HIS 1972 COMEBACK HAD SHOCKED the sports world and earned him legions of fans throughout Boston and New England. Now Luis Tiant had to prove it wasn’t a fluke.
Armed with a new contract and a spot atop the Red Sox rotation, Tiant set out to show his rehabilitated pitching arm could hold up to the rigors of a full season. The early results were mixed, but he had learned through all his trials not to let the good times or the slumps weigh too heavy on him. His teammates in Boston, as they had in Cleveland and Minnesota, admired Tiant’s ability to not let himself be undone by a bad outing. They delighted in how he could make light of any situation and keep things loose. And they loved his determination.
“I think Luis never understood that he could not beat somebody, no matter what the possibilities were,” says outfielder Bernie Carbo, a teammate starting in 1974. “He had the air about him that when he took that ball and went on that mound, you weren’t going to beat him. Luis expected to win.”
While they didn’t share a clubhouse with Tiant, fans saw these same traits on display whether watching from the Fenway stands or their living rooms: the hunger, the humor, and the ease with which he moved from one game to another. Boston’s past baseball icons had not usually fit this mold. Ted Williams made headlines for his tempestuousness as much as his hitting, and was often misunderstood or maligned by the sportswriters he scorned. Carl Yastrzemski, while admired for the unflappable, workmanlike way he approached each at-bat, felt largely unapproachable to the fans who idolized him. Tiant, in how he looked, talked, and acted, was a more refreshing, fun type of hero.
As one fan recalls, all you had to do was open the Sports page and see a photo of Tiant sitting in a whirlpool, with a cigar in his mouth, and you felt all was right with the world. The Fu Manchu mustache he first grew in 1972, combined with the scowl he gave batters, led legendary sportswriter Red Smith to describe Tiant’s appearance as something akin to “Pancho Villa after a tough night of looting and burning.”
Luis Tiant did no looting or burning for the Red Sox in 1973 and ’74, but he did just about everything else—and the fans loved him for it.
LIKE I SAID BEFORE, being an only child, my friends were my brothers when I was growing up. We went through everything together—the good and the bad. Sure, life could be tough. Some of us were born poor, and things started tightening up for everyone when Castro first came in. There were times we got into fights. But no matter what shit we had to deal with, we always found a way to have fun. If one guy was down, the others picked him up.
To me, a baseball team should be the same thing. You are living and playing together day after day, traveling from one city to another. For more than half of the year, you’re with each other more than you’re with your family. It’s a grind, and you need to keep things loose, so you don’t forget why you’re there. No matter what color you are, or where you come from, you all have one thing in common: love for the game. If you don’t, you’re in the wrong business.
Losing the pennant on the final weekend in 1972 hurt a lot, but it didn’t take away from what we had accomplished. Not just that we were in the race until the finish, or that a bunch of us had good years. We could feel positive about the season because we had started bonding more and more as a team the further the summer went along. From being in last place in late June, and still under .500 in early August, we had played .635 baseball for two months to put ourselves in position to win.
We didn’t get it done—I didn’t get it done—but we gave it our best shot and felt really positive about the future.
What’s the secret to good chemistry? I believe the key is not letting yourself or your teammates get too high when you’re winning or too down when you’re losing. Don’t get too full of yourself, and don’t get too down on yourself. If you remember that you’re playing a game that is meant to be fun, and is not a matter of life and death, you can ride out the slumps and losing streaks a lot easier.
I never considered myself a leader in terms of being a rah-rah type of guy. Although I always played as hard as anyone on the field, I knew you also needed to find ways to ease the tension off of it. During my first year in the minor leagues, even when I couldn’t understand most of what my teammates were saying, I learned I could make them laugh—and that broke the ice. It also helped me deal with all the racist bullshit going on around me and being separated from my family in Cuba. Laughing sure beat crying, and I noticed something else: the looser I was, the better I pitched.
In Cleveland we had a lot of funny guys on the club, but it was tough to joke around when things were so bad. The manager didn’t like to see you laughing when you were in eighth place, not that I think there was any connection between the two. In Minnesota we had a great team and a lot of fun, so I knew it was possible to have both.
