IT WAS IN 1971, DURING his summer of last chances, that Luis Tiant first got to know the catcher with whom he would soon be making headlines.
He and Carlton Fisk had briefly played against one another in spring training that year, when Tiant was still with the Twins and Fisk hoping to earn a roster spot with the Red Sox. Now they were teammates in Louisville, one young ballplayer on the way up and one veteran trying to do whatever he could not to be released a third time in three months. Both, of course, had the same goal: promotion to Boston and the big leagues.
On the surface, they could not have been more opposite. Fisk was a stoic, outspoken farm boy from New Hampshire, a college graduate from a large family whose chiseled good looks seemed straight out of a turn-of-the-century baseball card. His nickname of “Pudge,” earned as a boy, had stuck long after his baby fat disappeared. He was a Red Sox fan from birth and a keen student of the game—which he believed should be played hard and well and without humor.
What did he think about the balding, fun-loving Cuban with the high-pitched laugh? Certainly Tiant was not what Fisk envisioned a ballplayer to look like; in fact, upon first seeing the team’s newest pitcher stroll across the clubhouse with a towel across his barrel-chested waist and a big cigar in his mouth, Fisk might have thought his own nickname was better suited on the newcomer. Tiant’s background did not offer much entryway for casual conversation; there were few, if any, Spanish-speaking men of color around Fisk’s tiny hometown and no only children separated for a decade from their parents and other family members back in Cuba.
Tiant, however, had been what Fisk aspired to be: a major leaguer. Not just a guy on the roster, either, but a star. He had presence, confidence, and warmth that drew people to him. In their first days as a battery, Fisk also recognized in Tiant a level of baseball intelligence and will to win that matched his own. Neither took shit from anybody—even as a rookie, Fisk gave an earful to pitchers who didn’t like his pitch selection—and the young catcher’s own poise and leadership traits blossomed the more they played together.
By the fall of ’71 they were doing so in Boston. And starting in 1972, when both were healthy, Carlton Fisk and Luis Tiant formed what was arguably the major league’s best pitcher-catcher battery of the 1970s. When hot, each was capable of carrying a team on his back; together, they set a standard for excellence few could match.
In the end, they shared a sacred sixty-foot, six-inch bond through eight seasons and some of the most exciting games of the ’70s or any decade. In time their families grew close as well, and today it is impossible for many Red Sox fans of a certain age to think of one without the other. That in itself is a great legacy.
More than forty years after “Tiant and Fisk” last appeared in a box score on the final day of the 1978 regular season, these two Red Sox legends are still linked together.
I THINK THE KEY for any pitcher is to get along with your catcher. Your catcher is like a spouse. You may get angry at me, but we understand each other. You have a mutual appreciation, and that’s important. That way, you don’t have to go too far. You just do what you have to do. By the time you’ve been pitching to him for a while, you really appreciate what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to help you; not let you make mistakes and lose the game. The more he does this, and does it right, the closer you get.
When I signed with the Red Sox and reported to Louisville, Carlton Fisk was already there. He was twenty-four and looked younger; I was thirty but felt older with my sore shoulder and not knowing what my future might be. I heard him talking about it once in an interview, and he said he appreciated it that I didn’t come down to the minors like I was a king or anything because I had already pitched in the big leagues and did this and that. I was down there like a regular person who just wanted to pitch and make it back to the majors.
As Fisk remembers it:
“The rest of us we were all little minor leaguers, but he had been in the big leagues—he had experienced that big-league attention. The aura he gave off—the big-league aura—we could feel it. I mean, it wasn’t like, ‘I’m hurt, and you guys should understand that if I don’t do good, it’s because I’m hurt.’ None of that. He’d be in the clubhouse smoking that big ole’ cigar, and that was sort of the yardstick for being a big-leaguer. He was mature enough to smoke a cigar!”
Everybody called Fisk “Pudge,” a nickname he picked up when he was chubby as a kid. But by the time we met, he definitely was not fat. He was six-foot-two, 210 pounds—solid, strong, and a great athlete. He had grown up in a big, sports-oriented family, and played basketball at the University of New Hampshire. That was his first dream; he wanted to play for the Boston Celtics, not the Red Sox, but settled on baseball when he stopped growing in college.
