on June 5, Tiant won four more games to finish June at 12-1. On July 2, he beat the San Diego Padres, led by his fellow Cuban Tony Perez, 2-1, in a matchup of the best teams in the PCL’s Western Division. The next day, Portland GM Dave Steele said, “At first, 1 wasn’t sure that Tiant wasn’t just getting the breaks, but that 2-1 win over San Diego convinced me.”

Luis was called up to the big club on July 17. His record in Portland was 15-1 (a PCL record .938 win­ning percentage) with a 2.04 ERA. He had completed thirteen of his fifteen starts.

Tiant joined the Indians in New York on Saturday morning, July 18, and was asked by his manager, Birdie Tebbetts, if he was ready to pitch. When Luis said he was, Tebbetts replied, “Great, you’re starting tomorrow against Whitey Ford.” Tiant responded with a four-hit shutout, striking out eleven. Continu­ing his storybook season, he went 10-4 for the Tribe with a 2.83 ERA. His combined line for 1964 was 25-5 with a 2.42 ERA in 264 innings.

The Road to Stardom

Tiant spent the next three years as a .500 pitcher (11-11, 12-11, 12-9) for a me­diocre team. In 1966, he started the season with three consecutive shutouts, a streak that ended in the first inning in Baltimore when Frank Robinson hit a ball clear our of Memorial Stadium, the only time that was ever done. Luis hit a rough spell in May and June and spent the last half of the season in the bullpen, notching eight saves in thirty relief appearances. De­spite only sixteen starts, his five shutouts topped the American League. His ERAs in 1966 and 1967 were a respectable 2.79 and 2.74.

In 1968, Tiant became a star, going 21-9, with a 1.60 ERA. Luis won the ERA title in this “Year of the Pitcher,” and led the league with nine shutouts. He pitched his best game on July 3 in Cleveland when he recorded nineteen strikeouts in ten innings against the Twins. In the top of the tenth, the Twins got run­ners on second and third with no outs. Luis struck out the side. The Indians finally pushed across a run in the bottom of the tenth to give Tiant a 1-0 victory.

The following week, Luis started and lost the All­ Star Game, giving the NL an unearned run in the first inning, which turned out to be the only run of the game. After a 3-0 loss to Denny McLain in early Sep­tember, McLain suggested that “Luis and I would each be fighting for 30 wins if he had our kind of hitting to go with his kind of pitching.” Catcher Bill Freehan took it a step further, insisting that Luis would be “go­ing for 40 wins.” In the event, McLain finished 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA, and won the Cy Young and MVP Awards unanimously.

After a September game in which Luis left with el­bow stiffness, manager Alvin Dark told the press that arm trouble was inevitable with his “extreme mo­tions.” Throughout Tiant’s tenure in Cleveland, there was grumbling in the media and from management that his trademark exaggerated windup and gyrations were unnecessary. Any time Luis had a sore arm or a stretch of poor pitching, somebody would bring up his delivery-or his weight.

After his great season, Luis was told not to pitch that winter in Venezuela as he usually did. Luis seethed at what he considered disrespectful treatment after his great year. He openly suggested that if he couldn’t pitch in South America he would have an off year in 1969.

The Road to Oblivion

The Indians finished 1969 with the worst record in the American League and their worst winning percentage in fifty-four years. Luis declined from 21-8 to 9-20, and posted an ERA of 3.71. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds-changes to the strike zone and mound sent the league ERA up to 3.61. Nonetheless, Luis was an average American League pitcher, which was quite a step down from 1968. He insisted that it was all due to his not being able to pitch the previous winter.

Tiant’s feud with Dark got progressively worse as the losses mounted. Dark talked first through the media: “You can’t throw your head up into the air, then look over the scoreboard and then pitch a baseball”­ before finally ordering Tiant to curtail the fancy delivery. Tiant stood his ground, and the relationship never recovered.

In December, 1969, Luis was traded to the Twins in a six-player deal that brought Dean Chance and Graig Nettles to the Indians. In 1970, Tiant won his first six decisions for a strong Minnesota team, but left his sixth victory with a sore shoulder chat had been bothering him since spring. Luis went to see a specialist who found a crack in a bone in his right shoulder. He prescribed rest.

Luis sat down for ten weeks and returned to lose three of four decisions in the final weeks of the sea­ son. He pitched only two-thirds of an inning in the three-game playoff sweep by the Orioles.