When I came to the Red Sox in ’71, I figured they would be loose too. They always had big crowds, a competitive team, and an owner who paid them really well. But it wasn’t like that. Things were kind of divided in the clubhouse; some guys hung out in one group, some guys in another, and the place was pretty quiet except for all the sportswriters asking questions. No loud music, no laughing, and no fooling around—especially when we lost. Nobody likes to lose, but what good does it do to let it eat you up? You got to get that shit out of your head so you can try and win the next day.
Once I was established in Boston, and especially once I started winning, I made it my mission to change the mood in and around the Red Sox clubhouse.
Nobody was safe. Tommy Harper, maybe because he was my oldest friend on the club, was my favorite guy to torture. Each day I would come into the clubhouse, wrap myself in a towel, grab a cigar and a newspaper, and head to the toilet to take a dump. When I was done, I’d get up, yell “Bye, bye, TOMMMMEEE!” so everyone could hear, and then flush it away. When I came out smiling, it broke up the room. Tommy always acted upset, which made it even funnier.
Then there was the time I got a dead fish, dressed it up in a little baseball uniform, and stuck a tongue depressor in its mouth so its lips curled upward in a smile. I propped the fish up in Harper’s locker and had everybody wave “Hello, Tommy!” as they walked by it.
Yastrzemski was another regular victim. The two of us had already gone at it pretty good in the past—remember the three strikeouts in ’67 and the extra BP I razzed him about?—but now he had me on his ass all the time. Yaz had this wrinkled old tan overcoat we called “The Columbo Coat” after the TV detective who wore one just like it. I told him it was a damn tragedy to see a superstar making $165,000 a year wearing a coat like that, and so I hid it every chance I could. One time I threw it out a bus window, but the damn thing found its way back; maybe he just got another one out of a dumpster somewhere.
Yaz and Harper were my main hits, but other guys would get hot feet or ice water over their heads whenever the time was right. Pretty soon I had to start watching my own back, and that was fine. Nobody ever got me with an exploding cigar in the big leagues—I learned my lesson back in the minors, but you can be sure I checked.
Nicknames were also always good for a laugh. They came natural to me, and I tried to be creative with them. I couldn’t call Yastrzemski “Columbo” because that would have been too easy. When I saw him, it was always, “Hiya, Polack!”
Carlton Fisk was a big, handsome guy with a chiseled chin and broad shoulders, and he walked with kind of a swagger. So he was “Frankenstein.”
Rick Miller was one pale dude, so he was “Walking Dead.”
Doug Griffin, the thinnest guy on the team, was “Skeleton.”
And if I couldn’t think of something else, I just went with “Hey, Mullion!” That’s good for anyone—it’s baseball-ese for ugly.
“He called me that all the time,” said John Kennedy, “and if you did something funny on the field, he would get on you. I struck out one time and had a really, really unbelievably awful swing. I came in to the dugout, and a lot of guys didn’t want to say anything to me. Not Luis. He came right over.
“‘Hey Mullion—that’s the shortest stoke I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘You went from one shoulder to the other.’ I just started laughing.
“Pitchers got it from him too. If a guy let up a huge home run, Luis might go up to him after the game or the next day and say, ‘Hey, show me how you hold that pitch.’ It would crack the guy up.”
Cracking guys up loosened things up, and pretty soon everyone else was talking shit and pulling pranks. Guys were snipping each other’s ties, nailing shoes to the floor, and waiting outside the showers with buckets of ice water. I’ll never forget the time Luis Aparicio went to put on his $500 suit at the end of the season before flying home to Venezuela, and the arms and legs fell off. Yaz had paid a clubhouse boy to cut it up.
The important thing is this: with all that crazy shit going on, it was hard to get too wound up before a game—or too down after a loss. It kept things light and brought guys together.
“The Sox of my early years were somber clubs,” Yaz later said. “Winning changed that, but Tiant helped make us nutty. I know that I became a different character in the locker room. When did it start? Maybe with the first hotfoot. Maybe with the first scissored tie. Come to think of it, some of the stuff we did was scary, maybe even dangerous. But it was great fun.”
