GETTING OPPOSING BATTERS OUT WAS in many ways the easiest part of life in the minor leagues for Luis Tiant. On the field he could battle on equal terms with the man at the plate, and by working harder and longer could gain an edge. Outside the white lines, however, the road to success was not so easily paved.
Being young and Black, and in the earliest stages of learning English, he was an outcast in the small, dusty towns of the Deep South where the Cleveland Indians sent him to hone his craft. There were dirty stares on the street, ugly slurs from the stands, and lonely nights in his room missing his family—some trapped in Castro’s Cuba and some growing in Mexico City. He could not combat racism on his terms, with his fists and his wits, for the mores of Jim Crow did not allow it. Jail or worse awaited those who challenged the status quo. Fellow players, whites as well as African-Americans, didn’t know what to make of him.
So Tiant fought back with the weapons at his disposal. He used his ability to throw a baseball fast and strong to win over fans, and his talent for friendship and fun to gain the respect—and love—of his teammates. Off-seasons spent with his beloved Maria and baby boy Luis Jr. sustained him, as did the more welcoming conditions for athletes of all colors in the winter leagues of Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Nicaragua.
By the time he rose to the highest level of the Cleveland farm system, Tiant’s skills were bursting at the seams of his woolen uniform. Strikeouts and victories piled up to the point where the goal he had been working toward as long as he could remember—the same goal his father had been unfairly denied before him—was finally close enough to almost touch.
And when he did touch it, the result would shock everyone—except himself.
ONE MINUTE I WAS counting the weeks until my mother and father could meet my beautiful new bride. Now—in the summer of 1961—I was wondering if they would ever meet her, and if I’d ever see them or anyone else in my family again.
Cuba is only 90 miles from the United States, but it might as well have been on another planet as far as I was concerned. With Castro in control, I couldn’t go back to the island unless I wanted to give up being a pro ballplayer. Going back also meant risking that I couldn’t get back out. My parents, cousins, uncles, and aunts were all trapped too. If you wanted to leave Cuba on a plane, you needed money and connections. Our family had neither. For poor folks like us, the only way out was on one of those crowded, rickety old boats that were sneaking off the shores into the Atlantic, headed for Miami. My parents weren’t young or strong enough for that trip, and even if they were, many of the boats never made it.
People don’t understand how really bad something like that is unless you are faced with it. You take the good and the bad. When you go through it, it’s then that you think—damn, that’s tough. You just hope you’re going to see your family someday. My friend’s father passed away in Cuba, and he couldn’t go there for his funeral. In later years, I would see a lot of my friends die in the United States, and their families couldn’t even send their bodies back to be buried in Cuba.
That’s not right. That’s not the way to treat a human being. Every few weeks, you’d hear that so-and-so had died, someone you knew because you’d grown up with them. But you couldn’t do anything about it. That’s why I asked God every day to just let me see my mom and dad again.
With so much on my mind, I had to find a way to put it all aside and channel everything into my pitching. The Indians were giving me a chance and I did not want to blow it. If I had to wait all the way from October until spring training I might have gone crazy worrying about my career and my family, but there was winter ball to help me keep focused.
I spent the 1961-62 winter season with Caguas of the Puerto Rican League. It was almost like pitching in the majors. Orlando Cepeda of the Giants, Roberto Clemente of the Pirates, and Bob Gibson of the Cardinals, all established stars and future Hall of Famers, came to play in Puerto Rico because they knew the importance of staying in shape and staying sharp year-round. That’s how they remained on top, and I intended to do the same thing.
Facing the best brought out the best in me, and in one game I set a league record with 20 strikeouts. For the playoffs, at the end of January, 10,000 fans came out to see me battle the Mayaguez team and ace Juan Pizarro, a 14-game winner in the majors the year before. They saw a good show; it was scoreless until the sixth, when a guy named Martin Beltran got to me for a homer and gave Pizarro the 1-0 win. The fans were happy; both Pizarro and Beltran were native Puerto Ricans.
I hated to lose, but knew I had pitched well. So did Mayaguez. They signed me up for the Inter-American Series, where we faced top teams from the leagues in Panama, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. This was pretty common; because the seasons were shorter, lots of times you could play with two or even three clubs in one winter. You made some more money and got to show more people what you could do.
In this case I showed them plenty. I won two games in the Inter-American Series, hit a three-run homer in one of them—I told you I could hit!—and pitched in the championship final against Bob Gibson. He was just starting to show his stuff in the big leagues with the Cardinals, and I could tell he was the real deal. Yankees relief ace Luis Arroyo, who had saved the clinching game of the World Series just a few months before, saved one of my victories. Besides all the major leaguers in the series, there were also 13 Cubans—most of them guys like me looking for a new start. I wished my father could have seen it.