At the start, Fisk and I had one big thing in common: Darrell Johnson.
Pudge didn’t have nearly as much catching experience as some guys when he got signed out of college in 1967. In New England, with the long winters, he played about fifteen games a season in high school. The kids in California, Florida, and Texas who he’d be competing with for jobs in the minors played year-round. His first few years in pro ball, he progressed through the ranks but didn’t really stand out. At Double-A Pawtucket in 1970, he hit .229 with so-so power.
He went to spring training with the Red Sox in 1971, but manager Eddie Kasko wasn’t impressed. “Fisk has a long road to go to make this club,” Kasko said. “He can’t do it on what he has shown this spring. He’s got to go out and catch.”
So he was sent to Triple-A Louisville. The manager there was Darrell Johnson—the same man who believed in me enough to encourage the Red Sox to sign me that spring with a goal of helping me get back to the majors. Fisk couldn’t have gotten a better break.
Johnson spent nearly fifteen years as a journeyman catcher in the minors and the big leagues. He looked at Fisk’s athleticism and determination and knew he could make a big leaguer out of him. The ’71 season was his crash course, and Pudge picked up every ounce of information and expertise he could:
“I always worked hard, but I never knew what I was doing. He [Johnson] taught me pitches, pitchers, sequences, and the difference between being a catcher and someone who goes behind the plate to catch and throw.”
By the time I got to Louisville in mid-May, Johnson and Fisk had been together for a couple months. You could already see that Pudge was going to make it. He was the whole package, and damn, he was tough. He blocked the ball good, had a good arm, and hit the ball a long way.
But as talented as he was, he still understood how important it was to keep gaining as much knowledge as he could about every aspect of hitting and pitching. He saw me as someone else who could help him grow:
“Luis had a lot of experience before he came to Boston, and I tried to learn from that. He had to learn how to pitch again. When he was with Cleveland, he was a power pitcher. When he came to Boston, he had to ‘pitch pitch.’ So that was what was so special about him. He had a passion for his half of the game, I had one for mine, and we blended well.”
Fisk respected me and the way I played the game, and pretty quickly I came to respect him too. From the start, we got along beautifully. When you won, he’d come running to the mound and hug you. He wanted to knock you down, he was so excited. I liked that. We clicked really good.
Boston called me up in June of ’71, before Fisk. I had been a starting pitcher nearly all my career, but when they brought me up and I lost a bunch of games they put me in the bullpen. It was different for me—a different way to think, a different way to prepare yourself. You’ve been mostly a starter, and your body gets used to it. Now when you try to do something different, it’s hard to control your mind in that particular way.
Me, I still thought I could start. Kasko gave me some chances, but I didn’t have much luck. I was throwing the ball good, I just couldn’t get used to that reliever mentality. In September, when the Red Sox knew we couldn’t catch the Orioles in the American League East, management brought up a bunch of young guys including Fisk. This was great because we got into games together and had a chance to get to know each other on the big stage.
Fisk agrees: “That little time we had together that first year really meant a lot to each of us. It just kind of blossomed at the big-league level.”
Pudge made an impression right away, batting .313 in 14 games and hitting a couple home runs. His very first game was against the Yankees, who had a great young catcher of their own in Thurman Munson. Their names would be tied together an awful lot in the years to come, and I feel lucky that I was able to catch them both—in my opinion, the two best all-around catchers in the American League during the ’70s.
By now Kasko could see Fisk was for real. His batting eye and his defense were both much improved after the summer with Johnson, and Kasko felt Pudge could be a team leader. That’s what you need at that position. The two main Red Sox catchers in 1971 were Bob Montgomery and Duane Josephson; both were really solid, but neither was a guy who could stay healthy or consistent enough to play 120-plus games behind the plate. Boston had not had a “regular” catcher like that in a long time. They are always hard to find.