Sometimes I was funny even when I wasn’t trying to be. This had been going on since my minor league days because of my high-pitched Cuban accent and the way I pronounced some words in English. Here is where the writers came in handy.
If I thought something was stupid, or wrong, it was “BOOL-CHEET!”
When I looked at myself in the mirror, and liked what I saw, I’d say I was, “One good-lookeen sonafabeech.”
And if I was upset because another damn airplane was taking too long to get off the ground, I’d yell out my favorite Ray Charles line: “Heet Ze Road, Yack!”
Did it bother me when sportswriters quoted me in broken English or made fun in print of how I pronounced words? Not really. Once you’ve been called a monkey or a dumb Cuban nigger you get a thick skin, and I don’t think they did it to make me sound stupid anyway. They were just trying to give the fans an idea of how I sounded, which I know could be pretty funny sometimes. (For the sake of my readers, and because I speak English much better now, I’ve fixed the broken English in my old quotes.)
One thing I will tell you; I might not have spoken the language as well as a lot of other guys, but I wasn’t dumb. After I proved down the stretch drive that I could still be a big winner, I got myself a nice raise for 1973. My goal was to buy my family a house—a real house—in the Boston area. We were always living out of rented apartments, me by myself to start each season and then the four of us when Maria brought the kids up from Mexico City after school let out. I wanted someplace with a yard for Isa and Little Luis to play in and a big kitchen for Maria. Now those dreams were a little closer.
After another year of winter ball in Venezuela, I was set to prove that the second half of the ’72 season had not been a fluke. It was the first time in four years I knew I had a set job in the starting rotation entering the year, and I was in no mood to give it up. I drove my new Cadillac nearly twenty hours straight, all the way from Monroe, Louisiana to Winter Haven, Florida, to make it to the first day of spring training. A few hours after pulling into the parking lot at Chain O’ Lakes Park, I was in uniform and out on the field pitching to minor league catcher Vic Correll.
“He threw fast balls, curves, changes, and about everything,” Correll told reporters that day. “He must have some kind of arm to do that.”
You’re damn right. I wasn’t fooling around.
The big news in camp was our newest slugger, Orlando Cepeda. A former National League Rookie of the Year and MVP, “Cha-Cha” was a fantastic hitter with lots of experience in the outfield and first base. For us, though, he would be filling a new role: designated hitter. This was the first year of the DH, a move voted in by American League owners to generate more offense—and hopefully more fans—by adding another bat to the lineup in place of the pitcher’s spot. Cepeda, who had 358 career home runs but two bad knees, was perfect for the role. The proud but beaten-up son of Ponce, Puerto Rico, would not have to play the field at all, just go up and take his swings.
Most pitchers were happy with the DH. They were glad to not have to worry about hitting anymore, or even taking batting practice, since they were so lousy at it. Me, I always liked being in the lineup; I was a better hitter than most pitchers, partly because I hit all winter in Venezuela, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to help myself. But I also knew the change would help me conserve my legs for the long season and keep me in close games longer—since I wouldn’t ever need to be lifted for a pinch-hitter. Plus there was less chance of getting injured by a beanball or while running the bases.
After Eddie Kasko named me the Opening Day starter, I became forever linked to the designated hitter. We started the season at home on a windy, damp afternoon against the Yankees, and Ron Blomberg came up in the top of the first inning as the first DH to bat in a regular season game. I was off to a lousy start and had already allowed two hits and two walks, but thanks to a double play it was still scoreless with the bases loaded. Then Blomberg also walked, forcing in a run.
The Yankees wound up scoring three in the inning, but Fisk took up right where he left off the year before with two home runs and six RBIs on the day, and I settled down to pick up a 15-5 victory. We beat New York big the next day too behind four hits and a homer from Yastrzemski, and after we won our first four games—all against the Yankees, including a walk-off victory on Cepeda’s first shot over the Green Monster—fans figured they were in for a fun season.
