A BANNER IN THE FENWAY grandstand read “Loo-Eee for President!” while “El Tiante” T-shirts sold briskly on streets outside the ballpark. Scalpers were getting $100 for $10 seats, fans clamoring to get a look at one of the most improbable comeback stories in sports history as it reached its zenith.
Never was Luis Tiant’s pull on New England’s heart stronger than in the fall of 1975. After leading the Red Sox to the AL East championship with a string of clutch September pitching performances, the team’s Cuban ace was determined to keep them winning deep into the postseason. Doing so would eventually require beating two of the best major-league teams of the last half-century, but Tiant seemed up for the task. As much as any seasoned CEO or spy, he possessed both courage and craftiness in abundance.
Everywhere he went that October, Tiant was a balding, cigar-chomping leading man. Playoff broadcasters latched onto his story as pure theater—his parents’ August voyage from Havana to Boston, ending a fourteen-year separation between father and son; his use of a wildly entertaining (and wildly effective) whirling dervish pitching delivery; and his incredible ability, time and again, to perform his best in the biggest games. Once, as casual fans learned in the many biographical sketches popping up in Sports sections daily, Tiant had been a rising young star who blew batters away with a fastball nearing triple digits; now, after a mid-career injury, he had reinvented himself as a purveyor of screwballs, hesitation pitches, and other wizardry that laughed in the face of normal baseball convention—and bats.
Tiant’s loved ones, also flashed across millions of TV screens from their spot in the stands, were colorful in their own right. His bride, Maria, supportive as ever, led a contingent of family, friends, and fellow Red Sox wives in spinning matracas—handmade noisemakers brought in from Mexico for the postseason. Then there was Tiant’s aging father, Luis Sr. The former lefty pitching ace in the Negro Leagues watched with pride from the stands, clad in a fedora and perpetual grin, as his namesake did him proud. Racism had denied the elder Tiant a shot at the majors, so now his son was winning for them both in a city embroiled in its own racial strife.
Finally, looming over the entire tableau was Fidel Castro. Tiant still did not know just how long the Cuban dictator would be willing to allow his parents to stay in the United States—three months? Forever?—and this too was never far from his mind. He didn’t know if he could go through losing them again, but he might have no choice.
Boston’s most popular athlete did not feign an interest in politics. All he wanted was to be the best ballplayer, teammate, family man, and friend possible. And, in the end, it really didn’t matter if the Red Sox beat out the heavily-favored Oakland A’s in the American League Championship Series, or the All-Star lineup of the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series that lay beyond that hurdle.
In all four areas, as judged by the world watching him in the fall of ’75, Luis Clemente Tiant would come out a champion.
I KNEW MR. YAWKEY was just being nice with what he told me in the clubhouse; winning the AL East had definitely been a team effort. But I had been our most dependable starting pitcher in September with a 1.47 ERA and three complete-game wins—including two shutouts—as we held off the Orioles down the stretch. The 1975 season was not my best; not even close. When it mattered most, though, I had come through, just like I dreamed I would during those lean years in Cleveland.
So while Rick Wise led the team in wins with nineteen, and had a better ERA on the season that I did, Darrell Johnson felt I had earned the right to start Game One against the A’s in the American League playoffs. I was the hot hand, especially at Fenway where the first two games would be played. I had allowed just one run at home in twenty-seven innings and had beaten Oakland five times in a row going back to 1973.
Since we had home-field advantage for the playoffs (with Games One, Two, and Five slated for Fenway), and had split the twelve games we played against Oakland during the regular season, we felt good about our chances going into the series. Most everybody outside Boston, though, felt we had no chance. The experts all talked about how the A’s had shown they could turn up the intensity when it was necessary in the postseason. Their roster was filled with guys—Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Bert Campaneris, Ken Holtzman, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers—who had played on all of their three straight world championship teams. They were used to the spotlight shining on them in October and didn’t let it bother them.
