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Coming of Age in Cleveland

AFTER CONQUERING THE MIGHTY YANKEES, Tiant spent the last two months of the 1964 season showing the Indians organization the folly of keeping him stashed away in Portland so long. “Cleveland’s Cuban Cutie” dominated big-league lineups with the cool, cunning savvy of a veteran, and the refrain “He can’t be just 23” was repeated in dugouts and press boxes from Boston to Anaheim. A consensus decision was made regarding the balding, mature-looking hurler, one which despite his firm and proud denials reverberated for decades:

Tiant must be lying about his age.

For the next three seasons, performing admirably and at times brilliantly for an offensively-challenged Indians lineup, he strived to make the leap from rookie star to consistent contributor. It was not easy on a team with a revolving door of managers, each with his own views about how to best use the hard-throwing righty. One month he was a starter, the next a mid-game innings-eater, and the next a closer. Tiant wanted desperately to stay in the rotation permanently, and shined when given this opportunity. His strong performances, however, often came on the short end of 2-1 and 3-2 scores; this being a pre-sabermetrics era when gaudy win-loss records were the primary measure of a pitcher’s worth, Luis remained a second-tier star.

Frustrated, he kept it all in context. The cutting racism of his minor league days was mostly behind him, his salary was good, and he was living his dream. And even as his English was slow to improve, Tiant became an indispensable source of love and laughter for his teammates. They respected his skills, honored his friendship, and delighted in his festive approach to the game and life. Even opponents whom he mowed down and mocked in the heat of a pennant race find it hard to get angry; he was too damn funny.

Through it all, Tiant continued to endure a long exile from his homeland and parents. He and his wife Maria now had a son and daughter, giving Luis three precious gems his mother and father had never met. The new clan provided him with strength and a sense of duty, and he took almost no time off—pitching all spring and summer in Cleveland and all fall and winter in the warmer climes of Venezuela and Puerto Rico. The grind was tiring, and worried his big-league employers, but he believed it was the best way to hone his craft. Someday, he dreamed, he would shine so bright that nobody could deny him the riches and power needed to reunite his loved ones.

BACK WHEN MY FATHER was still playing, Cleveland was a baseball city. But by the time I came up in ’64, with the NFL growing in popularity, football was king. The Cleveland Browns had a future Hall of Fame running back in Jim Brown, and they were always competing for championships and drawing crowds of 50,000 or more to home games. The Browns and Indians shared Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and when the Indians won a couple pennants and a World Series in the 1940s and ’50s, they drew big crowds there too. Fans loved watching pitchers Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, and Early Wynn, and great hitters like Larry Doby, Al Rosen, and my buddies Bobby Avila and Al Smith. After all those guys retired or were past their prime, though, things changed.

The Indians of 1964 were a middle-of-the-pack team. They didn’t have too many big names anymore, and usually drew real small crowds. Sometimes there were only a couple thousand fans in the huge stadium. Sportswriters said interest in the team actually was up, and that a lot of fans were listening to the games on radios, in their cars, or watching them on TV when they were on. But it’s still sad as a ballplayer to see all those empty seats. You feel like your home fans are not supporting you.

Things were so bad that the group of businessmen who owned the Indians were talking about moving the team. As many as a dozen cities were supposedly interested. “Our problem is a simple one. We need more dollars,” general manager Gabe Paul told Cleveland Mayor Ralph Lacher in the summer of ’64. “Our loss last year, which was checked by Ernst and Ernst auditors, was $1,200,000. Our loss this year, up to August 31, was in excess of $800,000. We just can’t go on year after year like this.”

My win against the Yankees got a lot of press, especially back in Cleveland. One sportswriter called me “Lightening Luis Tiant, the Indians’ pitching papoose” and when I told reporters I thought I could pitch faster than I did in New York, I guess fans wanted to see for themselves. Four days after the Yankees game, one of the best home crowds of the season came out for my first start at Cleveland Stadium. They saw a good one.

It’s funny that the team I would be most associated with later on—the Boston Red Sox—was the second I ever faced in the big leagues. The Red Sox had two guys in uniform who would become two of my favorite people in baseball: Johnny Pesky and Carl Yastrzemski. Back then I knew them only by what they had done. Pesky, the Boston manager, had been an All-Star shortstop for the Red Sox before and after World War II, batting in front of Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr; I remembered him from listening to Yankees-Red Sox games on the radio as a kid. Yastrzemski, who everyone called “Yaz,” was a young guy just a year older than me. He didn’t quite have the power he’d develop later on, but he was a great left fielder and doubles hitter who had led the American League in batting the year before.

Another funny thing about that game was that it was only the second time I had ever set foot in the ballpark I would call my home field for the next six seasons. Two years before, as a minor leaguer, I came to watch a game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium while in town to have a shoulder injury checked out by the Indians medical team. Back then, Gabe Paul was worried I was damaged goods. He wasn’t worrying anymore.

Boston was in seventh place, just ahead of the Indians in the AL standings, but was one of the league’s top hitting clubs. Led by Yaz, Dick Stuart, Felix Mantilla, and rookie star Tony Conigliaro, they lead all AL teams in batting in 1964 and were second in home runs. None of it mattered to me. Still feeding off the confidence from my first time out, I pretty much stopped them cold with a six-hit, 6-1 win. I also got my first big-league hit—a single off of Bob Heffner.

“Luis Clemente Tiant is for real,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer announced the next morning. That wasn’t bad praise for a guy with only 18 innings in the big leagues, and showed how hungry the city was for baseball players worth playing up.

The sportswriters weren’t the only ones impressed.