Then we lost six straight.
That pretty much summed up 1973. We were up and down all year long, with several winning streaks keeping us close but bad stretches doing us in. Age had caught up to the Tigers, but the Orioles were back in their usual spot on top, and we only held first place a handful of times all season—never after mid-July. For the second straight year we played much better in the second half of the season than the first, but in the end, we just couldn’t quite catch Baltimore. In late August, when we won ten of twelve games, we actually went from four to five games back since the Orioles were winning fourteen straight at the same time.
We finished 89-73, the best record by a Red Sox team since the ’67 pennant-winners. A big reason was our much-improved offense. Cepeda never had to play even one inning in the field and was named the first “Designated Hitter of the Year” after batting .289 with 20 homers and 89 RBI. Fisk slumped at the plate in the later months but still hit 26 homers to lead the team and was great defensively. Yaz hit .296 with 95 runs batted in, Reggie Smith batted .303, and my old buddy Tommy Harper led the league with fifty-four stolen bases to set a new Boston record. Tommy also led the team in runs scored and hit seventeen homers, but I still got on his ass every chance I could.
Our pitching was decent, with a rotation that included me, Marty Pattin, John Curtis, and Bill Lee, but for much of the season we lacked an ace—a role expected to be mine. A groin injury dogged me during the first half of the year, and when I lost to Detroit on June 26 my record was 8-8. Willie Horton’s homer off me that night was my twentieth allowed in seventeen starts, and my ERA was 4.09—more than twice my 1.91 mark from the year before. People were wondering whether I was on the downslide again.
Then my groin got better, and as the weather heated up, so did I.
Starting on July 1, I went 7-1 over my next nine games to help put us briefly into first place. Then, after losing three starts in which I allowed a combined seven runs, I ran off four more straight wins in September.
A year after I had come up with the new twists on my delivery, guys on other teams were still trying to figure out how to deal with it.
“His motion used to drive you crazy; you were never comfortable hitting off of him with the way he turned around,” remembers Mike Andrews, who was on the White Sox then. “You never knew what he was going to do next.”
Even the way I set myself before delivering frustrated batters.
“Normally, when a pitcher is in his stretch, he has to come to a set and then pitch—or step off the rubber,” says Andrews. “He can’t break his hands apart again or do anything else, or it’s a balk. But Luis would set three times, keeping his hands together and drooping them down lower and lower each time. Because he did it the same way, every time, the umpires allowed it. I decided the best way to deal with it was to keep my bat on my shoulder until he got to his third set, and then pick it up and go.
“It didn’t help much, but it was better than just freezing, ready to pull the trigger.”
In the last few weeks of the season I had two shots to get my twentieth victory, something I had not done since 1968. Joe Coleman, the same guy who beat me in the AL East-clincher the year before, stopped us 3-0 on a one-hitter in my first try, at Detroit, but in my last start of the year I beat Milwaukee, 11-2, to get number twenty. I also recorded my two hundredth strikeout of the year during the game, making me just the fourth Red Sox pitcher to ever reach that mark (joining Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, and Jim Lonborg).
“I had brought this cigar with me to Detroit,” I joked with reporters when I lit up after the game, “but I had to cart it home.”
The fact I reached both milestones at Fenway Park was extra special. Ever since my rookie year with the Indians, I had loved pitching there; now that it was my home ballpark, I felt that way more than ever. In the five years between 1972 and ’76, my Fenway records would be 10-1, 11-7, 13-5, 11-6, 11-6—a .690 winning percentage. Away from Boston, I felt I could compete with anybody; in Boston, I felt almost unbeatable.
A lot of pitchers have trouble with Fenway because of that left-field wall only three hundred and ten feet from home plate. I looked at it this way: The same chance I have, the other guy has. The same he has, I have. You make a mistake, you pay. If you don’t make a mistake, you’ve got a chance. Thinking that way makes you a better pitcher. You know you can’t make too many mistakes, and you have to make adjustments to your pitches and learn how to pitch here.