In February 1962, after Maria and I flew back from Puerto Rico to Miami, she went on to Mexico City to be with her family and I flew to Tucson where the Indians trained. It was exciting to be joining a big-league organization, but it was a tough time for me. I thought about Maria, of course, and I thought about my parents. They sounded safe in their letters and phone calls, but remember, those were all being read or listened to by Castro’s people—just like my letters to them.
When I was a kid, my father didn’t want me coming to America because of what he’d gone through. After I did come, I knew why.
My first minor league stop was in Charleston, South Carolina, the Indians’ Class A club in the Eastern League. This was my introduction to the American South. The Black players, including Cubans, faced terrible racism. When we were on the road and stopped to get something to eat, the white ballplayers would have to bring the food to us on the bus because we couldn’t go in. We couldn’t eat in the same restaurant or stay in the same hotel as them.
They rented a house for us in the Black section of the city, which was far away from where the white players stayed. And when you got to the ballpark, forget it. They called us niggers, saying they were going to send us back to Africa or hang us. How we looked like monkeys. All kinds of barbarian things; it’s amazing what you’d hear, even at home games!
People don’t realize what we had to go through. They make you feel like an animal—worse than an animal. I think in those days, in the South, they treated animals better than they treated Blacks. I tell you, it was sad. I would sit down and just shake my head. I couldn’t believe what they would say and do to you. “You can’t go here. You can’t eat there. You can’t stay here.” Damn.
In my country, if somebody called you a nigger, you punched him in the face. You couldn’t do that in the South in 1962. Whatever happened between you and a white person, if the police came along they’d beat the shit out of you. Then they’d put you in jail. You lose, and then you lose again. So you just tried to keep your cool and look the other way.
It was tough for all the Black players, but at least the American Blacks spoke English. Now I knew why my father had pushed me to stay in English school; I should have listened to him. I couldn’t understand anything, and couldn’t even ask for food. “Lettuce and tomato and scrambled eggs.” That’s all I knew, and so that’s all I ate for about a month. None of the coaches spoke Spanish, and there were no interpreters or anything like they have today. Besides, I couldn’t eat too much anyway with only about $1.50 per day in meal money.
How did I start to learn more English? From TV. You would watch a show and get some idea of what they were trying to say, and then you would listen for the same words when people were talking around you. What I used to do was try to learn one word at a time, and what it meant. Then I could try and put it together with other words. You could also learn from the other players, but the problem there was it was “Baseball English”—and it had a lot of bad words. You couldn’t start many sentences off with those words, especially if you were being interviewed on the radio. I’d get in a little trouble for that later on.
Through everything, I kept writing my parents, and calling them once a month. I would send what little extra money and other things home that I could, but later I learned they didn’t get a lot of what I sent. Once my father sent me a letter, saying I had forgotten about them and didn’t care about them anymore, because he didn’t get one of my packages. That made me terribly sad.
Maria was back in our Mexico City apartment with her family, so she didn’t know what was happening. All I told her was that things were not so good between Blacks and whites, and it was tough finding a place to live. I left out the details because I didn’t want her to worry, especially with her expecting our first baby in September. We talked a lot on the phone, and she sent me pictures of herself with her big belly, but it was hard for both of us to be separated during such a special time.
It was all so much to handle. I used to go to my room every day and cry, because I felt I couldn’t do or say anything about what was happening to me and my family. But in my mind and my heart, I was also using these experiences to drive me. I knew I had to make it someday if I wanted things to change.
That first year I didn’t blow anybody away, but I didn’t embarrass myself either. After facing guys like Cepeda and Clemente over the winter I was real fired up to start the season and won my first five decisions. Then I had some trouble with a stiff elbow that I tried to pitch through, and the strong young hitters in the league like Dick Allen, Ken “Hawk” Harrelson, and Jim Ray Hart brought me back down to earth quick. Overall I held my own, going 7-8 with a 3.63 ERA on a team that finished under .500. We had some solid pitching. Besides me, our rotation had future big-league stars Tommy John and Sonny Siebert, but we finished last in the league in home runs. It turned out to be good practice for the way things would be in Cleveland a few years later.
My teammates were mostly okay; some made fun of my thick Cuban accent and how I struggled with my English, but riding guys is part of being on a team so I didn’t let it bother me. I learned to give as good as I got, with Blacks and whites, and found I could make people laugh without doing much of anything. A guy who clowns around all the time, on and off the field, will never get respect. But when my teammates saw how hard I worked on the mound, and how serious I was about winning, they understood I was no clown.