Another reason Oakland was favored was that we were missing one of our best players. Late in September, just a week before the end of the regular season, Jim Rice was hit by a pitch that broke his left hand. Our leading home run hitter and number-two RBI man would be out the entire postseason, and his injury forced Darrell Johnson to make several changes. He moved Yaz from first base back to his old spot in left field to take over for Rice. Cecil Cooper, normally the DH, replaced Yaz at first. Juan Beniquez, normally the fourth outfielder, would now DH.
I tried hard not to think about those moves or anything else going into Game One; all I concerned myself with was the task at hand. I wouldn’t be surprising Oakland with my stuff—they had seen me enough over the years—but I felt that my fastball was moving better than it had all season and hoped to use this to my advantage.
Mostly, I just felt confident—and relaxed.
“Luis knows how big the game is to all of us,” Yastrzemski said before the opener. “But he will be the calmest person on the field. Nothing bothers him.”
Just as they had down the stretch of the regular season in 1972, ’74, and again in ’75, the crowd gave me a special salute before this and every home playoff game I pitched, that pumped up the whole team. I’d finish my warmups in the bullpen, and then, as Dwight Evans later described, “…that lever came up from that gate, there was dead silence, and as soon as that latch opened he [Tiant] got a standing ovation all the way to the mound. It was exciting for us to see that, and it got us going, too. It was a tremendous thing.”
All that electricity from another overpacked house of 35,578 at Fenway for Game One must have affected our opponents. How could you hear that and not be a little intimidated, even if you were the defending champs? Oakland would never admit it, but look what happened at the start of the opener:
I got the A’s in order in the top of the first, and their starter, veteran lefty Ken Holtzman, got two quick outs in our half. Then the fun started. After Yaz singled to center, Fisk hit a hard grounder right to third baseman Bando. The inning looked over, but the ball got by the usually sure-handed Bando (error No. 1). Yaz never stopped running and came all the way around to score when Claudell Washington—backing up Bando in left field—threw the ball wildly trying to get it back in (error No. 2). That made it 1-0, and then a second run scored on the next play when Phil Garner booted Lynn’s easy grounder to second (error No. 3).
So much for the cool-headed champs.
The A’s strategy against me seemed to be to swing hard and knock the ball all over the park, which made sense since they had rocked me for six runs in less than three innings when they faced me on August 30. But I wasn’t the same pitcher I had been then; my back was better, my control was better, and I was able to place my fastball right where they couldn’t get good wood on it. They did get plenty of balls in the air—they only hit two grounders the whole game—but none went out. They didn’t even get their first base hit until the fifth, and we kept our 2-0 lead through the middle innings.
Then, in the seventh, we broke things open thanks to more bad Oakland defense. The biggest mistake came on Lynn’s liner to left field that Washington should have caught. He misjudged it, thinking it was going to bounce high off the Green Monster, and then watched as it scraped the wall just a few feet up to give Lynn a gift double and two RBI. Center fielder Bill North also dropped a fly ball that inning, leading to another run.
The A’s got one back in the eighth, but that was all; I wound up with a three-hitter and a 7-1 win. Holtzman definitely didn’t pitch as bad as it sounds, and only two of our runs were earned, but they all count the same on the scoreboard.
After the game, the reviews of my first career postseason start came in.
“A man can’t pitch any better than that,” said Darrell Johnson. “Today was no different than the last two years. Luis has done the job over and over for us.”
“The way he has been these last few starts,” said Fisk, “give him a couple of runs, and that’s it.” Pudge did his part to help, scoring twice and diving into the stands to make a great catch on a foul pop.
“This is Louie’s palace,” said Yaz. “In here he can do no wrong. I’ve never seen people react to a ballplayer the way they do with Louie here. It’s beautiful.”
Then there was Reggie Jackson, Oakland’s top slugger. He was held to one single in four at-bats and must have been impressed by my moves on the mound.
“Luis Tiant,” he said, “is the Fred Astaire of baseball.”