By spring training 1971, Luis considered himself fully recovered, but he pulled a muscle in his rib cage, missed two weeks, and was otherwise ineffective in just eight innings. On March 31, he was given his un­conditional release. The Twins and their doctors believed that he was finished at age thirty.

The only team willing to give him a job was the Atlanta Braves, who signed him to a thirty-day trial in Richmond. After giving him limited work, the Braves were unwilling co promote him, so he signed with Louisville, the Red Sox Triple-A affiliate in the International League. He pitched well in thirty-one innings-twenty-nine strikeouts and a 2.61 ERA­ and was summoned to Boston on June 3.

The Road Back

Tiant was not an immediate success in the Hub. In his first appearances on June 11, he gave up five runs in only one inning. Cliff Keane wrote in the Boston Globe: “The latest investment by the Red Sox looked about as sound as taking a bagful of money and throwing it off Pier 4 into the Atlantic. Tiant remained in the rotation, but he dropped his first six decisions. After one loss, Keane led his game story with “Enough is enough.” The team was in first place when Luis was recalled, but would be out of the race by the end of July.

Nonetheless, manager Eddie Kasko believed there were signs that Tiant might regain his old form. He shut out the Yankees for seven innings before losing 2-1, on a two-run home run by Roy White. He threw ten shutout innings, and 154 pitches, in his return to Minnesota, but did not figure in the decision.

Kasko finally took him out of the rotation in early August. He was better out of the bullpen- he finished 1-1 with a 1.89 ERA as a relief pitcher. Nevertheless, after his four-month trial, there was certainly no guarantee of a job the next spring. A lot of Sox watchers were surprised he was still on the 40-man roster in the spring.

On March 22, 1972, the Red Sox traded Sparky Lyle to the Yankees for Danny Cater, a trade that many Boston fans still rank among the worst that the Red Sox have ever made. However, it might be worth reconsidering the trade in light of the fact it probably saved Luis’ spot on the team. Kasko, who never stopped believing in Tiant, remembered his ef­fectiveness in the bullpen in 1971, and wanted him out there. The team believed it had a solid group of starters in Ray Culp, Sonny Siebert, Marcy Pattin, and Lew Krausse.

By the end of July, Kasko’s faith in Tiant seemed to have been justified. Luis was effective in a variety of roles-the occasional spot start, a ninth-inning save, or a long relief stint. The team started poorly, thanks in part to the ineffectiveness of Siebert and Culp, and remained under .500 for months.

Led by the emergence of rookie pitchers John Curtis and Lynn McGlothen, the Red Sox climbed to within five games of first place at the start of August.They went neck-and-neck with the Tigers, Orioles, and Yankees right through September. The drive for the pennant was led by two players who were hardly considered part of the team’s plans at the start of the season: rookie catcher Carlton Fisk and a sen­sational Luis Tiant.

On August 5, Tiant got a start at Fenway because Siebert wasn’t feeling well, and beat the Orioles. A week later, he faced the Birds again in Baltimore and pitched six no-hit innings before settling for a three-hitter. After picking up a save, he started in Comiskey Park on August 19, and had a no-hitter with two outs in the eighth before finishing with a two-hitter. After this game, Kasko announced that Luis was in the rotation to stay.”

Over ten starts, beginning with this game in Chicago, Tiant went 9-1 with six shutouts and a 0.96 ERA. All nine victories were complete games. The first four were shutouts, his streak of 40 scoreless innings ending during a four-hit victory over the Yankees at Fenway. After a loss in Yankee Stadium, Luis Shut out the Indians back home.

Before the second game of a twin-night double-header against the Orioles on September 20, the fans rose to their feet as Luis walked to the bullpen to warm up and gave him such an ovation that his teammates joined in the applause, and several reported that they had goose bumps. The crowd spent most of the evening chanting “Loo-Ee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee,” a sound that brings a smile to countless middle-aged people in Boston to this day.

When Tiant came up to bat in the bottom of the eight on his way to yet another shutout, the crowd rose to give him an ovation that continued throughout his at-bat, during the break between innings, and throughout the entire top of the ninth. Larry Claflin, writing in the Boston Herald the next morning, compared it pared it to “the last time Joe DiMaggio went to bat in Boston, or Bob Cousy’s final game.” Carl Yastrzemski, who had had one of baseball’s most famous Septem­bers himself only five years earlier, said “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. But I’ll tell you one thing: Tiant deserved every bit of it.”