Even at that point the Indians seemed to think I had a pretty good future. In the middle of the season, when I was dealing with my stiff elbow, they called me up to their Triple-A team in Jacksonville of the International League. Because I was injured I didn’t even want to go, but Charleston manager Johnny Lipon convinced me that you just didn’t say no to a promotion. So I went up, got into one game, and then spent a month riding the bench and staying in shape by running. It felt like being on a track team, but I had learned in Cuba that running was great for a pitcher’s legs and stamina.
When I was back in Charleston and the season was winding down I got a telegram with big news from Mexico City: Maria had given birth on September 2 to our first son, Luis Jr. Even though I would have to wait 48 long days to meet him, just hearing about him meant so much. If I had felt I was really alone, and on my own, during that first year playing in the South, I might have gone into a hole. But I knew I had responsibilities: a wife, a baby, a house. I had to take care of them. And that made me feel happy.
That fall, and all the way through Christmas, we were together in Mexico City—me, Maria, Little Luis, and Maria’s mother, brothers, and their kids. It was wonderful, but it also made me think of my parents and family back in Cuba, who were celebrating their first Christmas without me. When we called my mom and dad during the holidays, we told them about how beautiful Luis was, and how fast he was growing. There was no need to talk about the sad things; we all knew what they were, and we couldn’t do anything to change them.
The months went by very fast, and then it was off to another season of winter ball in Puerto Rico. I had an eight-game winning streak there, which helped get me invited to the Indians’ major league camp for the first time during spring training. Even though I didn’t stay on the big-league roster, it was another sign that they saw me as a real prospect. When the regular season began I was sent to Burlington, North Carolina, in the Carolina League; this was another Class A team, like Charleston, but a step up the minor-league ladder. I was ready.
Right from the start, I was one of the top pitchers in the league, leading in strikeouts and ERA. Burlington in 1963 wasn’t any better than Charleston in ’62 when it came to how people treated Black ballplayers. But now, maybe because I had that year with the organization under my belt, and was doing real good, I felt like I could fight back more.
Once in Burlington I went into a store to buy a little toy for my boy—a car that ran on batteries. A white customer was in there too, and when he saw me paying he left all his stuff on the counter and walked right out of the store. He wouldn’t buy from any place that sold to me. After I paid I went outside and saw him talking to another white person, and I cussed him out with every English word I knew.
Another time, in a fancier department store, I was looking at some of the watches and jewelry they had under locked glass. I pointed to something, asked the woman behind the counter, “Can I please see that?” and she said, “Well, you know that costs a lot, right?” Just because of my color, she assumed I couldn’t afford it. So I walked out.
The fans around the Carolina League weren’t much better to me or any of the Black players. My English still wasn’t too good, but I found a way of getting my point across. And just like I stuck up for my friends back home when it came to bullies and prejudice, I felt a responsibility to my teammates.
Our second baseman at Burlington, Barry Levinson, is still a close friend. He remembered one incident in Raleigh, North Carolina, that summer that shows what I’m talking about.
“Luis wasn’t starting that day, so he was coaching first base,” Barry recalled. “One fan called one of our Black players a nigger, and Luis went right over and vented as best he could to the guy. Our manager [Pat Colgran] came over when the incident was somewhat calmed down, and he said to Luis, ‘Stop! They’ll kill you!’”
They didn’t go that far, but fans were still calling us every name in the book. It was hard to keep my anger in, but like the year before, I tried to channel it into my pitching. I wanted to show them that color had nothing to do with what you could do. No matter what our color, or which language we spoke, we could do the same things as everybody else.
Those fans gave me more power to fight back, and show them, and so that’s what I did. I came there to play baseball, not fight, and if I was good enough I felt I could turn them around.
On May 2, I pitched a four-hit shutout and helped myself with two RBI singles. Five days later, in front of the home fans in Burlington, I threw a no-hitter against Winston Salem. Then, in my next start, I almost threw another no-hitter. After that, the fans filled the park every time I pitched, and they didn’t call me anything you wouldn’t want a little kid to hear.
Looking back, I thank God I never gave up. He gave me the strength to get through the hatred I experienced, and He provided me the confidence to do what I did to turn that hatred into respect. That was a big turning point for me. From that point on, because I knew what I could do, I was never going to let anybody step on me or do things to make me less than anybody else.
“Luis Tiant could be a name worth remembering,” sports columnist Gordon Cobbledick wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer after my no-hitter. I was determined to prove him right.