“Man is he strong. You got to like him,” said Red Sox manager Pesky. “He threw just as hard in the ninth as in the first, if not harder, and he got the ball over.”

Pesky’s players called me “Little Bull” as a way of saying I was strong, and Red Sox pitching coach Bob Turley agreed. Turley also said I “got away with” some bad curve balls, so I tried to remember that for the future.

What was most important to me those first couple games, besides winning, was how well I got along with my new teammates on and off the field. It happened real fast.

“How come you couldn’t pitch a shutout this time the way you did against the Yankees?” one guy joked in the clubhouse after the Boston game, loud enough for reporters to hear.

“Yeah, I told you to pitch a shutout,” kidded another.

“You can’t throw shutouts all the time,” I shot back.

“How come you let Mantilla hit that home run?”

“This is no game for little boys,” I said. “Sometimes they hit homers.”

Joking around has always been a sign of belonging in sports, of becoming one of the guys. It’s also an important way to build up a team. I knew I wasn’t going to win every time out, but if you play hard and do your best, and know how to leave the game on the field, your teammates will respect you. That’s especially true for pitchers; guys who respect you will play harder behind you.

On the Indians, we needed all the hard workers we could get to come up with runs. We didn’t have a lot of heavy hitters like the Red Sox. Outfielder Leon Wagner, a friendly, outgoing player who everyone called “Daddy Wags”, hit 31 homers for us that year, but nobody else even had 20. We only batted .247 as a team, so our pitchers really had to bear down to keep us in games. Three guys in the starting rotation the second half of the year—me, Sam McDowell, and Sonny Siebert—were all rookies. And since I did well as soon as I came up, Birdie Tebbetts didn’t think twice about using me whenever necessary.

I had to leave my third start, a 4-3 loss to the Los Angeles Angels, with a stiff shoulder, so Birdie skipped my next scheduled spot in the rotation four days later and instead pitched me in relief two days in a row—the last two innings of a 2-1, 11-inning victory over Detroit and the last two batters of a 4-2 win against Washington. I picked up a win and a save, but I was glad he put me back in the rotation after that.

“I don’t know how good a pitcher we have, but we’ve got a good thrower,” Tebbetts said during my first month with the club. “It helps when a boy comes from a baseball family. I think this kid should do very well.”

As a former catcher who had played back in the 1940s, Tebbetts probably also appreciated my ability to finish or go very deep into ballgames. In the ’60s, there was still a lot of satisfaction and pride in finishing a game that you started. It was a badge of honor. Today the managers all want to pull a pitcher after six or even five innings no matter how well he’s doing, because the stats show the value in saving your best arms for what has become a much longer postseason with three playoff rounds plus the wild card play-in game. In the ’60s, before the leagues split up into East and West divisions, the AL and NL champions went straight to the World Series—and you had your best guys out there on the mound as long as they could go.

Everybody knew the Indians were not going to the World Series in 1964, but I still tried to look at every game like it was important. If you gave me that ball in the first inning, I wanted to be out there at the end. Usually I was; seven of my first eight wins in the big leagues were complete games. I conditioned myself all year long, doing lots and lots of running, playing catch with a heavy ball, and some exercises with barbells, so that I would have the energy to get through a long season. I may not have looked like it, but I was always in great shape.

When I won my fifth game with the Indians in mid-August, a complete-game shutout against the Angels, someone pointed out that I was the first pitcher in organized professional baseball to reach 20 victories in ’64—combined with my 15-1 half-season in Portland, my record so far in ’64 was 20-2. Each week the Sports pages ran the statistics of every pitcher in both leagues, from the best earned-run-average down to the worst, in one long column. Names like “Ford, New York,” “Koufax, Los Angeles,” and “Marichal, San Francisco” were always bunched around the top, but by September “Tiant, Cleveland” was up there as well. I sent some of the clippings home to Cuba so my parents could see them.

My $5,000 salary may have been under the big-league minimum, but it was more money than I had ever had in my life by a long shot. I sent most of it home to Maria and Little Luis, and some to my parents—in hopes they would get it and not Castro’s soldiers. With a little of what was left I bought my first car. It was four years old, but I was still so excited I drove it straight from the dealer over to the ballpark.

It started making funny noises the closer I got to Cleveland Stadium. And as soon as I reached the parking lot and turned off the engine, the radiator blew up! Welcome to the big leagues!

Near the end of the year, with a chance for the Indians to finish over .500 and as high as fourth place in the ten-team league, Birdie put me back in the bullpen and told me be ready to pitch anytime during the upcoming four-game series at home against the league-leading Yankees. Players whose teams finished first through fourth in both leagues all got a share of World Series bonus money then, so there was added incentive for us to win besides pride.

I did get into one of the games late, and took the loss when Elston Howard got to me for a home run in extra innings. That one hurt, but I did get to live out another one of my dreams. As a kid I fantasized about pitching against Minnie Miñoso—the greatest of all Cuban players then in the big leagues—and Mickey Mantle. Now I had done both. First I faced Miñoso in winter ball, and in this game I went up against Mantle for the first time. He flew out to right.

The Yankees swept the series, and we lost seven straight overall to ruin our chances at .500, but I finished the season strong. My first time pitching at what would become my favorite place to play, I threw a shutout against the Red Sox in Fenway Park on September 30. Dick Stuart was gunning for the home run and RBI titles for Boston, but he was 0-for-4 with three strikeouts. Yaz and Tony C were both 0-for-4 too, and overall I let up only four hits while striking out 11. Maybe the most incredible number about the game was the attendance at Fenway: 934 in a 35,000-seat ballpark. They had some big hitters, but thanks to bad pitching and bad management, the ninth-place Red Sox were in even worse shape than the Indians.