After two more clutch victories over the Tigers and Orioles, Tiant lost his final start in Tiger Stadium, 3- 1, a game that clinched the pennant for Detroit on the next to the last day of the season. Though he was essentially a relief pitcher for the first four months of the season, Luis finished 15-6 with a 1.91 ERA, good enough for his second ERA title. He was the obvious winner of the Comeback Player of The Year Award. He was thirty-one years old and the most popular player on a team with a suddenly bright future.

Why had Luis struggled for so long and regained it all so quickly? There is no way to be certain, but perhaps after his shoulder injury he just needed some rest. He took only ten weeks off to recover from a bro­ken bone in his shoulder, and he never really stopped pitching after that. When the Red Sox brought him up in 1971, they put him in the rotation and let him throw as many as 154 pitches. Once they sent him to the bullpen he was fine, and by August of 1972, when his brilliant comeback really began, it had been a full year since he had been in the starting rotation.

A Star in Boston

The next four years are the most well known of Tiant’s career. He won eighty-one games and became a star on the national stage. He capped his comeback by winning twenty for the sec­ond time in 1973, as the Red Sox finished in second place again.

In 1974, Luis won his twentieth on August 23 to give the Red Sox a seemingly safe seven-game lead. The team then went into a horrific batting slump and faded to third, eight games behind the Orioles. Tiant, who had been considered an MVP candidate in Au­gust, won only two of his final seven decisions, though he continued to pitch well. ln his next four starts after winning his twentieth he lost 1-0, 1-0, and 2-0, then took a no-decision in a game in which he gave up one run in nine innings. He finished 22-13, with a league leading seven shutouts.

Tiant was revered by his teammates in Boston, much as he had been elsewhere. In 1968, Thomas Fitzpatrick wrote an article about Tiant in Sport en­titled “The Most Popular Indian.” When he was released in Minnesota, the Twins long-time publicist called the scene in the locker room , “the most forlorn experience I’ve ever had in baseball.”

The Red Sox had traditionally been a fractured team, but Luis was loved by teammates as different as Bill Lee and Carl Yastrzemski. They loved him be­cause he kept them laughing, largely by making fun of everyone, including himself. He called Yastrzemski “Polacko” and Fisk “Frankenstein,” among some of his cleaner sobriquets. A barrel-chested man who looked fatter than he really was, he would emerge from the shower with a cigar in his mouth, look at his naked body in the mirror and declare “good-lookeen sonofabeech” in his exaggerated Spanish accent. Af­ter the 1972 season, Red Sox pitcher John Curtis wrote a newspaper story about crying to explain to his wife why he loved Luis Tiant. Dwight Evans later said, “Unless you’ve played with him, you can’t un­derstand what Luis means to a team.”

Though 1975 was destined to be a great year for the Red Sox, Luis struggled for most of the summer. As Boston took over the lead for good in late June, Tiant was seen more and more as an aging back-of-the-rotation starter. Luis may have had a reason for his struggles though: his heart and mind were occupied with a long overdue family reunion.

In May 1975, Senator George McGovern made an unofficial visit to Cuba to see Fidel Castro. Although not the principal reason for his trip, he carried with him a letter from Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts making a personal plea that Luis’s parents be allowed to visit Luis in Boston. The letter suggested that “Luis’s career as a major league pitcher is in its latter years” and “he is hopeful that his parents will be able to visit him during this current baseball season.” The very next day, Castro approved the request and put the diplomatic wheels in motion for a visit for “as long as they wish.” Three and a half months later, there was a tearful reunion at Boston’s Logan Airport, with cameramen in full battle array.

On August 26, the Red Sox arranged for Luis’s par­ents to be introduced to the crowd and for Luis Sr. to throw out a ceremonial first pitch. After a prolonged ovation, the sixty-nine-year-old Tiant, standing on the Fenway Park mound adorned in a brown suit and Red Sox cap, went into his full windup and fired a fastball to catcher Tim Blackwell-alas, low and away. Luis Sr., looking annoyed, asked for the ball back. Once more he used his full windup, and deliv­ered a fastball across the heart of the plate. The fans roared as he left the field. His son later commented, “He told me he was ready to go four or five.”

Luis Jr. proceeded to get hit hard that night and again five days later, and shut it down for ten days co rest his aching back. Reporters privately lamented that it was a shame that his parents hadn’t gotten here a year earlier, when Luis was still good.

On September 11, manager Darrell Johnson de­cided to give Luis one last chance to get it going, against the Tigers. The Red Sox lead, once as high as 8-1/2 games, was now down to five. If Luis was going to help out, it had to be right now. Tiant responded with seven and two-thirds innings of no-hit ball be­fore giving up a run and three hits. When asked about the bloop hit by Aurelio Rodriguez that ruined the no-hitter, Luis Sr. responded, “Don’t talk about a lucky hit. The man hit the ball pretty good.”