Like me, Fisk also had a big fan in the front office who thought he could do it. “He has a chance to be one of the best,” Sox owner Tom Yawkey said after watching Fisk that September.
Not everyone was that confident, but it was thought that Fisk would get the starting catcher’s job in 1972. During spring training in Winter Haven, he hit very poorly, but what I noticed most about him was how hard he worked to get and stay in shape. I’m sure Kasko noticed it too. Pudge was always stretching and doing all kind of exercises to keep his body limber and strong. I did plenty of stretching myself, and running, but most pitchers and catchers didn’t back then. When they did, you noticed it.
Fisk made the team in ’72, but his batting slump held him back when the regular season started. The Red Sox carried three catchers in April, and Pudge was third in line. Josephson was the starter, but he got hurt early on and Montgomery went in. Monty was a good hitter but had trouble throwing out runners. After the Indians stole a bunch of bases off him in one game, Kasko gave Pudge a start. He had a triple in his first game, and then two more hits in his second. After that the job was his, and Monty spent the rest of the 1970s doing a great job backing Fisk up.
Pudge was an excellent hitter from the start, and within a few months was leading the team in home runs and among the American League’s top ten in batting, doubles, slugging, and triples. But what was always most important to him was his defense and controlling the game from behind the plate. Watching him emerge as a leader that year was an amazing thing. Here was a rookie—a rookie—who wasn’t afraid to chew out star players if he didn’t think they were hustling. Pudge only knew one way to play the game—HARD—and that earned him the respect of everyone.
Part of it was his intensity. He was such a fierce competitor that he didn’t care if he was the rookie and you were a veteran. As a pitcher, if you made a mistake in the game, he’d rifle the ball back to you extra-hard or go out there and chew you out. That was different than other catchers I had who would just get a new ball from the umpire and toss it back to you. They wouldn’t go out there and yell, “You better throw that ball where you’re supposed to throw it!” He had guts.
One thing he did sometimes drove me nuts. He would throw the ball back at me so hard my hand would get red. I’d call him out and tell him, “You see my hand? Who’s pitching, you or me?” He’d just cuss me out.
One day at Fenway, maybe our second or third year together, he did this a bunch of times in one game. My hand was stinging, and I decided I finally had enough.
“Next time you throw the ball back to me like that,” I said, “I’m going to let it go through. I’m not going to catch it.”
He wasn’t buying it.
“You do that,” he yelled back, “and I’ll kick your big Black behind!”
This didn’t scare me a bit.
“You’re not going to do shit! You just get back there [behind the plate]—don’t give me no bullcrap!”
Maybe he didn’t think I would do it, but I did. He threw the ball back to me, and I let it go through—straight into centerfield. There was nobody on base, or I would never have done it. That didn’t matter to him. He stomped out to the mound and chewed me out. He threw everything at me, really cussing me out good.
I waited for him to finish. Then I looked him right in the eye.
“Listen, I don’t want to hear no more crap. I told you I’d let it go, and I did. The best thing you can do is go back to home plate, put your goddamn mask on, and catch. You take care of your business, and I’ll take care of mine!”
Then I put a final stamp on the conversation.
“You mess with me, I’m going to cross you up and break all your goddamn fingers.”
Fisk has his own version of that story:
“Oh sure, I remember that!
“Luis said ‘AYE-TELL-AH-YOO!…AYE-TELL-AH-YOO!…I’m going to let it go!!’
“Ah, ‘OK’,” I said. I really didn’t think he’d do it.
“Then I whipped it back hard a few more times, you know, daring him.
“If there were guys on base, or it was an intense part of the game, I knew he wouldn’t do it. But that’s the fun part about being out there with Tiant. I challenged him—‘C’mon, Luis, just throw the F-ing ball! POW! POW!’
“He didn’t like it very much, but then all of a sudden when you do that…I wouldn’t call it waking him up, or whatever. But then he knows I’m serious about what I think of his game, and when he feels comfortable about me getting on his butt, that’s when he feels comfortable letting the ball go through into centerfield.
