AFTER A STEADY CLIMB UPWARD during the first decade of his professional baseball career, Luis Tiant was about to see his fortunes rise as dramatically as one of his most electrifying pitches.
The 1968 MLB season is remembered as “The Year of the Pitcher,” and one can make a strong argument that Tiant outperformed even 31-game winner Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers that summer in the American League. Fans who regularly combed the agate-type lists of league leaders in their daily newspapers grew accustomed to seeing Tiant’s earned-run-average appear above those of McLain and all other AL hurlers, while Tiant’s shutout and strikeout feats earned him both frequent appearances in bold-faced headlines and a spot on baseball’s grandest mid-summer stage.
Many attributed his new level of success to changes he had made to his already unique pitching motion. Always looking for an edge, Tiant added more head bobs and upper-body twists during his delivery, moves made to keep hitters off-balance. Fans loved the show, but for Tiant it was always about strategy rather than showmanship. He was pitching for his team, and for his family, not the cameras.
McLain got the glory, in the form of postseason awards and a World Series title. But with a far less-potent lineup supporting him, and with thoughts never far from his aging parents trapped in Castro’s Cuba, El Tiante was peerless as a competitor. It seemed at times like he had the weight of the world atop his strong, overworked shoulders, but he still managed to be a revered and hilarious teammate as well as a dedicated father, son, and husband.
Those were the things, he knew, that have the greatest value—even if measured by heart instead of hardware.
IT DIDN’T TAKE GABE Paul long to make his move when the 1967 season ended. Right after we lost our last game to Baltimore, 4-0, finishing the year eighth with a 75-87 record, the Indians GM fired manager Joe Adcock and replaced him with Alvin Dark. The news ran in the paper the next day along with a story about the Red Sox beating the Twins to win the AL pennant. It turns out my win the week before had not buried the Sox, as Carl Yastrzemski feared; he and his teammates were going to their first World Series since 1946, and Boston fans had stormed the field at Fenway Park to celebrate after the last game.
The headline about our new manager, above Yaz’s smiling mug, was big and bold:
Can Dark Make Tribe See Light?
I already knew a little about my new boss. An All-Star shortstop for the New York Giants in the ’50s, Dark managed that team after it moved to San Francisco. He won a National League pennant in 1962 when his club featured Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Willie McCovey, and for the past three years he had managed in the AL with the rebuilding Kansas City A’s. He had a reputation as a strong strategist and a great handler of pitchers, but was fired by A’s owner Charlie Finley in August of ’67 after KC fell into last place.
There were rumors that Dark didn’t get along with the Black and Latino players on the Giants, but Marichal told Indians second baseman Pedro Gonzalez, a fellow Dominican, that they weren’t true.
“Juan Marichal is my best friend,” Gonzalez said to a reporter. “He is my countryman. He is dark-skinned like me. He pitched for Al in San Francisco. He tells me Dark is a great manager. He tells me this many, many times.”
That sounded good to me, but I still wondered how I’d get along with Dark—or if I figured into his plans.
During the winter, Dark told reporters that it was “unlikely” the Indians would trade any of their starting pitchers, but “we would if the right kind of deal presented itself.” With a wife and now two kids to support, I couldn’t afford to start over with a new organization. There was only one thing to do: devote myself to being so good that Dark and Paul would never think of trading me.
After a month in Mexico City with Maria, Luis, and baby Isabel, I went to Venezuela to pitch a second winter with the Caracas Lions. I was determined to prove myself, and I did—leading the league with a 1.34 ERA and helping Caracas to the championship. Two of my major-league teammates also played for the Lions that year: Indians outfielder Vic Davalillo, a native Venezuelan, hit .395 to win the league batting title, and Diego Segui, a Cuban who pitched for Dark in Kansas City and later with me on the Red Sox, went 12-1 with a 1.56 ERA. Today Diego and Vic, both great ballplayers and gentlemen, are in the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame.
Dark made a trip down to Caracas to see me and Vic play, and told reporters he was worried about my weight. There was nothing to worry about. I reported to Tucson in great shape and pitched well in the exhibition games. And even though Dark ran a more relaxed camp than Adcock, with less drills, I knew how important strong legs would be for me late in the season. So, I ran as much as I could.