The crowd was a lot bigger four days later when we played at Yankee Stadium in our last game of the year. I got the start on three days’ rest, and Tebbetts pulled me after six innings with the score 1-1 thanks to my first big-league homer: a shot into the right-field seats off future Ball Four author Jim Bouton. McDowell pitched the rest of the way, and we wound up winning, 2-1, in 13 innings. Maybe Tebbetts should have left me in; a year later I hit my second career homer, and it was off Bouton, too!

Our victory kept the Yankees from winning 100 games, but they still went to the World Series while we finished sixth at 79-83. They really had our number; if you throw out our 3-15 record against New York, the Indians would have been well above .500 and considered a very competitive club. This frustrated me like all my teammates, but as my big-league career got going I began to notice something: I pitched some of my top games against the top teams.

In my three games against the Yankees that year, I had a 1.06 ERA, my lowest against any opponent. Facing the best brought out the best in me, and so did tight situations. In one game that September, I had a 5-4 lead on the White Sox when they loaded the bases against me with one out in the eighth inning. All they needed was a flyball or a grounder to the right side to tie the game, but I got a foul popup to the catcher and a grounder to short to get out of the jam.

All of this told me one thing: when the time came, whether in Cleveland or somewhere else, I believed I would rise to the occasion and win big games in a pennant race.

My final record with the Indians as a rookie was 10-4, with a 2.83 ERA, nine complete games, and three shutouts in 19 games (16 of them starts). When you add that to my numbers in Portland (15-1) and in the 1963-64 winter league season in Venezuela (11-3), I was 36-8 overall in less than 12 months. I pitched more than 350 innings for four teams, and I felt great.

So did Gabe Paul, who had almost let me go the year before. The press wouldn’t let him forget it.

“The most exciting pitcher in the American League today is a Cuban boy named Luis Tiant,” wrote Cleveland sportswriter Regis McAuley. “And those tears you hear splashing around the major leagues are being shed by the general managers of 19 clubs who could have grabbed this sensational righthander for the waiver price [of $8,000] at last winter’s minor league meetings in San Diego. They all missed the boat. ... The main reason Tiant is pitching for the Indians today is because Gabe Paul made a great big boo-boo and got away with it.”

Now he had learned his lesson. Two days after the ’64 season ended I signed an $11,000 Cleveland contract for 1965, more than double the $5,000 I had made the year before. I was very happy with the raise, and knew it would help me and Maria as we thought about giving Little Luis a sister or brother. At the same time, I was sad that I couldn’t easily share my good fortune with my parents and other family back in Cuba. Even if I mailed them cash, it was unlikely to make it into their hands.

I wasn’t the only one in this situation; a lot of young Cuban ballplayers who managed to get out after Castro came in were now making the majors, including three who would go on to long careers and meet up in the playoffs and All-Star games.

Tony Perez, the slugger I was getting ready to face in San Diego the day I got called up, joined the Cincinnati Reds seven days after my debut and soon became one of the National League’s top RBI men. Bert Campaneris, a shortstop in the Kansas City Athletics system, debuted the same week as Perez did and hit two home runs in his very first game with KC. He’d be a great fielder, base stealer, and leadoff hitter for close to 20 seasons, many of them with World Series-winning teams after the A’s moved to Oakland. Perez is in the Hall of Fame, and I think Campy should be, too.

But of all the Cubans to come up in 1964, the best pure hitter was my future teammate Tony Oliva. Joining me and Campy on the Topps All-Rookie team that year, he hit .323 for the Minnesota Twins to become the first rookie batting champion in big-league history, and also led the league with 209 hits, 43 doubles, and 109 runs scored. Oliva was one of many players from Cuba signed by scout Joe Cambria for the old Washington Senators—who in 1961 moved to Minnesota and became the Twins. What most people don’t know is that Olivia’s real first name is Pedro; Tony is his brother.

Here’s the story. Pedro was a great young ballplayer who Cambria wanted to sign to a Twins contract just a few weeks before spring training in 1961. This is when worsening relations between Castro and the United States were making it tougher than ever to fly out of Cuba, something I had to deal with myself after getting signed by Cleveland. Pedro didn’t have a birth certificate, which was needed for a passport, but Tony did. So Pedro borrowed it, got a passport, and flew to the U.S. with a new name.

We were the lucky ones. The real Tony, also a top player, never got out of Cuba.

One thing many Latino players had to deal with during our careers was talk about our ages. In my case it started right when I first came up. Because I was doing so good, people figured I couldn’t be just 23.

“He was so far ahead of everybody else who came along at that stage,” Cleveland sportswriter Russ Schneider, an old-timer who went back to the days of Babe Ruth, said later, “I was convinced he had knocked about five years off. It just seemed obvious. This was no naïve kid. Luis knew his way around. Plus he looked even older because he was already starting to lose his hair.”

First off, I knew my way around because I had been pitching all spring, summer, and winter, including to big-league ballplayers, for five years! Second, he may have thought it was a compliment saying I pitched like I was older and wiser, but I didn’t like being called a liar.

Think about it this way: Did they ever question whether Ted Williams was really 21 when he drove in 145 runs as a rookie, or if Mickey Mantle was 20 when he hit .311 and led the Yankees to a World Series title? Frank Robinson was as Black as me, but born in Texas. He had 38 homers his first year, and nobody asked to see his birth certificate. Frank said he was 21, so they believed him. But with the Latino players, especially the Cubans, if you didn’t look like a young kid, they figured you were lying.