By this point I had been pitching professionally year-round for five years, and at a top amateur level for several years before that. I wasn’t just chasing my own dreams, but my father’s too. So even though I was just 22 years old, I was much more experienced than the majority of guys in the minor leagues. My teammates could sense it.
“Luis was a real student of the game for a young man,” Barry Levinson remembered. “When I played with him, he already knew how to pitch—how to change speeds, and all about location. Most kids his age didn’t get that yet. That’s why they were there, to get it drilled into them, but he had it already.
“I never played with anyone who competed as hard as Luis. When he almost pitched the two straight no-hitters, the one hit against him in the second game was a Texas Leaguer. I just missed the damn thing [behind second base]. It was in the bottom of the last inning; I don’t remember if there were one or two outs, but Luis didn’t even blink. He just got the last outs he needed.
“The next time we played that team, Rocky Mount, the kid who got the hit was batting third. It was the first inning, the kid comes up, and BOOM! He goes right on his ass.
“I walk in to the mound from second to talk to Luis.
“‘What are you doing hitting that guy? It’s only the first inning!’
“Luis says, ‘SOB got the hit.’”
“Luis was talking about the blooper that killed his no-hitter. He had not forgotten.
“For however old we were in ’63, to have that competitive spirit…that really showed me: ‘Boy, this kid has really got it.’”
That kind of intensity and determination was the way to win over fans and teammates, and it was the only way I knew how to play. But you can’t be intense all the time. I knew the importance of keeping things loose, and the guys on the team appreciated that too.
One time we were driving back on the bus from a road trip late at night. It was pitch black, and we came to a railroad crossing. You could see the light from the train coming in the distance. We had this old bus driver, Sam, and he was pushing the pedal to the metal to get us across the tracks in time. That light is coming closer and closer, and then all of a sudden I jumped up and yelled, “LOOK OUT SAM, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
The whole bus broke up laughing. Up until then, I don’t think a lot of guys on the team thought I knew that much English!
Most people think of me, and they think about my cigars. I do love them, and that goes back to my days in the minors. One time it helped Barry get me good on a prank.
“My dad used to send me cigars, and we had these open lockers where you could see everything,” Barry remembered. “Luis would always steal my cigars, but I could never catch him in the act. So one day I decided to cure him of the habit.
“I went to the hobby shop and got one of those things you put in cigars to make them explode. I pushed it into one of mine with a toothpick, put the cellophane back on, and put it on top of my locker.
“Luis was pitching that night, and when he pitched there was no way I was going to get my cigar. So I took my time getting into the locker room, and sure enough I walk in just when he’s coming out of the shower with a towel draped around him. He goes over to my cigars, grabs one, and lights it.
“‘MMMMMM,’ he says as he drags on it. ‘That’s GOOOOOOOOD.’
“I pretend I’m mad as hell, and then all of a sudden the thing explodes. It was perfect.
“He wouldn’t take a cigar from me for weeks after that. ‘C’mon, Luis,’ I’d say. ‘Have one.’
“‘No! No! NO!’”
Barry got me that time, but I enjoyed plenty of victory cigars in 1963. By the end of the season I was 14-9 with a 2.56 ERA and led the league with 207 strikeouts in 204 innings. I was also gaining a reputation for finishing what I started, with 17 complete games in 24 starts, and including the no-hitter I had six shutouts. That was tops in the league too. It was my best year in pro ball so far.
By now the sportswriters in Cleveland were calling me one of the organization’s top prospects, and this gave me confidence that I carried over into the 1963-64 winter season. Pitching for the Lara Cardinals of the Occidental League in Venezuela, I threw a one-hitter in my first start, had 16 strikeouts in another game, and overall went 7-0 with five shutouts to help Lara to a championship. In 63 innings I struck out 89 batters, nearly 13 a game. Just like the previous year, it was not hard finding a second club to hook on with once the Occidental season ended. I joined Valencia of the Venezuelan League and stretched my winter winning string to nine straight—all complete games.
Tiant Toys With Batters–Five Runs in 79 Frames read a headline in The Sporting News after my ninth victory. This time Cobbledick of the Plain Dealer called me the “hottest item among the Indians and Indians-to-be in Latin America.” It took Gaylord Perry, a future Hall of Famer I’d face many times later on in the big leagues, to stop the streak.
Any streak like that—and I had them at several different stages of my career—depends on much more than the pitcher. You need a team of guys all doing their jobs, and that starts behind the plate. Having a catcher you can depend on is so important, and Elrod Hendricks—who later caught for several pennant-winning teams in Baltimore—was behind the plate for most of my starts for Valencia. He called a great game and was a strong hitter, too, coming through for me when it counted. Another teammate who would win a title with the Orioles later on was Luis Aparicio, a future Hall of Famer and as good a defensive shortstop as there was in baseball. Guys like that made it a lot easier to win, and playing with them did a lot for my confidence.
