Welcome to Baseball History Podcast, featuring baseball biographies. I’m your announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 18 of the 2011 baseball season.
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 2 week of May.
May 8,
1966 Orioles’ outfielder Frank Robinson hits the first ball ever completely out of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. The 541-foot shot which lands on the other side of the left-field wall, comes off Indian hurler Luis Tiant.
Luis Clemente Tiant Vega was born November 23, 1940 in Marianao, Cuba,
Tiant was a right-handed starting pitcher who baffled hitters with a rocking, twisting windup and an assortment of release points that ranged from over-the-top to nearly underhand.
He didn’t join the Red Sox until mid-career, but became one of the most popular players in club history. He was a balding, overweight starter whose age was often estimated at several years higher than its “official” listing.
His father was a legendary left-handed pitcher, starring in the Cuban Leagues and the American Negro Leagues for 20 years. The senior Tiant was famous for a variety of outstanding pitches. including a spitball and a knuckleball, a tremendous pickoff move, and an exaggerated pirouette pitching motion.
After failing a tryout with the Havana team of the International League, Luis started his professional career in 1959, at age 18, for the Mexico City Tigers.
During the next three seasons, Tiant spent his summers living in Mexico City, returning to Havana for the off-season to play winter ball and be with his family.
In August 1961, while in Mexico City, he married; at the close of the season he and his new wife were planning to return to Luis’ home in Cuba. Unfortunately for the newly weds, Fidel Castro’s government placed a ban on all outside travel. Upon the advice of his father, Tiant did not return home to Cuba in 1961, not knowing when or if he would see his parents again.
At the end of the 1961 baseball season, the Cleveland Indians purchased Tiant’s contract from the Mexico City Tigers for $35,000.
Now the property of the Indians, Tiant was 23 years old in 1962, and presumably one of the prizes of the Cleveland farm system.
Tiant quietly built up his minor league resume. He finally joined the Indians in New York on, July 18, 1964 and was asked by his manager, Birdie Tebbetts, if he was ready to pitch. When advised that he was, Tebbetts told him he was pitching the next day against Whitey Ford. Tiant responded with a four-hit shutout, striking out 11. He finished the season with a10-4 won-loss record and a 2.83 Earned Run Average.
Tiant was afflicted with a sore pitching arm in 1965, finishing 11-11, and showed up the next spring having lost 20 pounds on the advice of his father.
He started the 1966 season with three consecutive shutouts, a streak that ended in Baltimore when Frank Robinson hit a ball completely out of Memorial Stadium, the only time that was ever done. Tiant hit a rough spell in May and June and spent the last half of the season in the bullpen, notching eight saves in 30 relief appearances. Despite only 16 starts, his five shutouts topped the American League. His Earned Run Averages in 1966 and 1967 were 2.79 and 2.74, respectively, more than adequate, but not enough to win more than 12 games each year.
In 1968, Tiant became a star, finishing 21-9 and posting a league-leading 1.60 Earned Run Average. He really broke through that season after he altered his delivery so that he turned away from the plate during his motion, in effect creating a hesitation pitch. He led the league with nine shutouts, including four in succession.
Tiant pitched his best game on July 3 in Cleveland when he recorded 19 strikeouts in 10 innings against the Twins. In the top of the tenth, the Twins got runners on second and third bases with no one out and Tiant struck out the side. The Indians finally pushed across a run in the bottom on the tenth to give Tiant a 1-0 victory.
The Indians finished 1969 with the worst record in the American League, and their worst winning percentage in 54 years. Tiant fell to 9-20, and posted an Earned Run Average of 3.71.
In December of 1969, Tiant was traded to the Minnesota Twins in a six-player deal.
In 1970 he won his first six decisions for a very strong Minnesota team, but left his sixth victory with a sore shoulder that had been bothering him since the spring. He went to see a specialist, who found a crack in a bone in his right shoulder and prescribed only rest. He sat down for just 10 weeks, and returned to lose three of four decisions in the final weeks of the 1970 season.
By spring training of 1971, Tiant claimed to be fully recovered, but soon pulled a muscle in his rib cage, missed two weeks, and was otherwise ineffective in only eight innings. On March 31 the Twins gave him his unconditional release. Team owner, Calvin Griffith, believed that Tiant was finished at age 30. Suitably devastated, Tiant believed the move was intended only to save money.
The sole team willing to give him a shot was the Atlanta Braves, who signed him to a 30-day trial with their Triple-A Richmond team. After limited work, the Braves were unwilling to promote him at the end of the trial period, so he signed with Louisville, the Red Sox’ Triple-A affiliate. He pitched very well in 31 innings for Louisville – 29 strikeouts and a 2.61 Earned Run Average -and was summoned to Boston on June 3.