It felt so good to win for my parents, for my wife and kids, for my teammates, and for all the fans. We had a sign up on the bulletin board in our clubhouse that said, “SEVEN WINS IN OCTOBER!” and it was important to us that we got that first one quick. It gave us a lot of confidence that we hoped would carry over to the rest of the series.
One other extra-special thing about Game One was the manager watching it from the visitor’s dugout: Alvin Dark. Remember him? The guy who when we were both with Cleveland was convinced my injuries in 1969 were caused by my delivery? He predicted I would never last in the majors pitching that way, and as soon as he was able to trade me that winter, he did.
After Game One, they brought me into the interview room to meet with the press. Dark was there already, up at the microphone, so I went and sat down behind him. When he saw me, he leaned over and patted me on the head.
“Luis,” he said loud enough for everyone to hear, “you were beautiful out there today.”
I was glad he noticed, but I didn’t say so.
Johnson had me set to pitch the fourth game if the series got that far. It didn’t. We were down 3-0 early in Game Two against another lefty, Vida Blue, when Yaz started our comeback with a homer in the fourth. Then, after we had tied it, Captain Carl kept it at 3-3 with several great defensive plays in left field—performing like he had never given up his job out there.
“I can play left field in my sleep,” Yaz said after the game, in which he also doubled and scored the game-winner in a 6-3 victory.
Game Three was in Oakland, and we expected the A’s to put up a big fight at home and try to avoid the sweep. Rick Wise had other ideas. After just missing his twentieth win in his last start of the regular season, he got it here—where it meant much more—by pitching into the eighth and holding the champs down after we built up a 4-0 lead. Oakland’s pride was still there, and they put a late-game scare into us, but Yaz made some more great plays in left and Drago shut the door again. We clinched the pennant with a 5-3 victory.
This time we had a true celebration, partying and pouring champagne on each other’s heads in the visitor’s clubhouse. Sal Bando, captain of the losing team, stopped by and told me to “shake and bake those National Leaguers.” That was a class move and advice I planned to follow.
At that moment, right in the middle of all the yelling, I realized that the two biggest dreams for my life had come true at the same time:
Our opponents for the series were the Cincinnati Reds, a team I remembered well from when I was a teenager back in Cuba. The Havana Sugar Kings of the International League were the Reds’ top farm club from 1954 to 1960, and Cincinnati signed up a lot of the best Cuban players before Castro took over and outlawed pro ball. Among them was my friend Tony Perez, now Cincinnati’s star first baseman.
I played for the Sugar Kings’ team in the Cuban Winter League but didn’t get signed by the Reds. The club’s management reportedly thought I was “awkward and not coordinated and very young” when they checked me out as an eighteen-year-old, so they passed on me. Hopefully I could make them regret it.
When it came to the oddsmakers, even our sweeping the defending champion A’s wasn’t enough to change our underdog status. The Reds, who had beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates three in a row in the National League playoffs, were a powerhouse team that is today considered one of baseball’s greatest all-time clubs. Manager Sparky Anderson’s crew led the majors with a 108–54 record, more wins than any other team in 1975 and thirteen games ahead of our 95–65 total. They were known as “The Big Red Machine” for how they rolled over opponents with speed, power, defense, and pitching depth.
Cincinnati’s starting lineup read like an All-Star roster: Pete Rose, 3B; Joe Morgan, 2B; Johnny Bench, C; Tony Perez, 1B; George Foster, LF; Dave Concepción, SS; Ken Griffey, RF; Cesar Geronimo, CF. That’s the all-time hit king leading off, followed by three Hall of Famers and four more guys who would make anybody’s team better. Lefty fireballer Don Gullett was the only really big name on the Reds pitching staff, with a 15–4 record despite missing two months with injuries, but Anderson had five other very dependable starters and several relievers he wasn’t afraid to put in at the first sign of trouble.
Sparky was ahead of his time in how he handled pitchers. He pulled starters after five or six innings, even if they were doing good, and then quickly started swapping relievers in and out—sometimes letting a guy face just one batter. This is how most teams do things now, but back then it was so unusual it earned Sparky the nickname “Captain Hook.” It probably also pissed his pitchers off, but it got results: six guys with double-figure wins, a terrific 3.37 team ERA, and a league-leading fifty saves.