Around this same time, news got out that showed not just how far I had come, but how little faith Indians general manager Gabe Paul had in me just a year before. It turns out that after I struggled with injuries my first few months with the organization, he thought I was damaged goods.
“Luis Tiant keeps pitching shutouts in Venezuela. Gabe can now breathe a sigh of relief about Tiant’s success,” The Sporting News reported during my winter hot streak. “The pitcher had been unprotected in the draft and luckily he wasn’t claimed. The Tribe purchased him from the Mexican League a few years ago for a good price, but when he arrived in Tucson [for spring training in 1962] he wasn’t throwing as hard as the reports indicated. It developed he had arm trouble. Apparently his fast ball has come back.”
Imagine that—any team could have had me for next to nothing, and nobody picked me up. Now, like the paper said, my fastball was back, and one thing was for sure: if I kept this up, there was no way Cleveland or anybody else was going to make a mistake like that about me again.
After going 10-4 for the winter, with an ERA under 3.00, I went to spring training with the Indians in Arizona determined to make the big-league club out of camp. But Gabe Paul and management frustrated me again by sending me down to the Portland Beavers, Cleveland’s top minor league team. Portland played in the Pacific Coast League, a Triple-A circuit many believed was very close to the majors in terms of skill level. Winning there, I figured, would be my ticket to the big time.
It was, but it took a lot more winning than it should have.
Even back then, a lot of ballplayers got huge signing bonuses before ever playing a game professionally. These were the guys that big-league clubs were grooming for stardom, the sure things, and for the Indians in the early 1960s Sam McDowell was one of those guys. He was a big left-handed pitcher from Pittsburgh, and the Indians reportedly signed him for a bonus of $75,000 right out of high school, outbidding 14 other teams in the process.
McDowell was up and down between Cleveland and the minor leagues a bunch of times early in his career, mostly because of trouble with his control. They called him “Sudden Sam” because of how fast his pitches snuck up on batters, but getting the ball over the plate consistently was tough for McDowell. Just like when Nolan Ryan came up with the Mets, Sam was often wild and always nasty. Most guys couldn’t hit either one of them. If you look at the records today, you’ll see McDowell is still in the top ten for all pitchers lifetime in fewest hits allowed per nine innings—just over seven (7.0344). Ryan is first (6.5553).
I never knew about how much money Sudden supposedly got, and I didn’t care. If I could pitch as well as him, I figured, Gabe Paul would notice. The first game I played for Portland, our season opener at Arkansas, McDowell was the starter. He got into trouble in the sixth, so manager Johnny Lipon—who had also moved up from Charleston—brought me into a 4-4 game. For the next five-and-two-thirds innings I pitched one-hit ball, and we won 6-4 in 11 innings.
That was the closest either of us would come to losing for a long, long time.
By late May, McDowell and I were each 7-0 and tearing up the league. Sudden was pitching with better control than ever before, and was called up to Cleveland after getting his eighth win. I matched him a few days later with my eighth win, but even with an ERA of 1.94, I stayed put in Portland. It’s not like the Indians couldn’t have used me. Gabe Paul predicted before the season that Cleveland would battle the Yankees for the American League pennant, and the Indians were just four games out at 21-16 after sweeping a doubleheader at Washington on May 31. I’m sure I could have helped close the gap even more, but Paul kept me in the minors.
McDowell beat Washington in relief on the 31st, then moved into the rotation and had 14 strikeouts and just three walks in his first start. I was happy for Sudden, but also felt cheated. I was so mad that when I got to 8-0, I told Lipon to call Gabe Paul in Cleveland.
“You get me more money,” I said, “or I’m going home.”
I was making $400 a month, but I knew I was pitching better than all these guys making more than me. That wasn’t right.
“I’ll go home and wait until you reach him.”
I lived behind the ballpark, so I started to walk home.
“No, no, you stay here,” Lipon yelled. He kept calling Gabe Paul, and when he got through he got me more money—a raise to $800 per month.
Right after that I lost my first game of the season on a double by the other team’s pitcher, but then I won seven more in a row. This was one of the best leagues in the minors—if not the best—with guys like Tommie Agee, Rico Petrocelli, and Tony Perez who would be starring in the majors a few years later. I felt like nobody could beat me.
Plenty of teams were beating the Indians. They had strong young pitchers like McDowell, Sonny Siebert, and Gary Bell, but had trouble scoring runs. They dropped 11 of 12 games in one stretch and by the middle of July had fallen into eighth place, 15 games behind the Yankees.