I found out when I came to the Red Sox that the best chance for a pitcher at Fenway was to pitch the hitters inside. Take advantage of the fact the ballpark has such little foul territory and the stands are so close. Let a guy hit the ball foul two miles, and then you go away, or you come back up and in. I started pitching much better that way. They tell you, “Don’t throw a change-up inside to right-handed hitters,” but I used to throw a change inside. They hit them two miles into the right corner, a foul ball WAYYYYYYYY over there to the right of the Pesky Pole. “OK,” I’d say to myself, “that’s just a strike. Now go back inside and get them out.”
If you outthink the hitter, and don’t pitch scared, you’re already ahead of the game.
My final 1973 record of 20-13, with a 3.34 ERA and 206 strikeouts, sounded much more like an ace than 8-8. More importantly, with 272 innings and twenty-three complete games—fourth in the league—I had proven my arm was all the way back. It had been five years since my 21-9 year at Cleveland, and after all I had been through, twenty wins was much sweeter the second time around.
Unfortunately, it was not enough to save Eddie Kasko’s job. In Boston fans were getting really hungry for a winner, and after four years of strong teams that couldn’t quite do it, Kasko was fired. The only consolation was that his replacement as manager was Darrell Johnson, who like Kasko had encouraged the Red Sox to give me a shot back in ’71. Johnson had been managing in Boston’s minor-league system for the past three seasons, so a lot of the young guys on the team had played for him before. He knew them better than anybody, so it was a good choice.
For me, personally, it had been a greatly satisfying season—but I was also very tired. Combined with winter ball, I had thrown nearly four hundred innings in less than a year. For the first time since the Indians made me sit out during the winter of 1968-69, I decided to stay home and rest until spring training. Maria and the kids were happy to have me.
Just like the last off-season, when we picked up Cepeda, we added an aging superstar to our roster heading into the 1974 season. San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal, “the Dominican Dandy,” was a six-time twenty-game winner who, like me, was a right-hander with a very distinctive windup in which he kicked his leg way up in the air. He had gone 6-16 and 11-15 the previous two seasons, but his stuff was better than his record. The hope was that, like Cepeda, he could have a bounce-back year in switching to a new team.
If he did, Cha-Cha wouldn’t be around to see it. Right at the end of spring training, GM Dick O’Connell shocked everybody by releasing Cepeda and Luis Aparicio—two future Hall of Famers—on the same day. Even though Aparicio was about to turn forty, and Cepeda was thirty-six with those lousy knees, both had excellent seasons in ’73 and were projected to be starters again. Bobby Bolin, our best relief pitcher the previous season with a 3-1 record and fifteen saves, was also let go. He was thirty-five.
I was sad to see all three of these classy veterans go, but I understood what was happening. Darrell Johnson had seen up close all the great talent in the Boston farm system, and O’Connell was now giving him the opportunity to turn those young players into big leaguers by removing the guys blocking their way.
The place we loaded up on veterans for ’74 was on the pitching staff. In addition to Marichal, we picked up two more well-seasoned National League starters—righties Rick Wise and Reggie Cleveland—in a pair of trades with the St. Louis Cardinals that cost us All-Star slugger Reggie Smith and three young pitchers: Lynn McGlothen, John Curtis, and Mike Garman.
Now in my fourth year with Boston, I was quickly becoming one of the most-seasoned members of the club. I wanted to set a good example for the new guys, but I had my second straight stinker of an Opening Day—letting up seven runs at Milwaukee. It took my Cuban countryman Diego Segui, another veteran we had picked up who could start or relieve, to bail me out with his amazing forkball in a 9-8 win. But that was just the start of my problems during the first month; we lost five of my first seven starts, and my ERA shot up near 6.00.
As was often the case, the home fans at Fenway boosted me up when I needed them. The Yankees were reemerging as one of the real powerhouses in the league, but I tamed them on May 9 with a three-hitter in which I retired the last fifteen men in a row and didn’t allow a single runner to reach second base. The final score of 2-0 marked my first shutout in more than a year; even though I had twenty-three complete games in ’73, and twenty wins, I somehow didn’t have even one shutout. I made up for that in ’74 with seven of them, my most since racking up nine with Cleveland in ’68—and good enough to lead the AL for the third time.