It never was the Latinos’ fault. The American scouts would go down to our country, see a guy play, and think, “Hey, he’s got it going—maybe he can make it.” If they couldn’t verify how old the guy was, they’d figure they could take four or five years off his age. “He says he’s 24? OK, let’s make him 20 or maybe 19.” The scouts would even change the birth certificates, or make fake ones.

The players didn’t know anything about the rules and passports; we’d never had one before, so we didn’t know the difference. I’m sure with computerized records in lots of countries that this is harder to do now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if scouts still try to do it.

However old they thought I was, Indians fans were excited about my future—and the team—going into 1965.

Mostly, people were excited about our pitching. Our four top returning starters—McDowell, Siebert, me, and Jack Kralick—all had ERAs under 3.25 in ’64, when the Indians set a major league record with 1,129 strikeouts as a staff (I got the record-breaker in my Fenway start). We were young too; McDowell was still only 22 years old, I was 24, Siebert was 28, and Kralick was the old man of the staff at 29. With us as the “Big Four” for a full season, many baseball people including our manager Birdie Tebbetts predicted we would have one of the strongest rotations in the American League.

“When we started to pitch them in regular rotation [after the 1964 All-Star Game] and before the final two weeks of the season, we were the best team in the league,” said Tebbetts. “Give these kids a chance to mature and they’re going to win a lot of games for a long time.”

To keep us sharp during the long off-season, the Indians arranged for Siebert, me, and another young pitcher they were high on—Steve Hargan—to play on the same winter league team: the Ponce Lions of the Puerto Rican League. Ponce had a working agreement with the Indians; Johnny Lipon, who had managed many of us in the minors at Charleston and Portland, was the Lions’ manager in 1964-65, and young Cleveland position players like Tommie Agee and Duke Sims were also on the roster. Although Lipon was born and raised in the Midwest, he spoke pretty good Spanish before most U.S.-born managers did, and that made a big difference to those of us who were still struggling to learn English. Lipon did a lot for us.

The league was very competitive and filled with current and future stars. We were picked as the team to beat, but that winter’s champions were the Santurce Crabbers, whose lineup included Orlando Cepeda, a native Puerto Rican who was already one of the top home run hitters in the National League playing alongside Willie Mays on the San Francisco Giants. Leading pitchers for the Crabbers were Cuban Juan Pizarro, a 19-game winner that year for the White Sox, and Rubén Gómez, another local hero who had helped the Giants to the 1954 World Series title. He only played in the majors for 10 years, but he spent 29 years in the Puerto Rican Winter League.

Some of the young guys on rosters that winter who would soon be big-league stars included Joe Morgan of Santurce, Willie Horton of the Mayaguez Indians, and Bert Campaneris—who I loved having behind me as shortstop on the Lions. Tony Perez, who played 10 winters for the Crabbers, has said that Puerto Rican baseball was “almost major league caliber” in the ’60s. I agree. That’s one reason I never liked taking winters off when I was young, no matter how many innings I pitched during the summer. There was no better way to stay in shape and stay sharp.

I didn’t have a very good winter for Ponce, going 5-6, and Siebert was only 5-4. But Cleveland management was still confident enough in our pitching staff, and worried enough about our offense, to pull off a huge trade just before spring training. Gabe Paul sent promising left-hander Tommy John, who had failed to stick in the big leagues the previous two seasons, to the White Sox in a three-team swap with Kansas City that brought outfielder Rocky Colavito back to Cleveland. Rocky was a great home run man with a rifle arm, and had been one of the most popular players in Indians history before being traded away back in 1960. He could still hit the long ball at age 31, and I’m guessing Paul hoped he would both help us win and help our attendance.

The deal not only cost us John, who would go on to win 288 games in the big leagues, but also starting catcher Johnny Romano and outfielder Agee, a speedster with a great glove and bat who would later be Rookie of the Year for Chicago. But at the time everybody in Cleveland was really excited about the move. The switchboard operators at Indians team offices said they were getting hundreds of phone calls in support of the trade, the most since all the angry calls they got the day Rocky was dealt five years before. Some experts predicted the move might even win us the pennant.

It didn’t, but we did improve a lot in 1965—finishing with an 87-75 record that was the best for a Cleveland team in six years. Rocky did his part, leading the AL with 108 RBI and hitting 26 homers. As a club we finished third in the ten-team league in homers and batting average, and our attendance went up nearly 35 percent, which stopped the talk of moving the team. In June we won 10 straight and 16 of 18, making believers out of a lot of fans, but in the second half of the season we lost a lot of close ballgames when we couldn’t get the key hit, double play, or big catch when it mattered.

The guy affected the most was Sudden Sam McDowell. He topped the AL with a 2.18 ERA and 325 strikeouts, and he made both the All-Star team and the cover of Sports Illustrated. But his record was only a so-so 17-11, and although the magazine compared him to Sandy Koufax, to me Sudden was a lot more like Nolan Ryan would be a few years later when he first went to the Angels. Both were faster than anybody else in the American League, and nearly unhittable, but had trouble with their control. McDowell topped all AL pitchers with 132 walks and 17 wild pitches, and that was a lot of free bases to give away when you were suffering from a severe lack of run support. In seven of his 11 losses, the Indians were either shut out or limited to just one run.

I knew how he felt. My record was 11-11, and eight of my losses were by one or two runs. But I’m not going to blame anybody else for that season; my job was to keep the other team off the scoreboard, and I didn’t do it good enough in 1965. My ERA was 3.53, a big jump from my rookie year, and I only had 10 complete games in 30 starts.

Part of my problem was getting hurt early on. In spring training I strained a muscle in my pitching arm, throwing a curveball in the first intrasquad game, and I tried to come back from it too soon. For a month all I could do was run and lob a baseball, and for the rest of the year the arm never really stopped hurting.