One day a reporter overheard Dark and new pitching coach Jack Sanford talking as they saw me running around the field.
“Look at the way that guy is working,” said Dark.
“I’ll bet you a case of golf balls right now that Looie is at least 18-6 this season,” Sanford replied.
“I won’t bet against him,” said Dark, “but that’s one I’d sure like to lose.”
There was a lot of energy around the team, and a lot of new faces besides the coaching staff. The Indians had picked up speedy young outfielders Tommy Harper and Jose Cardenal, who would make our lineup one of the fastest in baseball. The big addition to the pitching staff was Eddie Fisher, a veteran knuckleballer Dark figured would be real tough for batters to face after getting fastballs in the upper 90s from me, Sudden Sam McDowell, and Sonny Siebert.
“Man, we’re all just floating into this season,” outfielder Leon Wagner said with a huge smile on the first day of training camp. “I tell you baby, it’s just awful beautiful.”
Daddy Wags was right. First it was awful, and then it was beautiful—for a while.
On April 4, just before the season started, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. There were riots in lots of the big cities, including Cleveland, and many teams postponed their openers. I could understand why Black people were angry; I remembered how it felt being yelled at and treated like shit because of the color of my skin. In Cuba, a friend of mine was one of the thousands executed by Castro’s firing squads for standing up for what was right. But it was supposed to be different in the United States, and this made me wonder. It was sad to see so much hate.
The start of our season didn’t cheer anybody up. I pitched lousy in the home opener when Dark brought me in to relieve Sudden Sam, letting up a home run to former teammate Chuck Hinton and taking the loss. The team went 6-11 in April overall, and I hoped that Dark would move me into the rotation and leave me there.
He did, and I got hot—along with the club. We won 11 of our first 12 in May to move into second place. What we couldn’t do is overtake the Detroit Tigers at the top. We had good speed, and great pitching, but just didn’t have any power. Paul had traded our top home run hitter, Colavito, over the winter, feeling he was starting to decline. Wagner, our other big slugger, “promised” a 40-homer year during spring training and then came out flat. He was also showing his age, and nobody stepped up to take his or Rocky’s place.
On defense our guys tried their best, but sometimes it seemed we couldn’t hit or catch the ball. This put a lot of pressure on the pitchers. You knew every time out that one mistake could cost you the game.
A start I made at Boston early in the year is a good example. I let up a three-run homer to Reggie Smith in the fourth inning, we shut them out the rest of the way, and we lost, 3-2. Of course, you can’t lose if the other team doesn’t score, and that’s how I won my next four games—by scores of 2-0, 4-0, 8-0, and 2-0. The four consecutive complete-game shutouts got me within one of the major league record for one pitcher, which had held since 1904.
I wasn’t just pitching good, I was dealing—allowing just 14 hits and seven walks while striking out 35 over the 36 innings of the streak. Batters hit a combined .118 off me during those games, but I wasn’t paying attention. I never looked at numbers when I pitched, and didn’t care what I did the last time out. The only thing I wanted to do was get ready for the next start.
The press made that tough. After the fourth straight shutout at Baltimore a photographer got cute and took a shot of me holding up four metal bat weights, or donuts, that looked like zeros. The picture ran all across the country.
We always had a hard time turning double plays on the Indians, and that’s what happened in my next start—we failed to get one when we needed it. This was also against Baltimore; I was up 1-0 with one out in the sixth when Frank Robinson hit a grounder to second base, a sure double-play ball to get me out of the inning. Larry Brown picked it up and threw to second, but shortstop Chico Salmon dropped the ball as the runner slid in.
Everybody was safe, and big Boog Powell was coming up next. That was trouble. Boog hit a three-run homer, and we wound up losing, 6-2. My scoreless innings streak was over at 41 1/3; there would be no fifth donut.
Here’s where being a good teammate comes into play. Sure, I was mad we lost, but I knew that Chico—who was my roommate on the road—felt even worse. He didn’t drop the ball on purpose, so what good would it do to chew him out? It was like being back home as a kid. I took care of my friends, because they were the closest thing I had to brothers. Now I felt the same way about my teammates.