At least one guy knew I could be of some help.
“Sam McDowell pulls out all the stops in appraising Luis Tiant, a pitching staff mate at Portland the property of the Indians,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on June 20. “It’s Sudden Sam’s opinion that the Cuban right-hander, a speedballer, can’t miss in the big time.”
A few weeks later, my record with Portland was up to 15-1 when we flew into San Diego for a series against the Padres. (This was five years before the city got a major league team of the same name; these Padres were Triple-A.) We get there around seven o’clock in the morning, and I was supposed to pitch that night. The Padres had Tony Perez, who was leading the PCL in home runs, and I was excited to battle my fellow Cuban countryman.
I picked up a newspaper at the airport, and it was filled with talk about me facing Perez—the league’s best pitcher against its best power hitter. I went back to the hotel, hoping to get a nap, and as soon as I walked in my room the phone rang. It was the trainer, saying Lipon wanted to see me right away.
“Goddamn, it’s early!” I yelled into the phone. “I’ve got to pitch tonight! I need some rest!”
“No,” the trainer says. “He really wants to see you.”
Lipon, the manager, was like a father to me. He had pitched in Cuba, too, and in the big leagues. He was good to me and my family. But why did Johnny want to see me? I wasn’t sure; I thought maybe they were going to release me. Yeah, I was 15-1, but I had pulled that stunt when I was 8-0 and demanded more money. Maybe they thought I was a troublemaker.
When I got to Lipon’s room, he told me the news:
“The Cleveland Indians want you in the big leagues.”
I’m sure what I said next surprised him.
“They want me in the big leagues, huh? You tell that son of a bitch Gabe Paul I want to finish what I started here.”
“No, no, you have to go!” Lipon says. “This might be your last chance—the only chance you’re going to get!”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m not going anywhere! I wasn’t good enough when I was 8-0, and they brought up McDowell with the same record. Now I’m 15-1 and suddenly I’m good enough? No—let me finish what I started here.”
“No, no, no,” said Lipon. “You better go.”
Lipon was fighting with me like he was my dad, and that’s why I loved him. I still laugh thinking about it. When Maria and I used to go to Mexico, years later, we would make a stop at Johnny’s house in San Antonio and stay there for a few days. He was a good man to me and my family.
I might have been the first guy to say no to a big-league promotion. Looking back, it was a matter of pride, and maybe a little anger. The Indians should have brought me up earlier, but I wasn’t a big bonus boy like McDowell. Now I had a chance to win 20 games for Portland and lead the team to a PCL pennant. If I did that, the Indians would have to take me to the big leagues.
Eventually, Lipon talked me into moving up. Thank goodness he did. I’m not sure what Gabe Paul would have done if he heard I didn’t want to report. That might have been it for me.
I went from the hotel over to the San Diego ballpark, and said goodbye to my teammates in the visitor’s clubhouse. Then I caught a plane to meet up with the Indians on the road in New York. My first time wearing a big-league uniform, I’d be in Yankee Stadium, home of the greatest team in baseball history. The team I read about and heard on the radio growing up, revered in Cuba and the rest of the world. The team of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle. The four-time defending American League champions.
Did I feel any pressure? Not really. I had proven myself against the best before, in winter ball, and I had nothing left to show them in the minor leagues. Besides, I figured Cleveland would work me in slowly, against a less challenging opponent.
It was Friday, July 17. I flew on the red eye all night to New York, and got in at 7:00 in the morning. I headed over to the Biltmore Hotel, and as soon as I was in my room, the goddamned phone rang. I swear those things know just when you’re coming.
The trainer was on the line.
“Gabe Paul wants to see you.”
“Goddamn it! I just flew all night from San Diego. Why does he want to see me now? It can wait till later.”
“No it can’t. He wants to see you in his room. You have to sign your contract.”
“Oh shit, OK. I’ll be right over.”
The major-league minimum salary at the time was $6,000, and they gave me $5,000. Even though I came up mid-way through the season, that was $1,000 less than I was supposed to get. But what was I going to do about it right there, on the spot? I was worried if I said something they’d threaten to send me back to Cuba. That’s what they did back then; they scared you into doing whatever they wanted. Nobody had agents, so they knew they could take advantage of you—especially the Latino players who had trouble with English.
So I kept my mouth shut, signed the contract, and went back to my room to try to get a little rest.
That afternoon I took the team bus to Yankee Stadium. When I got there, the first thing I did was go in to meet the Indians manager, George “Birdie” Tebbetts. Birdie was a baseball lifer, a tough former catcher back in uniform a few months after having a heart attack and bypass surgery in April. He was a big bear of a man with a high-pitched voice like a bird that led to his nickname.