Tebbetts put me in the bullpen at the beginning of the regular season to work me back slowly, and I didn’t make my first start until May 1. Then, after getting my record up to 9-3 by late July, including a one-hitter and a two-hitter, I lost eight of my last 10 decisions with a 4.05 ERA over the final two months. My slump was a big reason the Indians, who were just half a game out of second place starting August, finished in fifth, 15 games behind the pennant-winning Minnesota Twins. If it wasn’t for Siebert (16-8 with a 2.43 ERA) and terrific relief work from Gary Bell, Don McMahon, and Lee Stange, things might have been much worse.

In a real up-and-down season, the one place I pitched consistently well was Boston. I had a 1.63 ERA in three starts at Fenway Park, and my win there on June 28 moved us into a first-place tie with Chicago. In my next Fenway appearance, on September 16, I walked none and struck out 11—including Yastrzemski three times—and in one stretch put down 17 straight batters. But I got out-pitched by another young fireballer: Dave Morehead. While I was holding Yaz and Co. to six hits and two runs, Morehead was pitching a no-hitter to beat me 2-0.

Just that kind of season.

It turned out to be a big day in Red Sox history, and not just because of the no-hitter. While Morehead and his teammates were celebrating after the game, Boston owner Tom Yawkey fired general manager Mike “Pinky” Higgins. It was a move long overdue. Higgins had been either GM or manager of the Red Sox for most of the past decade, never coming close to winning a pennant. He was also known by Black players throughout baseball as a terrible racist. Higgins supposedly said, “they’ll be no niggers on this team as long as I have anything to say about it.”

Sure enough, Boston was the last big-league team to integrate, in 1959, and they had only had a handful of African-American or Latino players through ’65. Their first Black pitcher, right-hander Earl Wilson, was just emerging as a star when he was traded to Detroit for telling a reporter off the record that he had been denied service at a bar during spring training in Florida. That reporter told another writer, who wrote a story, and Wilson was deemed a troublemaker. After the trade, he became a 20-game winner and helped the Tigers to a World Series title.

In his autobiography, I Never Had it Made, Jackie Robinson described his own phony tryout with the Red Sox in 1945—two years before he broke the color line with Brooklyn. Jackie said he and two other Negro League guys did great in their tryout, but none even heard back from Boston. “Tom Yawkey,” Robinson wrote, “was one of the most bigoted guys in baseball.”

I’m not saying I agree with Jackie; I have no proof Mr. Yawkey was a racist, and he was always good to me when I joined the Red Sox. But even though I never met Pinky Higgins, I heard enough bad things about him to believe he was probably the guy at the center of the problem. Mr. Yawkey’s biggest mistake was probably that he didn’t fire Higgins sooner; by the time he gave him the boot, Boston was finishing up a 62-100 season, its worst in more than 30 years.

The guy who took Higgins’s place as Red Sox GM was Dick O’Connell—and he was the right guy for the job. In his first two years he completely turned the team around, rebuilding the farm system and making a bunch of smart trades. He didn’t care if a guy was white, Black, or blue, as long as he could help the club. And because Mr. Yawkey had plenty of money he was willing to spend, O’Connell could take risks on guys he had a good feeling about.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that GM move in Boston would have a big impact on my own career and my life a few years down the road.

Meanwhile, as the ’65 season was winding down, I began to think about taking the winter off. I had been pitching year-round for six years, and while I enjoyed doing it, and always felt strong as the summer wore on, I also had my share of injuries. The extra money definitely came in handy, but by taking a vacation from playing I could spend more time with Maria and Little Luis back in Mexico City. Gabe Paul and the front office were also in favor of my skipping winter ball, so I did. I worked out off a mound two or three times a week, and I ran a lot, but didn’t pitch any games from October through January.

The other big thing I did that winter was change my eating habits. I was never a fat guy, but because of my stocky physique people always joked about my size. When I struggled during 1965, even my dad wrote me from Cuba saying I had to lose weight. That was easy for Señor Skinny to say, but not so easy for me to do. One sportswriter wrote that I had “a tendency to gain weight by merely looking at a big dinner.”

I figured if I wasn’t playing a lot, I had to be careful. Maria is a great cook, but I really watched myself. No greasy foods, chocolate, potatoes, or bread. Beans and rice was my favorite meal, but Maria only let me have it once a week. Team management was worried that I was gaining weight in Mexico City, but I was actually losing 20 pounds. And when I showed up in Tucson for spring training, this was the headline: “Tiant Tantalizes Tribe By Cutting Down On Weight.”

Nobody was more shocked than Birdie Tebbetts.

“Holy smokes ... how about that?” the manager told reporters after first seeing me. “I was almost afraid to look at him. I’d heard he got so fat.”

I loved it.

“I feel goooooood,” I told the shocked writers. “How do I look?”

Then I went into the clubhouse and picked up a pair of size 32 pants, down from 36 the year before.

The writers all started calling me the “new” Luis Tiant, and there was a great feeling about the team in general heading into the season. After the jump to 87 wins the year before, the expectations were for even bigger things. “This could be the team to watch in 1966,” the New York Times predicted in its baseball preview issue. “The Indians have the basic ingredients of success—pitching and power.”

Both were clicking when the season started. We tied what was then a major-league record by opening the year with 10 straight wins, and after sweeping New York three in a row at Yankee Stadium were 14-1 on May 5. I had three wins already—all of them complete-game shutouts. Our pitching coach Early Wynn was a 300-game winner, but I was also getting tips by mail from another good source: my dad. He stressed the importance of getting the first batter out each inning, and never, ever pitching the ball high to anyone.