When the writers asked me my thoughts about what happened, I reminded them that Chico had made a great play at Yankee Stadium earlier in my shutout streak to help keep it alive.
“Errors are part of the game,” I said, looking over to where Chico had his head hung in his locker. “I like to have a shutout, but I’m pitching to win. You have to be lucky to get shutouts. You have to be lucky to win, too.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised the Orioles found a way to break the streak, just like they broke my chance at a fourth straight shutout back in ’66 on Frank’s moon-shot homer. They were just an incredible team. Their lineup was dangerous nearly all the way through, from Don Buford and Davey Johnson up top through Boog and the Robinson boys—Frank and Brooks. In the field they had Gold Glovers at second base (Johnson), third (Brooks Robinson), shortstop (Mark Belanger), and center field (Paul Blair). They called Brooks “Hoover”, like the vacuum cleaner, because he picked everything up. When the ball hit the bat, I swear to God, he knew by the sound it made where that ball was going. He was BADDDD.
For years the Orioles had Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, and Mike Cuellar atop their rotation, all of them 20-game winners, but that team could make any pitcher look good. In Baltimore the saying was that manager Earl Weaver’s strategy consisted of three things: pitching, defense, and three-run homers. That’s all he needed.
On the Indians all we really had was the pitching, but it was so good it was keeping us near the top the first half of the season. McDowell, who had the best fastball in the majors and was always considered our ace, was leading the league in strikeouts and had an ERA below 2.00. He and our other starters Siebert, Stan Williams, and Steve Hargan were all doing great, but for the first time since we both joined the Indians in 1964, it wasn’t Sudden Sam getting most of the attention.
There were stretches before where I pitched great for a month or even six weeks straight, but never for this long. After the loss to Baltimore I won seven of my next nine starts, all complete games, never allowing more than two runs. Boston manager Dick Williams, after winning the 1967 pennant, would be managing the American League in the All-Star Game the next month. Players voted for the All-Star starting lineup then, not the fans, but managers got to select the pitching staff. I gave Williams something think about when I struck out 13 of his Red Sox in an 8-1 victory at Fenway Park. That gave me a 12-5 record, tying my previous high in wins for a full season—and it was still only June. The win also dropped my ERA to 1.19.
I felt I deserved to be an All-Star, and I hoped Williams wasn’t still mad at me for beating Boston during the final week of ’67. If he was, he didn’t show it. He named me to the team, my first time as an All-Star.
They called 1968 “The Year of the Pitcher” and it really was; besides my long shutout streak, Bob Gibson of the Cardinals had one of 47 innings and Don Drysdale of the Dodgers set a new record of 58 2/3 straight just before the break. The Tigers’ Denny McLain, whose team we were chasing for first place, was on pace to be the first 30-game winner since Dizzy Dean in 1934. Among hitters, two Red Sox—Carl Yastrzemski (.307) and Ken Harrelson (.302)—were the only American Leaguers batting .300 at the halfway mark.
There were different ideas for what was causing the offensive dip. Some thought that the bigger fielding gloves now being used were cutting down on hits, or that the new, bigger ballparks were too hard to homer in. Even Hank Aaron, closing in on his 500th homer that summer, was seeing a dip in his offense. He suggested giving batters four strikes to improve their chances. “What worries me,” Aaron said, “is that lack of hitting is cutting deeply into our attendance.”
Harry Walker, a former batting champion and big-league manager, blamed organized youth baseball programs like Little League. He said that instead of hitting all day by themselves or with a couple friends, like he and others from the previous generation did, Little Leaguers were taking only a very limited number of swings each practice and game. Their coaches, he believed, cared more about winning than teaching them how to hit.
“They tell the boys the pitcher is wild, and he’ll walk ’em, so DON’T SWING,” said Walker. “I’ve seen kids stand at the plate all day without swinging a bat. The pitchers get to throw, but the hitters don’t get to hit.”
I didn’t buy that. We weren’t facing little kids; these were big-league ballplayers who got plenty of swings every day for years in the majors and the minors. Great athletes who were the best in the world at what they did. These things went in cycles; hitters mashed the ball in the early ’60s, and now pitchers had the edge.