Luis’s next start, on September 16, was the biggest game of the year and one of the legendary games in the history of Fenway Park. The hard-charging Ori­oles, now 4-1/2 games out, were in town, and Jim Palmer would face Luis. Many observers claim that there were well over 40,000 people in the park that night, several thousand over capacity. Tiant pitched his first shutout of the year, a 2-0 five-hitter, and the crowd was chanting for most of the night (“Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee”). At the end of the month Tiant pitched another shutout in Cleveland, and the Sox won the pennant by 4-1/2 games.

After these three remarkable performances, Tiant had evolved from an afterthought in the rotation to the obvious choice to start the first game of the play­offs against the three-time defending champs. He three-hit the Athletics to start a Red Sox sweep, and followed with a five-hit shutout in the first game of the World Series against the Reds. In Game 4, in per­haps the quintessential performance of his career, he threw 163 pitches, worked out of jams in nearly every inning, and recorded a complete game 5-4 win. He couldn’t hold a 3-0 lead in Game 6, and was finally removed losing 6-3, before Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk bailed him out with legendary home runs.

Winding down

Tiant won twenty-one games for a struggling Red Sox team in 1976, and followed that with twelve and thirteen wins the next two years. After the team’s stunning collapse late in the 1978 season, the Red Sox found themselves 3-1/2 games behind the Yankees with eight games to go. Before a game in Toronto, Luis said, “If we lose today, it will be over my dead body. They’ll have to leave me face down on the mound.” He won, of course, and Boston went on to win its last eight games, including two more Tiant wins on three days’ rest. On the last day of the season, the Red Sox needed a win and a Yan­kee loss to force a playoff. Cleveland beat Catfish Hunter while Tiant dazzled the Fenway crowd with a two-hitter against the Blue Jays. His career record for the Sox in September and October was 31-12. It was his last game in a Red Sox uniform.

In the off-season, the Red Sox management de­cided to let Tiant and Bill Lee leave, and Tiant signed with the Yankees. Dwight Evans was devastated at what he considered management’s ignorance of what Luis meant in the clubhouse. Carl Yastrzemski says he cried when he heard the news: “They tore out our heart and soul.”

Luis had one good year with New York, winning thirteen games in 1979, before falling to 8-9 in 1980 and not pitching at all in the playoff loss to the Roy­als. After the season, the Yankees released him. He signed with the Pirates in 1981, but spent most of the season with his old team in Portland. He excelled again for the Beavers-13-7, 3.82-but struggled with the Pirates and was released at the end of the season. He finished his major league career with six games for the 1982 Angels, winning his final game against the Red Sox on August 17, 1982.

Luis Tiant was one of the most beloved and re­spected players of his time, and certainly one of the most popular players ever to wear a Red Sox uniform. His career was one of streaks, and his best ones, in the pennant races of 1972, 1975, and 1978 and in the 1975 postseason, came when his team needed him most. Given up for dead in the middle of his career, he came back to greatness that inspired a region and two nations. He is a reasonable candidate for the Hall of Fame, but for those of us fortunate enough co see him close up in the 1970s, his career needs no such confirmation. El Tiante is unforgettable.

 

Sources

Claflin, Larry, “He Smokes in Shower, Sizzles on Hill,” The Sporting News, 174:14, October 14, 1972.

Fitzpatrick, Thomas, “The Most  Popular Indian,” Sport, 46:3, September 1968.

Johnson, Lloyd and Miles Wolff (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, 2nd Edition, Baseball America, Inc.. 1997.

Gammons, Peter, Beyond The Sixth Game, Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Gammons, Peter [Danny Peary. ed.], Baseball’s Finest, J. G. Press, 1990.

Leggett, William, “Funny Kind of a Race,” Sports Illustrated, 37:13, September 25, 1972.

Schneider, Russell. “‘I’m Skinny, Lucky,’ Says Winner Luis.” The Sporting News, 161:19, May 28, 1966.

Schneider, Russell, “Lucky Luis? Modest Hurler Tiant Thinks So,” The Sporting News, 166:3, August 3, 1968.

Tianc, Luis and Joe Fitzgerald, El Tiante, Doubleday, 1976.

The Oregonian (newspaper), April-July 1964.

The Sporting News Baseball Guides, 1963-1979.

Clark, Dick and Larry Lester (eds.), The Negro Leagues Book, SABR, I 994.