It was that first one that really got me going. Starting with the win over the Yankees, I went 18-4 with five shutouts, seventeen complete games, and an ERA of 2.22 through the middle of August. More importantly, our team was in the thick of the pennant race, boosted by great play from some of the youngsters O’Connell was counting on when he released Cepeda and Aparicio.
Rookie Rick Burleson, who took over for Aparicio at short, had a fantastic glove and a fiery temper that sparked the team just like Fisk had two years before; I was the first to call Rick “Rooster” because of his aggressiveness and confidence, and it stuck. Dwight Evans, now the regular right fielder, was also outstanding defensively with great range and a tremendous throwing arm. He showed real promise as a right-handed hitter too, but the most complete player on the team next to Yaz was probably Fisk—tremendous at the plate and behind it. Cecil Cooper, Rick Miller, Juan Beniquez, and Bernie Carbo, all under twenty-seven, did their part while dividing up much of the outfield and DH load once filled by Cepeda and Smith.
Their contributions and their energy helped make up for what was not a very impressive team statistically.
The pitching, expected to be a strength, was more of a mixed bag. Left-hander Bill Lee had become an innings-eater who won seventeen games for the second straight year with his great sinker ball, but Cleveland was inconsistent, and Wise missed most of the season after injuring his triceps muscle in his very first start. Marichal showed flashes of his old brilliance, but his arm was running out of gas after nearly twenty years of pro ball. He pitched less than sixty innings and combined with Wise for just eight wins. Our team ERA of 3.72 was worse than the AL average, and Lee and I were the only regular starters with winning records. Segui led our relievers with ten saves.
The offense didn’t jump out at you either. Yaz and Rico Petrocelli, the two holdovers from 1967, tied for the team high with fifteen home runs—the lowest number to lead a Red Sox club since World War II. Our 109 total homers was the least by a team calling tiny Fenway Park home in nearly twenty-five years and was a huge drop-off from the 147 we hit just one season before. One reason for the big letdown was also our biggest setback of the year: when Fisk tore ligaments in his left knee in a home plate collision on June 28. Pudge was out for the season, and many predicted his career—at least as a catcher—was over at age twenty-six.
It says something real positive about our team that even with our low power numbers, pitching problems, and with our best hitter and field general out of the lineup, we still managed to hold onto first place in the AL East most of the summer. In the case of Fisk’s injury, two catchers stepped up to fill in: rookie Tim Blackwell and veteran backup Bob Montgomery. Neither hit much, but both did a great job defensively while holding the pitching staff together. That was how it went for most of the season; everyone on the roster contributed. Here’s another example: although nobody in our lineup drove in even eighty runs, as a team we led the league in runs scored. It was a real group effort and beautiful to see.
Two games stand out for me from that season. The first was on June 14 against the California Angels in Anaheim. The Angels were not a strong offensive team, but with two outstanding young power pitchers in Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana, they wound up in a lot of low-scoring contests. I was up against Ryan that night, and my arm felt great; I got the first nine men in order, and although I allowed three runs in the fourth inning—due in part to my own error throwing to second base—I locked things down after that.
Ryan, who had set a big-league record with 383 strikeouts the year before, was always overpowering but not always accurate. Through eight innings he had walked seven of our guys, struck out fifteen, and had a 3-1 lead. Yaz saved us with a two-run homer in the top of the ninth, and then I got a double-play grounder in the bottom of the frame to keep things tied and send it to extra innings at 3-3.
These days a manager will usually pull his starter after one hundred pitches no matter how well he’s doing, but nobody worried about pitch counts then. The game stayed tied through the tenth, eleventh, twelve, thirteenth, and FOURTEENTH innings, and all Darrell Johnson did was ask me how I felt at the end of each one. I said I was fine, so he left me in.