For me, that edge was never bigger than on the night of July 3, 1968. We were facing the Minnesota Twins, runner-ups to Boston for the pennant the previous year. A good home crowd of 21,135 turned out to see if we could stay in second place, and I got off strong with seven strikeouts over the first four shutout innings.
I was just warming up.
In the fifth, I struck out the side. Cesar Tovar led off the sixth for Minnesota with a hard hit into center field, but we got him trying to stretch out a triple. I had one more strikeout that inning, and then another in the seventh. Stan Williams was on our bench charting every pitch, but I had no idea how many strikeouts I had. All I cared about was keeping us in the game, because Minnesota starter Jim Merritt was doing great, too. It was still 0-0 in the eighth when I struck out the side again.
Then, with one out in the ninth inning, the Twins sent up Harmon Killebrew to pinch-hit. Everyone called him Killer; he was strong as a bull and the best power hitter in baseball. He hit 40 homers practically every season, and wound up with 574 lifetime including five off me. But this time he went down swinging, and I eventually got out of the inning when Tony Oliva—another great hitter, and a fellow Cuban who should be in the Hall of Fame with Killebrew—flew out to right.
Nine innings, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Merritt was still shutting us down, and so we kept going.
The fans were on their feet when I came out to start the top of the tenth, maybe the loudest I had ever heard them at Cleveland Stadium. We never made the World Series, but I was thinking this must be what it sounded and felt like. My heart was really pumping, and I let up a double on my first pitch to Rich Reese. He was the go-ahead run, and Frank Quillici got him to third with a bunt single, but I kept him there by striking out the side for a third time.
Only after my Cuban buddy Joe Azcue won the game for us with a single in the bottom of the tenth did I find out how many strikeouts I actually had: nineteen!
When they told me I was one of only a few pitchers to ever get that many since 1900, it felt great. Bob Feller, an Indians legend who had a 348-strikeout season right after World War II, never did it. Neither did all-time career strikeout champ Walter Johnson, or Bob Gibson, or even Sandy Koufax! A guy named Tom Chesbro had 21 in a 1961 game, but he pitched 16 innings to get them. Other than him, the only ones to reach 20 all came later on: Roger Clemens (twice), Kerry Wood, Randy Johnson, and Max Scherzer. A few other guys have gotten 19 since ’68, including Nolan Ryan four times, but it’s still a short list. The most I had other than that night was 16.
Combined with my 13 strikeouts against Boston in my previous start, I now had 32 in my last two games—which broke Koufax’s two-game record of 31 set in 1959. Sandy had also struck out 41 batters in a three-game stretch, and I tied him on that one. John Roseboro, Minnesota’s catcher, said he had “never seen a fastball thrown so hard, for so many innings,” as he did facing me that game. He would be a good judge, because before joining the Twins, he had caught Koufax on the Dodgers.
What’s funny is that I didn’t even feel like I had my best stuff that night. In the clubhouse afterwards, I was having my regular victory cigar and getting my pitching arm iced down by trainer Wally Bock when Stan Williams heard me saying I wasn’t happy with my control. So he came over and told me that out of 135 pitches I threw during the game, 101 of them were strikes—and I didn’t walk a single batter. So whatever I thought, the results were OK.
If you weren’t in Cleveland, or maybe Baltimore, you didn’t see that game. This was way before MLB.com, ESPN, or cable superstations, so the Game of the Week on national TV was the only chance fans had to watch games their teams weren’t playing in. If your city didn’t have a big-league club, the Game of the Week was it for baseball, and only teams having a good season usually made it onto the national telecasts.
After we started winning in ’68, we showed up a few times on the Game of the Week—which some people managed to pick up down in Cuba from a Florida station. There was a friend of mine I grew up with whose father was a butcher. His family knew my father and mother, and they had a big TV. If the authorities caught you with one, you’d get put in jail, so they kept it out of sight. But every time I pitched on TV, on the Game of the Week, the butcher would send somebody to my parents’ house to tell them. Then they would go to the butcher’s and watch.