“So he did—and I got out there fast.
“‘You SON OF A BITCH!’ I yelled. ‘What did you just do?!’
“He just stared at me.
“‘AYE-TELL-AH-YOO I would!…AYE-TELL-AH-YOO I would!’”
You see, we could talk like that. We never got to the point where we were going to really fight or anything. We went at it a little bit, but me and him, we got along great. He understood when to push me and when to lay off:
“You know, that’s part of the deal—part of me challenging Luis or any other pitcher on my pitching staff. You challenge them, and you ask them to do something maybe above what they think they can do. Then they do it, and all of a sudden their level of confidence rises. It’s all part of the gamesmanship. The more he asks, the more you give, and the more he gives, the more you ask.”
When you have a catcher like Fisk you can count on him to make almost all the calls. You know he’s not trying to screw you. He’s trying to protect you. He wants you to win more than you want to win. If I didn’t want to throw a pitch, I didn’t throw it. I’d shake him off. But I didn’t do it too much. He knew me very well—and he knew what I could do.
We’d go after hitters and do certain things. He’d just put down those fingers, and I’d throw it. He knew me. We didn’t even have to talk much in the dugout. He and I should have been twins; we think almost the same way. It was like we could read each other’s minds.
One time I did surprise him was when I first decided in 1972—in the middle of a game!—to change my delivery and start turning myself all the way around, shaking my head and hands, and adding a hesitation pitch. He was a good sport about it, and he did a great job handling whatever I threw at him.
A few months later, after I had won ten of eleven games, Tim Horgan of the Boston Herald asked Pudge to tell him how we worked so well together. This is what he told him:
“Luis has only four basic pitches—fast ball, curve, slider, and change-up. Luis also has about four variations on each pitch. He might go straight over the top, or drop his arm down a little, or come in from the side. I just use the four standard signs for fast ball, curve, sinker, and change. Luis decides whether he’ll come in overhand or sidearm, fast or slow. Oh, yes. He also has maybe six different speeds on his curveball and change-up. I never know how Luis will wind up. He decides on his own.”
Forty-five years later, he looked back with the wisdom of age and explained it again:
“Luis’s delivery was one of his weapons. We talked about all the pitches he had and how deception is the key to getting guys out. It’s not power pitching, and it’s not soft pitching. It’s the back-and-forth, the little games you play with the hitter. And that was one of the games he played. I had never, ever seen anything like it before, and I was a young player then. I played a long time and never once came close to seeing it afterwards. It’s kind of a lost art, to tell you the truth.”
Fisk was the key to our late drive for the AL East title in 1972. Besides doing a great job with me and all the pitchers, he hit .293 with 22 home runs, a .538 slugging percentage, and won a Gold Glove for his defense. He even led the league with nine triples, which you don’t expect from a catcher. It didn’t surprise me—I knew how good he was—but a lot of people were caught off guard. He was better than they expected, and he won the American League Rookie of the Year. It was a unanimous vote, the first time that had ever happened. I was voted the Comeback Player of the Year, and both me and Pudge got a lot of MVP votes.
I think going through that experience together—from uncertainty one year to almost winning a division title—solidified our relationship. He had a lot of respect for me, I had a lot of respect for him, and we knew we made each other better. The way he commanded a game, and the way he pushed me, made me a winner:
“We fed off each other; we understood each other. We demanded things from each other—and expected things from each other. When it comes to situations where the game is on the line, you know you can work as a team. You can get it done, knowing that whatever I feel in a situation that might work, he trusted me enough to go with it—or if he didn’t like what I was doing, then I trusted him enough to know that he knew what he was doing. Obviously, he did.”
Our managers, and our teammates, felt comfortable leaving much of the decision making of the game up to us. They knew us and knew we could handle it.
“They both had huge personalities and are really two dynamic dudes,” says Fred Flynn, whose bat and amazing catches in centerfield helped us both. “That’s what you want, really. You want those guys because they’re controlling the flow of the game—they’re controlling what’s going on.”
The fans saw it too.