Still just forty-one years old, Anderson was in his sixth season as Reds manager and had already won two NL championships—in 1970 and ’72—before this one. Eventually Sparky would win three World Series in his career including one with the Detroit Tigers, and join many of his former players in the Hall of Fame. But at this point he had yet to win any. He was looking for any edge he could get, and before the series started he began telling reporters, umpires, and anybody else who would listen that he was convinced something in my delivery constituted a balk.
By its simplest definition, a balk occurs when a pitcher on the rubber goes into his regular wind-up or pickoff move but then doesn’t throw the ball. A called balk, as ruled on by the umpires, allows all baserunners to advance one base. The Reds led the NL with 168 stolen bases in 204 attempts that year and had eleven more steals in three playoff games, so running was a huge part of their offense. Sparky wanted to make sure he and his baserunners knew exactly what I could and couldn’t do.
Thanks to him, all or parts of this excerpt of rule 8.05 of the 1975 baseball rules appeared in newspapers across the country before and after Game One:
“If there is a runner, or runners, it is a balk when the pitcher, while touching his plate [rubber]—
(a) Makes any motion normally associated with his pitch and fails to make such delivery;
(b) Feints a throw to first base and fails to complete the throw;
(c) Fails to step directly toward a base before throwing to that base.”
Even with my herky-jerky delivery, I had never, ever been called for a balk in eleven seasons of big-league baseball—all in the American League. I made sure every AL umpire knew that all the steps in my delivery, including my head shakes and body twists and the three-step drop with my hands holding the ball, were done at the same exact pace and with the same exact motion each time. They videotaped me to make sure, and I passed the slow-motion eye test. The consensus was that there was no intentional deception in my moves.
The potential problem was that AL and NL umpires would be working the World Series, and the NL umps had only seen me pitch a couple times in All-Star games and during spring training. According to Sparky, they had a different view on what should be called a balk.
“He couldn’t play in the National League in 1975 with his no-step [pickoff move],” Sparky told reporters before the series. “There are two no-nos that we’ll be watching for: any dip of the hands after he gets them down to his belt, and any throw to first base without stepping in that direction.”
The afternoon of October 11, 1975 was gray and damp. It was sixty degrees, with a little rain falling, as I took the mound for Game One of the World Series. When I saw Sparky talking to the umps, I figured he was suggesting to them that as soon as a runner got on first for the Reds, they should try and catch me in the act and call a balk. But if that was the plan, they would have to wait a while.
My family—and the world—was watching. This was my chance to show all of them what I could do.
I was perfect over the first three innings, while we left four men on (including one thrown out at home) against Gullet. Then, with one out in the fourth, Morgan singled to center to become the first Cincinnati baserunner. He was among the top base stealers in baseball with sixty-seven during the regular season, so I was pretty sure he would be running here. I also knew that the umps would have their eyes on me, but I wasn’t worried—I had a real good pickoff move, and Fisk had a terrific arm.
“Now the drama starts,” broadcaster Curt Gowdy told the forty million fans watching the national broadcast on NBC—plus a few more tuned in illegally down in Cuba. “Will Joe Morgan run on Carlton Fisk? Tiant—does he balk? Some say he does, some say he doesn’t.”
Before making my first pitch to Bench, I looked over and saw Morgan taking a big lead. I stepped off the rubber, keeping him honest, and he hurried back. Then, after Bench fouled one off, Morgan took the same bunch of steps toward second—so I threw over to Cooper, and Morgan dove back.
I knew he’d keep taking that big lead, and I felt I could get him, so I kept throwing over. The third time, it was REALLLLL close, with Cooper sweeping his glove hand onto Morgan’s arm at almost the same instant it touched the bag. Cooper, our bench, and most of the fans seemed to think he was out, but first base ump Nick Colosi’s safe call was all that mattered.