My father told me later that every time they put me on the screen during those games, my mother would go up and touch it—to try and touch me. Then she would cry. That’s why I tell people you have to go through it to really know the feeling of what it is like to be separated from your family like that. It makes you sad, but it also makes you appreciate what you have.
Every season during those years, once the school year ended, Maria always came up from Mexico City with the kids to live in whatever city I was playing in. I had very few chances to see my father pitch, or to even be around him when he played, and I wanted things to be different for my children. So in ’68, Maria, five-year-old Luis, and baby Isabel spent the summer in Cleveland.
Little Luis loved it.
“We would run around the whole stadium, which was usually pretty empty,” Luis Jr. remembers about those days. “I spent a lot of time down in the clubhouse, playing with the other players’ sons. We would hang out and play baseball or whatever games we could come up with, and Cy Bynick, the clubhouse man, used to take care of us. He’d buy us hot dogs and ice cream, and let us break the old lights hanging down from the ceiling with our balls. Tony Horton, the Indians first baseman, was one guy I could remember vividly; I used to call him my big brother.”
Maria tried to bring the kids to every game I started at home that summer. Given our crowds, they were easy to spot.
One time, after a tough win against Detroit, I was telling reporters about how some of the Tigers players had talked trash to me during the game. I was getting real heated up, like I had been on the field, until Little Luis walked over and gave me a big kiss. Then I just smiled. That picture made the papers, too.
“It was one of the funnest times of my life,” says Luis Jr. “I was at the ballpark all the time, and even got to fly on the plane with the team on a short road trip. When my father went head-to-head with Denny McLain in Detroit, I sat in the first row of a packed Tiger Stadium, right by the Indians dugout. Dad shut McLain out, 2-0.”
Little Luis, his baby sister, and their mother came to the All-Star Game, too, which that year was in the Houston Astrodome. Most of us American League players had never seen the first domed stadium in the majors, and I was excited to represent the Indians along with Sudden Sam and Azcue. Joe and I had come a long way together since he caught my first start in Yankee Stadium and translated interviews for me back in ’64. My dream then was to face Mickey Mantle just once; now I was going to be his teammate for a night. Making it even more special was that Dick Williams had named me his starting pitcher for the American League.
There were 48,321 fans in the stands, plus 160 million more watching on TV—60 million across the United States, and the rest on the Spanish-language broadcast shown in South and Central America and the Caribbean. I think I was a little hyped up, trying too hard to be perfect. Maybe it was also something about playing indoors for the first time. I just wasn’t myself, and that cost me.
Willie Mays led off for the NL with a single. He loved to run, so I figured he might take a big lead and try to steal. After going to my set, I spun around and looked to first. He did have a big lead, and I had him picked off easily, but I rushed my throw to Killebrew and it went off his glove as Mays raced to second. Then I got my signals crossed up with Tigers catcher Bill Freehan, and threw a wild pitch on ball four to Curt Flood. Freehan was expecting a curve, I threw a high fastball, and Mays went to third and Flood to first as Freehan chased it down. The next batter, Willie McCovey, hit a double-play grounder, scoring Mays from third.
That was the only run I let up in my two innings, and it was all the NL needed; they won, 1-0. I took the loss due to my own errors, but had held my own against a lineup with five future Hall of Famers: Mays, McCovey, Henry Aaron, Ron Santo, and baseball’s best hitting pitcher, Don Drysdale. When I talked to my parents on the phone after the game, which they were able to watch, my mother was very happy.
My father wanted to know why I threw a wild pitch!
After the All-Star break, it seemed like there were more reporters wanting to interview me than ever before. And they were all asking the same thing: What was I doing different this season?
Part of it, I told them, was why I didn’t win more in the past: luck. For years mine was not so hot, but now it was OK. Plus I had added more movement to my delivery—and that seemed to be bothering hitters.
My delivery. More than 35 years after I stopped pitching, it’s the thing people remember most about me. That’s OK. Everybody has something that makes them different, that makes them unique, and for me it was how I went about my business on the mound.
Most guys keep their body sideways to the batter throughout their windup, and then swing around to face the plate as they release the ball. I usually turned my body completely backward during my windup, so that it almost looked like I was facing center field. Then I’d spin completely back around again for my release. I felt it gave me more power, and more deception, and gave the hitter less time to react to the ball.