Birdie didn’t mess around with small talk.
“You ready to pitch?”
“Damn right I’m ready to pitch. I was supposed to pitch last night for San Diego.”
“OK, you’re going to pitch tomorrow, in the second game.”
“Fine, no problem.”
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to be nervous. The Indians were playing a Sunday doubleheader against the Yankees the next day at the Stadium; McDowell would start the first game for us against Rollie Sheldon, and I’d start the second game . . . against Whitey Ford!
So much for easing me in slowly.
Ford was the ace of the Yankees, a left-hander who had gone 24-7 and started Game One of the World Series the year before. He had won his 200th career game earlier in the 1964 season, and even in his mid-30s had a great curve he threw more than half of the time. Whitey also liked to scuff up the ball now and then, and as a native New Yorker was probably the most popular guy on the team next to Mickey Mantle.
After talking to Birdie I went to the clubhouse to say hello to my new teammates. I knew most of the guys from spring training, and had played with a lot of them in the minors. Cleveland had a real young team without any big stars. The oldest position player, and the one I was the closest to, was outfielder Al Smith. It was great to see him. Al had played with my father in the Negro Leagues and was an old family friend. In the ’50s he had been an All-Star on strong Indians teams, but now he was more like a coach, playing once or twice a week and passing on his wisdom. In my case, he was really looking out for me.
When Al found out Tebbetts was going to pitch me against Whitey Ford right out of the gate, he was mad.
“Goddamn it! They are throwing you to the dogs with your hands tied!”
“I don’t care. I’ll just do what I gotta do.”
“But why didn’t they put you in against Kansas City or another bad team?”
“You know what? The way I’ve been throwing the ball in Portland, I don’t care who I’m pitching against. It makes no difference to me.”
“But why do they put you against the best team, and the best pitcher?”
“It doesn’t matter. If I lose, I lose against the best. If I win, I beat the best. I have to go out there, do my thing, and show them what I can do. I really have nothing to lose.”
Al still didn’t like it, but that’s really how I felt. I mean, there was nothing I could do about it, right? I wanted my chance, and here it was. I just had to make the most of it.
I slept well that night, and got to the ballpark early. When you were the starting pitcher, back in those days, you always found a brand new ball in your locker. That was a sign from the manager—the game was yours. When I picked up that ball, and moved it around in my hands, I started to feel a little nervous tension. I’m not afraid of anything, except maybe really big needles, and I never lost my head. I knew what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know if it was going to work. That’s the problem; to believe is one thing, but to play is another.
Yogi Berra, the great Yankees catcher, was now the team’s player-manager. Everybody knows what a funny guy Yogi was, but he was also smart. When the New York sportswriters asked him if he knew anything about me, he said “Yeah, he must be real old, because I remember playing against him a long time ago.” When I saw him I said, “You played against my father, not me.”
He just smiled. I’m sure he knew, but it was still funny.
That was one of the ways I felt like my father was with me in this game. Another was that we were playing just across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, where my dad had pitched so many years for the New York Cubans of the Negro Leagues without getting the chance to play in the white man’s league. Later I learned that he actually pitched one of his last games right there, at Yankee Stadium, during the 1947 Negro World Series. Al Smith was in that game, too, playing against my father for the Cleveland Buckeyes. If he remembered, he didn’t say anything to me. Maybe he thought I had enough on my mind already.
There was a big Sunday crowd at the Stadium, more than 30,000. The Yankees lineup was packed with All-Stars—Mantle, Elston Howard, Bobby Richardson, Tom Tresh—and they knocked Sudden Sam around in the opening game of the doubleheader. They got 10 hits off him in less than six innings, and won, 6-2. Beating up on the Indians was nothing new to these guys; in 10 games against New York so far in the ’64 season, Cleveland had only won once.
But the Yankees had never faced me.
I had one thing going for me before I even took the mound in the second game: a 1-0 lead. Ford was wild in the top of the first inning and walked three guys. One of them came around to score, and guess who it was? Al Smith! I guess he felt like he had to take things into his own hands to help me out. Pitching with a lead always made me bear down harder, so I appreciated it.
The first guy up for New York was Tony Kubek, their great shortstop. I had heard of him, but I really didn’t know most of the Yankees or how to pitch to them. There had been no time to prepare, and my English still wasn’t too good. But my catcher that day was Joe Azcue, a Cuban, so I could communicate with him easily. He was young but had played a bunch of games against the Yankees and knew their lineup. He helped me out a lot.