Man, I thought, I almost had him there. Was it worth one more shot? Why not?
So I gunned it over again, and this time Morgan yelled, “Balk!” Colosi agreed, sending Morgan to second base. I couldn’t believe it—I know I stepped toward first before I threw, which is the rule to keep it from being a balk. Gowdy and his partners Dick Stockton and Tony Kubek on the NBC telecast watched the replays with the rest of the country, and they thought my move was legit. But it didn’t matter what they, me, Darrell Johnson, the fans, or my teammates thought. Just the man in blue.
I was steamed and ran over to try and find out from Colosi what he was thinking.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “I’ve been here a long, long time—since ’64,” I said to him. “This is 1975. Nobody has ever called me for a balk, and now you’re going to come in here to an American League town and you’re going to call me for a balk? What’s the matter with you—do you need glasses?”
“You double-dipped your knee, and that’s a balk,” he replied. “By National League rules, it’s a balk.”
I had a few more things to say after that, including a couple of bad things, but nothing I felt should really offend him. He let me yell a bit, bull-this, and bull-that, and then he said his final piece:
“You better go back over there (to the mound), or I’m going to throw your Black ass out!”
My Black ass? If he tried to say that shit now, they’d throw his ass out of baseball. But back then, I just did what I was told and got out of there as quickly as I could.
“OK, thank you very much. Nice speaking with you!”
When you’ve been working all your life to get there, you’ve got to be stupid to get yourself thrown out of a game that big.
So now I had Morgan at second, Bench at the plate, and Perez on deck. Kubek had asked me the day before if a balk call would throw me off my game, and I said no. Now I had to prove it. It took thirteen pitches, including seven foul balls, before Bench popped one up behind home plate that Pudge caught by the screen. Two outs. Then I climbed the ladder with Perez, got him to one-and-two, and froze him with one on the outside corner for strike three. As I ran to the dugout, and my teammates slapped me on the back, I felt a huge rush of energy.
The Big Red Machine had not squashed me, and the balk call had not rattled me. I kept pitching the same way, and they never called another balk on me the whole series.
The funny thing was I really didn’t have a strong fastball that day like I did against Oakland. I had just enough of one to use it when I had to, and my control was so good on my curveball, slider, hesitation pitch, and everything else that I could stay in command. Cincinnati had seen video from the Oakland game and was expecting lots of fastballs they could try and slam off and over the Green Monster. They didn’t get them.
The game was still scoreless into the bottom of the seventh when I led off. Since we had added the designated hitter in the AL in 1973, I had only batted once in three years entering this game. The NL was so anti-DH that they wouldn’t even agree to allow it in the World Series until 1976—so all us rusty AL pitchers were at a big disadvantage.
I had already struck out once against Gullett, and I figured he would try to get me again with his great fastball. When he fed me a slow curve instead, I waited it out and pulled it on the ground into the hole between third and short for a base hit. I’m still not sure why he didn’t just blow me away again.
The crowd gave me a standing ovation, and I could hear Maria up in the stands spinning the two-foot-long matraca noisemaker our friend Mario had brought her from Mexico City. Coach Johnny Pesky gave me my big blue warm-up jacket at first base, which made me look and run even slower than normal. Then, when Evans bunted to the mound on Gullett’s next pitch, I figured I was dead meat at second—until Gullett bounced his throw wild past Concepción covering the bag. I slid a little early (OK, a lot early), jumped up, rounded the bag, and then took a few big strides toward third before realizing I’d never make it.
High-tailing it back to second, slipping along the way, I was just in time to beat Geronimo’s throw in as Curt Gowdy on NBC and a good chunk of the sellout crowd laughed. Watching the highlights later, I have to admit it was pretty funny. My helmet went one way, my upper body the other, and my lower body someplace else! But all that mattered was how I ended up: safe.
Now the fans were really into it, and you could see Gullett was rattled. Doyle tried to bunt, fouled it off, and then grounded a single into the same shortstop hole I had found. This got me to third, loading the bases with nobody out.