Some think my motion was patterned after my father, who also had some funny things he did with his windup. He did give me a few tips, but mostly I developed my own style over time—adding in new things as I went along. It was always about gaining whatever edge I could against the hitters. The big thing I added in ’68 was more head motion, bobbing it up and down during each stage of my windup. Some guys said it looked like I was gazing up at the moon. I didn’t do it for show, although I’m glad people enjoyed it.
My hesitation pitch really bothered batters. I would go into my regular windup, and then stop for a moment in mid-motion right before I threw the ball. It was totally legal, but I only did it with the bases empty. If there was someone on, I figured, an ump might call it a balk. So I was careful, and for my first 11 years in the majors I was never called for a balk once. Some managers and players on opposing teams said that I should be, including Orioles manager Earl Weaver, but they never won that argument.
Rico Petrocelli, later my teammate with the Red Sox, is one guy who remembers my hesitation pitch well.
“It was almost comical,” Petrocelli says. “What he would do is wind up and take his stride—the left foot going on the ground—and then he would drag his right foot off the mound and throw a slow pitch. He threw it once to George Scott and we were all laughing. It was a riot, unless you were the one trying to hit it.”
One pitch I started in Cleveland I called “The Jaw Breaker.” I’d shake and stop my head seven times, look up, look down, and then point my jaw toward second base, third, the centerfield corner, and behind my back. A lot of times, I didn’t even know what I was going to do until just before I did it. It depended on the situation, or how I felt, or what I thought the batter was thinking.
One big difference in my early years was my velocity. Back then, before my shoulder injuries, I could throw real fast—close to 100 miles per hour. Maybe 75 percent of my pitches were fastballs, but they weren’t all the same. The fastball is the best pitch in baseball because it’s really like five pitches, if you move it around. There was nobody who threw quite like I did, although Al Dark said I reminded him of my dad’s old Negro League rival, Satchel Paige. Tommy Harper thought I was more like Giants ace Juan Marichal, who had a real high leg kick and also did a great job concealing the ball. Not bad company.
Everybody seemed to have a different ways of describing my windup. Here are a few from the summer of ’68:
“He’s the toughest pitcher in the league to follow. You think he’s throwing from one direction and all of a sudden he’s throwing from another.” —Mickey Mantle
“I still have nightmares about that pitch of his. To me, standing there in the batter’s box, it seemed like he threw everything at me but the ball.”
—Frank Howard of the Senators, after I struck him out with my hesitation pitch (“I gave him the shoulder, back, foot, and the ball last,” I told reporters afterward.)
“Tiant uses the pitcher’s rubber like a swivel. He plants his right foot on top of it and moves his body in all sorts of directions. His arms go toward third base, his head goes toward centerfield and his left leg goes up and down. Somewhere, from the midst of all this motion, out comes a baseball.”
—sportswriter Leigh Montville of the Boston Globe, who would later cover me on the Red Sox
“When Tiant can throw that fastball from his spinning motion, he is unbelievable.”
—Yankees manager Ralph Houk,
whose team I shut out three times that year
Pitching is important, but it can only take you so far. I kept doing well in the second half of the season, and so did the rest of our staff. But our hitting never came around, and eventually that caught up with us—especially me.
McLain got his 20th win on July 27, and I got my 17th the next day. Then, in August, the team scored 10 runs for me in seven starts—and I only won once. By mid-August we were nearly 15 games behind the Tigers, and knew we couldn’t catch them. It became a matter of pride for guys in the rotation to keep pushing each other to win.
“There was so much competition between the pitchers,” McDowell said later. “One guy would throw a shutout, and then you’d want to do it. If Tiant threw a four-hitter, then I wanted to throw a three-hitter. If Siebert struck out fourteen, I was going for sixteen. All of our pitchers threw hard. We could knock the bat right out of people’s hands.”
Gabe Paul helped, too, when he started giving $100 clothing bonuses to every Indians pitcher who threw a complete-game shutout. “I hope we have the best-dressed pitching staff in the major league,” he joked early in the season, and we did. By the end of the year we had twenty shutouts—tied with the Dodgers for the most in the majors. I led the AL with nine, Sonny Siebert had four, and McDowell had three. That’s a lot of suits.