“They had a bond, and that came through,” says Kevin Vahey, a tremendous Red Sox fan and later a Fenway park cameraman. “There was love, and a lot of it was kind of comical. Carlton claimed that at times he couldn’t understand a thing Luis was saying.”
Even my ten-year-old son could see how special things were between me and Pudge from the beginning.
“They really seemed to hit it off, even in Louisville,” says Luis Jr. “Their chemistry just came naturally. Fisk was probably one of the only guys who could tell my dad what to do on the mound. He knew how to call and control a game, and he knew when my dad was on and when he had to reach into his back pocket to come up with something to get a guy out.”
Little Luis is right. It got to the point, over time, where Pudge knew my stuff so well that he could tell in the first inning if we were going to have to make adjustments.
“There are three things involved with getting people out: velocity, ball movement, and location. If you’ve got two out of three, you’ve got a chance to get guys out. Luis might have two of three things involved on a given day, and if he’s got a couple of those things, then you try and work around everything else. I like to think that’s my job, as his catcher, to try and use those two things to get people out.
“You kind of feel it around. First of all, you go out there expecting to get the same pitcher you always get. Then if you find out you don’t, well then you have to work from there. Then sometimes as the game goes on, now you’ve got all three of them—or one goes away and another comes in.
“Some people thought he was just a trickster out there, but Luis was not just that. He was always thinking ahead, and so was I.”
Another big part of our relationship was built around how we felt about each other off the field. I respected Pudge as a man who took care of his family—a good father, son, and husband. He respected those same things in me. I saw how hard he worked to come back when he was hurt, especially when he tore up his knee really bad in ’74 and a lot of people said he might never play again. And he knew what I had to do to come back from my shoulder injury and to deal with racism and being separated from my family.
Over time, we got much closer. Our families got to know each other and our kids. A ballclub is like a family anyway, but I always felt a special connection with Pudge because we spent so much time in each other’s heads. Sometimes it was like we were one person.
Pudge knows just what I mean:
“You would think it would end when baseball ends—or when you go your way and he goes his way. I went to a different team, and he went to a different team. And you would think that all of a sudden your teammate becomes your competitor. But that has never happened with him, or any of the guys I played with in Boston. Maybe it’s because we’re all in the same generation and because we played together so much. So you identify with those situations, and that identity never leaves. You always consider them your friends because they were your friends. Even if you only see them once or twice a year, it’s like you’re long lost buddies. That kind of thing never goes away, I think.”
We really went to war together. We played during a time when there were some real super teams in baseball, and we took them all on—the Oakland A’s of 1971-75, the Cincinnati Reds’ “Big Red Machine” of 1970-76, and the Yankees of 1976-78. On paper people thought we couldn’t match them, especially the Reds with all those Hall of Famers in their lineup. But we showed we belonged in their class:
“It was a challenge, for sure, and that’s the great part about Luis—he was up for a challenge and motivated by that challenge. And you see what happened. He was as good as anybody against the big guys in a big game. Even when he didn’t have his good stuff, he wasn’t going to give in or give up.”
I was so happy when Pudge made the Hall of Fame in 2000, and the Red Sox retired his number, twenty-seven, that same summer. He deserved both honors because nobody worked harder or got more out of their ability. It was great to be invited back and be a part of the number retirement ceremony because those were the days when I was coaching in Georgia and wasn’t around Fenway too much. I was also excited when the Red Sox asked me to “reverse roles” and be his catcher when Pudge threw out the ceremonial first pitch that day. I’d actually been thinking about suggesting it before they offered.
When I heard what Fisk said in his induction speech in Cooperstown, I was very grateful—and very honored.
“I played with Rico, and Yaz, and Dewey, and Freddie, and Spaceman, and Jim Ed, and Rooster,” he said. “But the guy I had the most fun playing with, catching for, was Luis Tiant. The best and most colorful player I’ve ever caught, and the best and most colorful ever, I think, in a Red Sox uniform.”
Later, he said it much more simply: “If I had one game I had to win, Luis Tiant would start it.”
And he would most definitely catch it.