He was not an immediate success. After his first appearance on June 11 resulted in 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 dropped his first six decisions as a starter. Nonetheless, manager Eddie Kasko believed there were signs that he could become a quality pitcher again. Tiant threw seven quality innings against the Yankees but lost 2-1 on a two-run home run to Roy White. He threw ten shutout innings, and 154 pitches, against the Twins, but did not figure in the decision. Kasko finally took him out of the rotation in early August. He was better in the bullpen, finishing 1-1 with a 1.80 Earned Run Average in that role.
After his four-month audition, many in the media were surprised he was still on the 40-man roster in the spring.
On March 22, 1972, the Red Sox traded Sparky Lyle; a move which likely saved Tiant’s spot on the team. Kasko elected to keep him for the team’s bullpen. By the end of July, Kasko’s faith seemed to have been justified, as Tiant was effective in a variety of roles – the occasional spot start, a ninth-inning save or a long relief stint. The team had floundered for the first half of the season, but a July hot streak had pulled them to within five games of first place on August 4.
On August 5 at Fenway Park, Tiant started for just the seventh time and beat the Orioles. One week later in Baltimore, he beat the O’s again, pitching six no-hit innings before settling for a three-hitter. After a relief appearance, he pitched a two-hitter in Chicago, losing a no-hitter with two outs in the eighth. After this game Kasko finally announced that Tiant was in the rotation to stay.
Surprisingly, the Red Sox had climbed into a fierce four-team pennant race with the Yankees, Orioles and Tigers. Even more surprising, Tiant had become their best player. Over a period of 10 starts, beginning with the game in Chicago, Luis furnished with a record of 9-1 with six shutouts and a 0.82 Earned Run Average, all nine victories being complete games.
Before the second game of a twi-night doubleheader against the Orioles on September 20, the fans rose to their feet as Tiant walked to the bullpen to warm up and gave him such an ovation that his teammates joined in. The crowd spent most of the evening chanting “Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee”, as their hero recorded out after out. When he came up to bat in the bottom of the eighth on his way to another shutout, the crowd again 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, in the Boston Herald the next morning, wrote that he had never heard a sound like it at a game, unless it was “the last time Joe DiMaggio went to bat in Boston.” Carl Yastrzemski, who had one of baseball’s most famous Septembers 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 clutch victories over both the Tigers and Orioles, Tiant lost his final start on October 3 in Tiger Stadium, 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, Tiant finished 15-6 and won his second Earned Run Average title with a mark of 1.91, and the Comeback Player of the Year award. By leading the Red Sox to an unexpected race for the pennant, Tiant won the hearts of the Red Sox fans. He would never lose them.
He capped his comeback by winning 20 for the second time in 1973, while the Red Sox again finished second.
The next year Luis won his 20th by August 23 to give his team a seemingly safe seven-game lead. Unfortunately, the Red Sox went into a horrific team-wide batting slump that was responsible for a disastrous fade-they were 8-20 during one stretch – and finished in third place, seven games behind Baltimore. Considered a Most Valuable Player candidate in August, Tiant won only two of his final seven decisions, although he continued to pitch well. In the four starts after his 20th victory, he lost 3-0, 1-0, and 2-0, and then had no decision in a game in which he gave up one run in nine innings. He finished 22-13 on the season with a league leading seven shutouts.
The Red Sox had recently been a fractured team, but Luis kept his teammates laughing, largely by making fun of them and himself. After the 1972 season, Red Sox pitcher John Curtis wrote a newspaper story about trying to explain to his wife why he loved Luis Tiant. Dwight Evans would later say, “Unless you’ve played with him, you can’t understand what Luis means to a team.”
Tiant struggled for most of the 1975 season. While the Red Sox took over the division lead for good in late June, he was seen more and more as an aging, back-of-the-rotation starter. He may have had a reason for his struggles: His heart and mind were occupied with a long-overdue family reunion.
Though Tiant’s mother had visited Mexico City to visit Luis and his family in 1968, while his father was reportedly jailed to ensure her return, Tiant had not seen his father in 14 years. A renowned jokester, his mood darkened when he thought of his homeland and his parents. In early 1975, he expressed himself to Boston Herald reporter Joe Fitzgerald: “How much longer? My father’s seventy now and he’s not well. Yet he still works in a garage down there, and here I am living like this, and I can’t send him a dime for a cup of coffee. I listen to people in this country complain that they don’t like this, they don’t like that. I’ve got friends up here [fellow Cuban expatriates] whose parents have died and they couldn’t go home to bury them. What can ever hurt like that? Now all the time, I think about my father dying and …” Luis spoke of his parents often, and had been led to believe many times over the years that a reunion could be arranged. When asked about his namesake, Tiant would say, “I am nowhere near the pitcher my father was.”
In May 1975, U.S. Sen. George McGovern made an unofficial visit to Cuba to see Fidel Castro. While it was not the reason for his trip, he carried with him a letter from his Senate colleague, Edward Brooke III, of Massachusetts, making a personal plea that Luis’ parents be allowed to visit Luis in Boston. The letter suggested that “Luis’ 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.