I tried to follow his advice, and the “new” Luis Tiant was the talk of baseball. When one sportswriter asked me how I was doing it, I smiled and replied simply: “I am skinny and I am lucky.”

Of course it wasn’t all luck. It seemed like the time off over the winter had been a good idea. My arm was completely pain-free for the first time that I could remember, and my ERA was 1.71 at the end of May. I was pitching so well that Tebbetts again used me in relief a few times between starts, and it didn’t bother me at all. He even thought about making me a full-time reliever, because he knew I didn’t mind throwing every day. But this was before guys like Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter got real big contacts as relievers, so I hoped to stay a starter where I could make more money for my family.

Besides, why mess with something that isn’t broken? McDowell, Siebert, Bell, and our other pitchers were all doing great, and guys like first baseman Fred Whitfield, shortstop Chico Salmon, and my Cuban catching buddy Joe Azcue were coming through big at the plate. It looked like nobody could stop us. When Bell four-hit the Twins on May 28, we had a 27-10 record and were in first place by four-and-a-half half games.

But what’s funny about baseball is that you never know when things are going to shift. It’s a long season, and injuries can pile up. Maybe a bunch of guys get cold at once, or you can just run into plain bad luck. Whatever the reason, after being the hottest team in the league for the first two months, we went belly-up in June and July. During one stretch we lost 20 of 29 games, and we quickly fell from first place to nearly 15 games behind the Baltimore Orioles.

That was big trouble. The Orioles had been developing into a contender with guys like third baseman Brooks Robinson, first baseman Boog Powell, and a great young pitching staff. Trading for Frank Robinson before that year put them over the top.

After a decade as one of the best hitters in the National League, Frank immediately became the best in the AL. Off the field he was the type of leader who could control a clubhouse, and his teammates called him “Da Judge” because he ran a “Kangaroo Court” where fines were given out for things like missing the cutoff man or not moving a runner along. Frank made everyone around him better, and in ’66 he won the Triple Crown by leading the AL in batting (.316), home runs (49), and RBI (116).

I did my small part to help him get there. We were playing the Orioles at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium on May 8, and had just lost the first game of a Sunday doubleheader. I was trying to keep us in first place by a game over the Birds, and pitch my fourth straight shutout to begin the season. Robby came up in the first inning with Luis Aparicio on base, and I started him off with a fastball that broke low and inside. Real tough to hit—just like Dad preached.

It didn’t fool him.

“The ball jumped off his bat, rocketing toward left field in a towering arc,” Baltimore sportswriter Doug Brown wrote. “The only question was whether it would stay fair and third base umpire Cal Drummond signaled that it had. The ball landed in the parking lot behind the left field bleachers and was retrieved by two teenagers, Bill Wheatley and Mike Sparaco, from under the wheel of a car, 540 feet from home plate. It traveled a measured 451 feet on the fly.”

The Orioles had been playing at Memorial Stadium for 12 years, and when the public address man announced to the crowd of nearly 50,000 fans that it was first time a ball had ever been hit completely out of the ballpark, they gave Frank a standing ovation.

“I’d never heard anything like it before,” Robinson said later. “The ovation started and it mounted and it was a little touching. I was a little embarrassed, though tremendously pleased. It was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It was so unexpected.”

Happy I could help!

After the game, the two kids who found the ball after it had rolled 100 feet to a stop under a white Cadillac brought it back to Frank; each got a season’s pass and an autographed ball in trade.

That’s not even the whole story. A week later the Orioles had a pregame ceremony where they put an orange and black flag at the spot where the ball left the park on the fly. The flag read “HERE,” and they left it there until Memorial Stadium closed in 1991. Frank gave the ball a place of honor in his trophy case.

Me? All I got for making it possible was a loss—and ribbing from teammate Gary Bell and Mike Cuellar of the Orioles every time we came to Baltimore. “Luis, what’s that up there?” they’d say, pointing at the flag. “Do you know?”

I do know this: Frank Robinson hit about .150 off me the rest of his career.

Later in the season, after reliever Dick Radatz got hurt, Tebbetts put me in the bullpen again, this time for six weeks. While I didn’t complain, I really didn’t like it too much. I wanted to be out there to start the game, not just to finish it. But the manager is No. 1, and what he says goes. Especially if you’re a young player trying to stick in the league.

Birdie was a good man, and a good manager, but he couldn’t turn things around when they went south. On August 19, with the team in third place, 14 games out, he resigned for, as he put it, “the good of baseball in Cleveland.” Coach George Strickland, who had filled in as manager in ’64 when Birdie had a heart attack, took over again on an interim basis. The change didn’t help; after going 65-57 under Tebbetts, we were well under .500 the rest of the way and finished in fifth place at 81-81. The only good thing to come out of the switch for me was that Strickland let me start a couple times down the stretch, and I threw two solid complete games.

In the end, the year was a mixed bag. I finished just 12-11 after my hot start, but my 2.79 ERA was still a big improvement over ’65. Even though I started only 16 games, I tied for the league lead with five shutouts. And when Birdie put me in the bullpen, I finished 22 games and picked up eight saves. We all underachieved as a team, but I felt I had done OK with all the shuffling between roles. My biggest problem, honestly, may have been all the weight I had lost before the season. As the summer wore on, I got more and more tired.

I didn’t know who would be the Indians’ new manager in 1967—most thought it wouldn’t be Strickland—but if I wanted to prove that the best place for me was in the starting rotation, I figured the time to start doing that was now. No more long vacations. When the American League season ended, I signed on for the winter with the Caracas Lions of the Venezuela League. That was the same league where my success playing with Valencia three years before had proved the launching pad for my journey to the majors.