Because I knew that every shutout was a team effort, I shared my clothing bonuses with the guys who made key hits or fielding plays in my games. And while Paul didn’t pay us extra for strikeouts, we had plenty of those too. McDowell topped the majors with 283, and I was third in the AL with 264—behind him and McLain (280).
Sudden Sam was really something. I’ve never seen anybody, including Nolan Ryan, throw harder than him. His pitches looked like they were going 105 miles an hour, and he’d throw one over or behind your head to keep you guessing. He also had a great curveball, and hitters used to come up with phantom injuries so they wouldn’t have to face him.
McDowell had two problems, though: he didn’t take care of himself, and he was always trying crazy stuff on the mound. Like he would throw two fastballs to a hitter so he couldn’t even get the bat off his shoulder, and then he’d come back with a change-up and the guy would hit a home run. He loved to challenge guys in different ways, rather than just blow them away.
That was the one season that people looked to me as Cleveland’s ace, not McDowell. And in mid-August, after I lost 3-0 to the Tigers in Cleveland, McLain and Freehan both said some real nice things about me.
“Luis and I would each be fighting for thirty wins if he had our kind of hitting to go with his kind of pitching,” said Denny, who had picked up his 24th victory the day before.
Then Freehan, McLain’s regular catcher, corrected him.
“If Tiant had our lineup on his side,” Freehan said, “he’d be shooting for forty wins.”
They weren’t just throwing bull. Denny was great that year, no doubt about it. But as he said himself, he had a great hitting team supporting him. The ’68 Tigers had 185 home runs—led by Willie Horton’s 36—and scored the most runs in the league. The Indians only hit 75 homers, and our top guy had just 14. My record was 21-9, pretty good, but in my nine losses we scored a total of 12 runs. That’s barely one run a game, and you’re not going to win 30 games with support like that unless you’re a magician.
Sometimes I felt like every pitch I threw had to be my best, and I’m sure that put undue strain on my pitching arm. In September I developed a sore elbow and missed three starts. I still managed to get my 20th win at Minnesota, and treated all my teammates to a champagne celebration in the clubhouse. Then, after being out most of two weeks, I shut out the Yankees, 3-0, in my final game. Mickey Mantle’s line single in the first inning was New York’s only hit, and also the last of his career. Mickey retired during spring training of 1969, after deciding that playing with bad knees and so many other physical problems had become too hard. He didn’t like being a .237 hitter (which he was in ’68), or being in constant pain. Mickey will always be one of my favorite players, and I was honored to give up his final hit.
With that last win, I signed my name into the Cleveland record books. My ERA of 1.60 was the lowest in franchise history, topping Stanley Coveleski’s 1.82 from way back in 1917. It was also the best in the American League since Walter Johnson of the old Washington Senators had a 1.49 mark two years after Coveleski. From what I’ve heard, Johnson and I had something in common: he also pitched for a team that struggled to score runs, and all his losses that year (he was 20-14) shows it.
McLain didn’t have to worry about runs, and he went 31-6 for a Tigers team that won the World Series. He took home the Cy Young Award as the AL’s best pitcher in a unanimous vote, while also being named the league MVP. Bob Gibson, who went 22-9 with an incredible 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts for the National League champion Cardinals, won the same two awards in the NL.
I came in fifth in the AL MVP voting, but I’d rather have gotten to the World Series. Gibson struck out 17 Tigers in the series opener, and Mickey Stanley of Detroit said he didn’t think Gibbie was any faster than me. It would have been nice to take him on that October and see for myself.
Even with our drop-off in the second half, it had been a good year for the Indians. We wound up 86-75 and in third place, our highest finish since 1959. That got each player $900 in World Series bonus money, and gave us confidence about the future. We had tied the Orioles for the best ERA in the American League at 2.66, and all our starting pitchers were still in their prime. The White Sox were the only AL club that hit fewer home runs that we did, but Gabe Paul said he was committed to picking up a big power hitter over the winter. That would be a huge help.
Maybe I’d get my chance at Gibson in October of ’69.