After several delays and postponements, Isabel and the elder Luis touched down in Boston’s Logan Airport on August 21. Their son, with his wife Maria, his three children, and dozens of reporters and cameramen, greeted them. As witnessed in homes all over New England, Luis embraced his father and shamelessly wept. Isabel told her son, “I’m so happy I don’t care if I die now.”
On August 26, the Red Sox arranged for Tiant’s parents to be introduced to the crowd and for his father to throw out a ceremonial first pitch. After a prolonged ovation, the 69-year-old Tiant, standing on the Fenway Park mound adorned in a brown suit and Red Sox cap, took off his coat and handed it to his son. He went into his full windup and fired a fastball to catcher Tim Blackwell-alas, low and away. Looking vaguely annoyed, he asked for the ball back. Once more he used his full windup, and floated a knuckleball 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.”
The younger Tiant was hit hard that night and again four days later. The whispers in the press box included the lament that it was a shame that his parents had not gotten here a year earlier, when Tiant was still an effective pitcher. At this point, he took ten days off to rest his aching back.
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 five. Tiant responded with 7 2/3 innings of no-hit ball before allowing a run and three hits. When asked about the bloop hit by Aurelio Rodriguez that ruined the no-hitter, Luis’ father responded, “Don’t talk about a lucky hit. The man hit the ball pretty good.”
Luis’ 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 faced Tiant. Many observers claim that there were well over 40,000 people in the park that night, several thousand over its official capacity. Predictably, Tiant pitched his first shutout of the year, a 2-0 five-hitter, and the crowd chanted all evening (“Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee”). Later in the month Tiant pitched another shutout against Cleveland, and the Sox won the pennant by four-and-a-half games.
After these three remarkable performances, Tiant was the obvious choice to start the first game of the divisional playoffs. He three-hit the Athletics to start a Red Sox sweep. One week later, he began the 1975 World Series with a five-hit shutout of the Cincinnati Reds. In Game Four, in perhaps the quintessential performance of his career, Tiant threw 163 pitches, worked out of jams in nearly every inning, and recorded a complete game 5-4 win. He could not hold a 3-0 lead in Game Six, and was finally removed trailing 6-3 before Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk bailed him out with legendary home runs. Alas, the Red Sox lost the seventh game to the Reds the next evening.
The 1975 postseason marked the zenith of Tiant’s career, as his family story, his charm and charisma, his unique pitching style, and, finally, his talent made him a national star. At age 34, he was said to have thrown six pitches-fastball, curve, slider, slow curve, palm ball, and knuckleball-from three different release points-over the top, three-quarters, and sidearm. His windup and motion seemed to vary on a whim.
With all of his loved ones nearby, Tiant won 21 games for a struggling Red Sox team in 1976. His parents never returned to Havana. They stayed with Luis for 15 months, until his father died of a lingering illness in December 1976. Two days later, while resting for the next day’s memorial service, Luis’ mother Isabel died in her chair, although she had not been ill. The two were buried together near Luis’ home in Milton, Massachusetts.
After watching several of his teammates reap the rewards of the new free agency era, Luis had a protracted holdout in the spring of 1977. He came to terms, but managed only 12 and 13 wins the next two years. Tiant’s relationship with the team’s management was strained from this point forward.
After the Red Sox stunning slump late in the 1978 season, the Red Sox had crawled back to within two games of the Yankees with eight remaining. Prior to the subsequent contest in Toronto, Tiant 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, and the Red Sox went on to win their last eight games, including two more victories from Tiant on three days’ rest. On the final day of the season, the Red Sox needed a win and a Yankee loss to force a playoff game. Catfish Hunter and the Yankees lost in Cleveland and Tiant dazzled the Fenway crowd yet again with a two-hitter against the Blue Jays.
In the off-season, the Red Sox management offered the 38-year-old Tiant only a one-year contract, allowing Luis to sign with the New York Yankees for two years, plus a ten-year deal as a scout.
Tiant won 13 games in 1979, including a 3-2 victory over the Red Sox in September, before falling to 8-9 in 1980. After the season, the Yankees released him. He signed with Pittsburgh in 1981, but spent most of the season with his old team in Portland. He excelled again for the Beavers-13-7, 3.82, including a no-hitter-but struggled with the Pirates and was released at the end of the season.
He finished up his major league career with six games for the 1982 Angels, with his final win coming against the Red Sox on August 17.
Luis Tiant was one of the most respected and revered players of his time, with his teammates, opponents, the media and his fans. His career was one of streaks, but his best streaks, in the pennant races of 1972, 1975, and 1978 and in the 1975 postseason, occurred when his team needed him most. He was believed to be finished in the middle of his career but came back to have most of his best seasons and to become, for a few weeks in 1975, the center of the baseball world.
A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Mark Armour. It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org
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Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