There was plenty of strong competition to measure yourself against in Venezuela, and I responded to the challenge. I got off to a great start and helped the Lions make a push for the playoffs. My partner in crime was outfielder Jose Tartabull, a Cuban who played with the Kansas City A’s during the summer. In one two-week stretch Jose hit .457, and he was gunning for the batting title as we battled Valencia for first place.

The Latin fans were always passionate, but sometimes things could get out of hand. In one game I pitched against the Aragua Tigers, their left fielder Dick Dietz—who normally caught—made two errors that led to four runs. The crowd really let Dietz have it, throwing bottles, oranges, and whatever else they could find at him. Even after he singled in the ninth inning, they kept at it. When a cup of ice hit Dietz as he stood on first base, he called time, left the field, and quit the team.

That was one of seven straight wins I picked up for Caracas en route to a 12-6 record and 1.84 ERA during the regular winter season. I also had some fun at the plate, helping win several games with my bat and knocking in five runs on three hits (including a homer) in one game. We wound up tying Valencia for the pennant, and in the playoffs I had three complete-game wins as we won the Venezuela championship over the LaGuaira Sharks. There were 35,000 fans at our title-winning game in Caracas’s University Stadium, as big as any crowd we drew in Cleveland.

I was ready for a fresh start with the Indians in 1967, especially when I heard the team’s new manager was from outside the organization. Joe Adcock was real young for a skipper, only 39, and had been an outfielder with the California Angels the year before. As a player he was known as a nice guy, but he ran us hard in spring training.

“The boys can expect me to be strict and I’ll stress fundamentals,” he said after getting the job. “I think there are a lot of mental errors made that shouldn’t be.” Perhaps to show he meant business, he fined McDowell $500 for missing curfew during spring training.

Adcock planned to use a five-man rotation, and I wanted to be in it along with McDowell, Siebert, Bell, and Steve Hargan, a terrific rookie for us in ’66 with a 2.48 ERA (third best in the league). I told the manager how I felt, and he told me “he’d see”—which I took to mean he wanted me to prove to him I deserved it.

When we opened the exhibition season, Adcock gave me the start in our first game. This meant a lot. Not only did it show he was giving me a fair shot at being a starter, but the game was in Mexico City. This was the birthplace of my wife, and it was my adopted home. We were also playing the team I’d started my career with: The Mexico City Tigers. Sure, it was spring training, and the Tigers were not a big-league club. But it still felt special to me, and when I threw five shutout innings with just one walk, Adcock told reporters he was impressed with my control. “Looie looked like he was in mid-season form,” he said.

After pitching 195 innings in three months of winter ball, I hoped to pace myself in Tucson and not throw hard all the time. I had worked on a knuckleball in Venezuela, and wanted to try it out, along with some other breaking stuff, when the games didn’t count. This didn’t go over too well with Adcock and the new Cleveland pitching coach, Clay Bryant.

In one game against the hard-hitting Giants, I relieved Siebert to start the fifth and let up two hits and a walk that inning. Even though nobody scored, I got an earful from Bryant.

“Looie was throwing blankety-blank lollipops up there and I had to straighten him out quick,” the coach told reporters after the game. “He acted like he didn’t want to throw the blankety-blank ball, and I told him to either do it or get out.

“If he’s going to be that way, he’ll not pitch for me.”

This went on for a while. When I let up five hits including a homer to Ron Santo against the Cubs, blowing a 4-1 lead, I got more abuse from Bryant.

“You don’t get in shape by throwing lollipops,” he said after this game, which we came back to win. “It’s all right if you’re trying something, but the only thing Tiant should be doing now is getting himself ready.”

This thinking made no sense to me. I was already in shape from playing three months of winter ball. Trying things was how I got myself ready for the season ahead. I had been working on some new stuff in Venezuela, and now I wanted to try it against whole lineups of big-leaguers. I realize, looking back, that he and Adcock were trying to toughen me up and help me get back to the level of success I’d had as a rookie. They were trying to piss me off, and it worked.

During my last starts of the spring I threw more fastballs and less “lollipops”—which pleased the coaching staff enough to secure my spot in the starting rotation. The decision on an Opening Day pitcher was initially kept a secret, and some people thought I might even get it over McDowell. But Sudden Sam was still the golden boy, even after a 14-15 season, and he got the nod. After two postponements—one a rainout and one from a power outage—I started the second game and got whipped 10-1 by the Angels. Then I got knocked around in my next start.

Things got better after that, at least for me. I went on a six-game winning streak that included back-to-back 12- and 13-strikeout efforts against the Senators and Tigers, but the team was playing barely .500 baseball. Gabe Paul decided something had to be done. Pitching continued to be the club’s greatest strength, but our hitting and defense needed work.

The previous November, during the winter baseball meetings, Paul had said he was willing to listen to trade proposals for pitchers—with me and 10-year-veteran Gary Bell rumored as the candidates most likely leaving. We both survived the winter, but with the team limping along in mid-1967, Paul finally pulled the trigger. On June 4, with the Indians in fifth place, he sent Bell to the Red Sox in exchange for young, hard-hitting first baseman Tony Horton and longtime outfielder Don Demeter.

It was tough to lose a great guy like Bell, who was dependable whether starting or relieving and was hilarious in the clubhouse. Everybody called him “Ding Dong,” and we had a lot of fun together. But good pitching only worked if you could score some runs, too, and we hoped Horton and Demeter would provide us some much-needed power.

“I just hope the Indians continue to hit against me the way they hit for me,” Bell joked on the way out.