Ryan was going through the same thing on his end. He was throwing a lot more pitches than me because of all the walks, and California manager Bob Winkles wanted to pull him after twelve innings. When Ryan asked if he could pitch one more “to get my record,” Winkles thought he meant the mark for most strikeouts in an extra-inning game—Ryan had a career-high nineteen, and the major-league record was twenty-one. But Ryan was talking about his own high for most pitches in a game, and he knew he was closing in on the two hundred and forty-two he had thrown against Detroit the previous year.
Somehow Ryan talked Winkles into one more inning, but he wound up getting neither record: he didn’t strike out another batter, and he “only” reached two hundred and thirty-five pitches. Barry Raziano came in to start the fourteenth for California, and he was perfect for two innings: six men up, six men down. That left it to me, still out there in the bottom of the fifteenth, to keep it at 3-3.
Most people back in Boston had gone to sleep when I got the leadoff man, Bobby Valentine, to fly out. But then Micky Rivers singled to center, and Denny Doyle—who already had two hits off me—drove him home with a game-winning, opposite-field double past Yaz in left. A loss was a loss, but my arm and my whole body had held up. That was important.
“I felt good and strong all the way,” I told reporters afterwards. “I might have been out there yet if he [Doyle] hadn’t decided to hit what I thought was a bad pitch—a ball. It was high and outside, and he reached up and slapped into the opposite field and that was it.”
I guess Dick O’Connell didn’t hold it against Denny; we traded for him the following June, and he wound up doing a great job for us at second base. He was just wearing the wrong uniform that night in Anaheim.
You know what’s really funny about that game? Not only did I not feel tired afterwards, but I was back out there on my normal three days’ rest later that week against lefty ace Vida Blue and the Oakland A’s. Johnson didn’t bring me back slowly, either; I went ten innings and picked up a 2-1 victory against the two-time defending World Series champs.
I figure in those two games combined, I probably threw close to four hundred pitches. That’s more than a lot of guys make in five starts today, but we really didn’t think anything of it. We just wanted the ball, and when we got in trouble the manager let us try and pitch out of it.
That’s one of the big problems with young pitchers today; as soon as they give up two straight hits or walks in the middle innings, the bullpen is warming up. Then, if they allow a third, it’s time for the hook. How can a guy learn to pitch in adversity under those conditions? He can’t, and so he doesn’t. Then when the playoffs come around, people wonder why guys melt down.
Sure, some of it might be pressure, but pitchers can also be left in longer in the postseason—or bought into situations that they’ve not been adequately prepared to handle. Back then we took real pride in getting out of jams and in going the distance. We learned through trial and error so that when it really mattered, we had the experience—and the confidence—to make the right decisions.
That was how I felt on August 23 when I faced the A’s and Vida Blue again at Fenway. By this point I was 19-8, one step away from being the first twenty-game winner in the majors. Our lead in the East was six games and had been building even though we had hit only three home runs in twenty-one August games. The electricity in the ballpark was amazing, and there were 35,866 fans packed into Fenway—the biggest crowd for a game there since 1956.
Four people among them were extra special to me: Maria, Luis Jr., Isabel, and our brand new baby son Daniel. They had flown in from Mexico City just a few hours before, and I had a friend meet them at Logan Airport to rush them over to the ballpark. By the time they got there we were already winning, thanks to a leadoff homer from my man Tommy Harper. It was 1-0 until the sixth, when we added two more on a Yastrzemski single and a sac fly by a terrific-looking young hitter just up from the minors, Jim Rice. At several points during the last two innings, the crowd was on its feet chanting my name.
I felt tremendous pride surging through me, and it peaked when Yaz squeezed the throw at first base for the final out of my 3-0 shutout. Not only was my family there to see me win a big game, but afterwards the five of us would be driving to nearby Milton to spend our first night together in our new home—the first house Maria and I had ever owned in the United States.
“I think, without any reservation, that he [Tiant] should be the Most Valuable Player in the American League, as well as the Cy Young Award winner,” Darrell Johnson said after the game. “Just look at the record on what he has done. There’s no way a man can do more for his team than what he has done for us.”