Kubek had sat out the first game of the doubleheader, so he was fresh. I struck him out anyway. Next was Phi Linz, and he grounded out. “Shit, this ain’t so tough,” I said to myself. “The guys don’t matter. It’s the same here as it is down in Portland. Just keep going.”
Hector Lopez walked, bringing up the cleanup hitter: Roger Maris. I sure knew who he was, the 61-homer man, but he didn’t know me. I struck him out too. Later on, you start thinking about it, and that’s when you realize how crazy it is. But when you’re doing it, the scared part goes away. All you want to do is play.
And so that’s what I did; I just kept going—boom, boom, boom. I felt so good; it was unreal. I remember thinking, this is so easy, I could have been here before. That’s really what I was thinking: I could have been here before.
We grew up in Cuba listening to baseball on the radio, and since it was usually Yankees games, most Cuban fans rooted for New York. Now here I was at Yankee Stadium striking out Roger Maris, the home run king, in front of a big crowd. Maybe this game was on back home, and men like my father were listening while playing dominoes. Everybody wants their family to see their major league debut; I didn’t have that option, but I wanted to believe that somehow they were listening.
Through five innings the Yankees only had one hit off of me, a single by Tresh. We scored another two runs on a groundout and a Leon Wagner home run, so we were up 3-0 when they pinch-hit for Ford in the fifth. It didn’t matter who they put in there, this was my day. The score was still 3-0 when I struck out Maris again to end the eighth, and I got them one-two-three in the ninth. I finished with a four-hit shutout and 11 strikeouts.
It turns out there were some Cuban guys in the stands right next to the visitor’s dugout who knew me from when I was a kid. When the game was over, and I was coming in, somebody called out “Hey Lusito!” I heard that and knew it had to be somebody from home. So I looked over, and Goddamn it, it was a guy named Manuela Cabrera who was friendly with my father when I was growing up. That felt good.
In his story the next day, Leonard Koppett of the New York Times wrote that “Luis Tiant, a 23-year-old Cuban refugee...yesterday made the sort of major league debut that little boys dream about, even in Havana.”
He was right. They let me do what my father never could do. It started right there, in that moment and that time. All the things they did against my father in the Negro Leagues, saying he couldn’t play in the big leagues…. This put Señor Skinny back on top. We had finally made it.
The day before, Yogi Berra had called Birdie Tebbetts and asked who the Indians were starting in Sunday’s doubleheader. Yogi probably figured since the Indians were in eighth place, 16 games out, Birdie wouldn’t care about keeping it a secret. It was already mid-July, and we weren’t going to catch the Yankees or the Orioles in the American League pennant race without a rocket.
“McDowell and Luis Tiant,” Birdie told Yogi.
“Who’s Tiant?”
“We just smuggled him in from Cuba,” Birdie said seriously. “He’s so good, Castro wouldn’t let him out. You guys better stay loose.”
I’m sure Yogi knew Birdie was joking, like when Yogi told reporters he played against me and not my father twenty years before. He was having some fun riding the rookie before the Yanks would try to knock me back to Havana the next day. Maybe trying to rattle me.
It didn’t bother me a bit; I had confidence in myself. And now I had gotten the last laugh, too, by beating his team.
“I was good enough to win, but not against this kid today,” Whitey Ford told reporters after the game. That was classy of him to say, and it made me proud to hear it coming from the best pitcher in the league.
Besides being a great catcher, and translating to Spanish when the manager and other guys visited me on the mound during games, Joe Azcue helped me out with sportswriters in those days.
After that first game, they asked if facing the Yankees scared me.
“I was nervous at the beginning,” I said through Joe, “but as soon as I struck out Kubek, I felt better.”
Was this my first time in Yankee Stadium? I said it was.
“It certainly is impressive,” I added. “But I wasn’t scared out there. I have confidence in myself.”
In all the excitement of the moment, I tried to be careful how I talked. I wanted to be respectful, but also let them know that no matter how many championships the Yankees had won, they didn’t intimidate me. Ballplayers said they didn’t read the papers, but they heard what other players said about them.
“This was the moment I’ve been dreaming of, and I wanted to make the most of it,” I added. “Now that I’m here, I plan to stay here—because they didn’t let my father play in this league.” Maybe all of that didn’t make it on the air, or into the papers, but I said it and meant it.
Did I think my father had heard about the game on the radio back in Cuba?
“Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes there is some wire service report on the Cuban boys here,” I said through Joe, “and sometimes they may hear the Voice of America.”
Later, when things calmed down, I thought about it some more. I sure hoped Dad did hear it—and Mom, too.
I was there because of them.