Ding Dong got his wish. He immediately moved into Boston’s starting rotation and won 12 games in just over half a season for the Red Sox, including three wins against Cleveland. Horton hit OK for us, but Demeter was barely above .200; overall, we played much worse after the trade than before it. Just as fast as I won six games in a row, I lost six straight in July and August, earning me another short stay in the bullpen. My ERA was still right near the top 10 in the league, but my record was 8-9. Offensive production was dropping throughout the majors, so there was less room for error.

The American League pennant race that summer was crazy. Five teams—Chicago, California, Minnesota, Detroit, and Boston—were all bunched at the top of the standings. The Red Sox were the biggest surprise; they had finished ninth the year before, but had a tough young club led by two superstars: pitcher Jim Lonborg and leftfielder Carl Yastrzemski. Lonborg, a tall, thin right-hander with a great fastball and the courage to pitch inside, was leading the AL in strikeouts and wins; Yaz, already an excellent player, was taking his game to the next level and chasing a Triple Crown just like Frank Robby the year before. Plus, Yaz played Gold Glove defense.

It’s a long season, full of stress, and you need ways to keep yourself from going crazy when you’re going bad. On every team I played on, I tried to be a guy who not only played hard, but also knew how to have fun. Taking my cigar in the shower always made guys laugh, I’m not sure why. My imitations had ’em chuckling, too. Even when my English wasn’t too good, I could do a pretty good version of Sam McDowell arguing with Joe Adcock about coming out of a game. Poking fun of guys, giving them the needle, it was all fair game. Even guys on other teams—hey, they were stressed out too, right?

In May we had come to Boston before the fans there really caught on that the 1967 Red Sox might be something special. I struggled with my control, walking eight, but also struck out nine—including Yastrzemski three straight times on fastballs. We won in 10 innings, 5-3, and Yaz was so angry he had them wheel out the cage after the game so he could take extra batting practice. It was impressive dedication, it really was, but I couldn’t help getting a little jab at him for it.

I walked by while he was in the cage, looked him in the eye, and said simply, “You need it.” (If you’ve already read the foreword to this book, you know how that story ends.)

Unlike the year before, we pretty much knew by August that we had no chance to make the World Series. Still, even if we couldn’t win, I wanted to prove my value by pitching well against the teams that could. Sometimes our bats didn’t make it easy. On August 22, I struck out 16 Angels, but it took a homer in the bottom of the ninth by pal Joe Azcue to get me the 3-2 win. Ten days later I pitched nine shutout innings against the Angels, this time on the road, but we lost 1-0 in the 12th. That was a tough one to get over.

Overall I made six starts in September, and that game in Anaheim was the only one I didn’t finish. I was 4-0 with a 1.55 ERA for the month, and beat the Twins, White Sox, and Red Sox—all of whom were going for the pennant. I tried to think of it like we were going for the pennant; if we couldn’t win, at least we could have a say. The newspapers got into the act, too; after we beat Chicago in 13 innings, the big headline in the Plain Dealer was “Tribe Drops Chisox Two Behind.”

The final week of September we went to Boston. Fenway Park felt much different than when we’d ended the season there two years before. Only about 1,200 people saw Dave Morehead’s no-hitter against me in ’65; now the Red Sox were in first place, with a chance to go to their first World Series in 21 years, and were leading the league in attendance. Fenway had no second deck, and very little foul territory, so you felt like the crowd was right on top of you. You could tell by how they cheered that they really knew the game. It reminded me of the atmosphere at games back in Cuba, and I loved it whether I was pitching for the home team or the visitors.

It’s important to try to let yourself go a little in a tense pennant race, but it’s much easier to keep loose when you’re not in one. I was real loose on this day, and I was bringing it. I struck out three guys in the first inning, seven through the first five, and we knocked out our old pal Gary Bell, Boston’s starter, with two homers in the fourth.

As we built a 6-0 lead, I couldn’t help having some fun.

“We couldn’t hit him, and each time he struck somebody out, he’d look over at our dugout and say, ‘You guys are tight, huh? You’re looking like realllll tight assholes!’” remembers Rico Petrocelli, shortstop for the Red Sox that day. “He was a character, you know? You couldn’t help but like him, even when he was beating you.”

Yaz got to me late in the game for a three-run homer, his 43rd of the year, but we still won, 6-3. That knocked Boston one game behind league-leading Minnesota and a percentage-point behind Chicago with three games to play.

“Tiant was good; I have to tip my cap to him,” Yastrzemski said after the game.

What did I think?

“I have to make money, too,” I told the big group of reporters around my locker. “I eat like these guys eat.”

We beat Boston again the next day, but they still won the pennant by sweeping the Twins over the weekend while the White Sox and Tigers were losing. Yaz, Rico, and Gary Bell each earned more than $5,000 in World Series bonus money, which could buy plenty to eat. I was left watching the Series on TV, again.

Still, it wasn’t a bad year for me personally. My 12-9 record wasn’t anything great, but I finished in the AL’s top 10 in strikeouts (219) and ERA (2.74). Nobody in the majors struck out more batters per nine innings than my 9.225, and I even hit .254—sixth-best on the team. But when your club finishes eighth at 75-87, no one really cares about your stats.

The best news for me that fall came off the field: Maria gave birth to our daughter in October. We named her Isabel, after my mother, and I couldn’t help wondering if she and her big brother Luis Jr. would ever meet the grandparents whose names they carried. As another Christmas approached, with another mouth to feed, I also wondered what the future had in store for me.

Would I ever break through with the kind of season that would get me the big money—and get me on TV for the big games?