It was great to hear words like that, but I felt it right to spread the praise around.
“Naturally, I’m happy,” I told reporters in the clubhouse. “You have to be happy to win twenty games. However, everybody deserves credit. All the guys play good behind me. That’s the difference.”
After I had a cigar, showered, and got dressed, I met up with Maria and the kids, and we headed to Milton. If I could have frozen time right there, with my family in our new house with the swimming pool and big yard out back for the kids, and the kitchen for Maria, and the Red Sox heading for the playoffs, it would have been perfect. But time never stands still, and our fortunes as a ballclub were about to change faster than I ever thought possible.
Starting with a 4-1 loss to the A’s the next day, we stopped hitting overnight. All the clutch extra-base shots we had been getting all year long—we led the league in doubles and triples for the season—dried up. Home runs? Forget it. We could barely scrape together a few scattered singles. One thing I learned playing in Cleveland all those years was that it doesn’t matter how good your pitching is if your hitters can’t hit. Now it was happening to a Red Sox team that had been on fire for months, right when we could least afford it.
After my win on August 23, we had led the AL East by seven games. During the next month, while the two teams trailing us—Baltimore and New York—got red hot, we lost twenty of twenty-eight to drop into third, five games back. In one stretch we went thirty-four straight innings without scoring, and we were shutout in four of five games.
I had been the “stopper” for us all year, with eleven of my first twenty wins coming after Red Sox losses, but even at my best I couldn’t stop this slump. In my first three starts after winning my twentieth, I lost 3-0, 1-0, and 2-0. All were complete games, and I pitched well, but my support consisted of eleven singles and zero extra-base hits combined over twenty-seven innings. You don’t have much chance to win under those conditions, and all talk of big-time awards coming my way quickly stopped.
For some of us the bad luck spread off the field too. While we were in Baltimore over Labor Day weekend, getting shutout in three straight games by the Orioles, someone broke into my hotel room and stole all my credit cards and cigars. The thief was so sure he wouldn’t get caught that he took a few minutes to enjoy one of my stogies before putting it out in an ashtray. Bill Lee was robbed too, losing his portable stereo, but we didn’t know if it was the same guy because he didn’t leave any cigars in Bill’s room.
I’d like to say I laughed my way through the whole thing, but this slump was so bad it was tough to joke about. Instead I tried to keep everybody’s spirits up, saying how there was still time for us to get hot again and for the other teams to go cold. We won six of eight in late September, capped by a 7-2 win at Detroit in which I picked up my twenty-second and last victory, but the Orioles and Yankees didn’t start losing. Our final record of 84-78 left us in third, seven games behind first-place Baltimore. New York finished two back.
For the second time in three years, we had gone into the final month of the season looking like a playoff team. For the second time in three years, the Red Sox ticket office made American League playoff tickets that wouldn’t be used. And, for the third straight year, my selection as the Red Sox “Most Valuable Pitcher” by sportswriters covering the team left me feeling proud but also frustrated. How valuable could I be if I couldn’t pitch us to a pennant? What good was a 22-13 record and a 2.92 ERA if all it got you was third place?
Watching Oakland, the AL West champ, beat the Orioles in the playoffs and then the Dodgers in the World Series—the A’s third straight championship—was also tough to swallow. We had Oakland’s number; we had beaten them in eight of twelve games during the regular season. If we ever had an opportunity to face them in the postseason, I liked our chances.
As I sat in my beautiful new home, I tried to focus on the positive. It was sad to see old pros like Cepeda and Aparicio and Marichal come and go, but the great young players who had come up to the Red Sox in the last couple years had me really excited about the future. Guys like Evans and Burleson and Beniquez and Cooper made an immediate impact in the big leagues, and they were improving all the time. Lost a bit in our September collapse was the arrival of two more kids who looked like they were going to be something special: outfielders Rice and Fred Lynn. We needed more power, and they had it.
If this group continued to develop, and we got Reggie Cleveland and Rick Wise healthy, and Pudge somehow found a way to get back on the field and behind the plate, maybe 1975 would be the year it all came together for us.