Who was up next? Who else? Yaz.
Those were the situations Captain Carl loved most, and he came through as usual—lining one to right field that landed just in front of Griffey. I had to stay at third, ready to tag up, in case Griffey caught it, but I still ran (and slightly stumbled) home easily. My momentum carried me to the on-deck circle where I high-fived Fisk.
There was just one problem…
I missed home plate.
It was only by about a half-inch, and hoping nobody had noticed, I started sneaking back to tap it. Pudge, who was in the on-deck circle, did notice but didn’t want to yell and draw Bench’s attention to the situation.
Bench knew too, and so did Concepción at short. They both started screaming for Perez—who had taken the cut-off throw from Griffey—to throw the ball home from first. I could hear Bench, who was right near me, but the crowd was so loud that Perez never heard either of them. My mistake cost us nothing.
I tapped the plate, we took a 1-0 lead, and my teammates, the fans, and my family and friends got one more big laugh.
“You forget how to do things when you don’t do them for a long time,” I recalled for a reporter years later. “The main thing is I didn’t get hurt, and I can come back and continue to pitch.”
That play got Captain Hook out of the dugout. Sparky pulled Gullett and brought in Clay Carroll, but the move backfired. Carroll walked Fisk to bring in another run and another trip to the mound by Sparky. This time he called for Will McEnaney, and things only got worse for the Reds. While I was sniffing smelling salts on the bench after my big trip around the bases, we quickly added two singles and a sac fly to make it 6-0.
They say a big lead is never safe at Fenway, but with the wind blowing in and the crowd yelling, “Hang in there, Luis!” I was determined to not let this one get close. Getting the last six men in order in the eighth and ninth, I preserved the shutout and earned myself hugs from my teammates on the field and from my father later in the clubhouse.
Having Dad there with us after the game, with all the press around, was great. I knew it was one more way to make him feel like a real big leaguer—and a real teammate—again. He was even good for a quote; when I told reporters that day had been my greatest ever in baseball, both because of what it meant to my family and what it meant to my teammates and our fans, he said through an interpreter that it was his greatest, too.
“One of the things that I admired about Luis was all the love that you could see between him and his father after the years and years they had been apart,” Bernie Carbo recalls. “They were really proud of each other, and that was something that I think we all, as players, looked to when Luis brought him into the clubhouse—seeing how much fun they had.
“I wish I would have had the relationship with my father that Luis had with his father. Luis said, ‘Dad, I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to show you how much I love you.’ Then he did.”
Bernie was right. It was wonderful to share that moment with my father, my mother, and the rest of my family. I had been waiting for it all of my life.
Among those who felt strongest about my win were those Black and Latino Red Sox fans for whom my presence on the field had special meaning—like Jeff Anderson in Jamaica Plain. Bob Parajon, whose parents had managed to get their family out of Cuba in 1965, was another one.
“Every time Tiant took the mound, it became a family affair; everyone crowded around the TV,” remembers Parajon. “We would all enjoy Luis as a family, and knowing that his parents had come over from Cuba too gave it all more meaning because of the political climate at the time. It was a sense of pride.”
Sportswriters had fun with me too, as usual, but now there were more of them than ever from across the country focusing on my delivery. Some of their descriptions were really funny, like this one from Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News:
“On one pitch, he checked the position of his centerfielder, counted the house, looked up to see if it was raining, and then ordered three hot dogs from a vendor behind third base before striking Tony Perez out with a sidearm curveball.”
Then there was Roger Angell of the New Yorker, who gave my pitches new names like “The Slipper Kick,” “Falling Off the Fence,” “The Runaway Taxi,” and “Call the Osteopath” during which “in midpitch, the man suffers an agonizing seizure in the central cervical region, which he attempts to fight off with a sharp backward twist of the head.” All you have to do is read those to me out loud, and I start laughing.
The Reds, I can guarantee you, were not laughing after Game One. They realized now that we weren’t going to roll over for them. We might have only had three guys with World Series experience (Yaz, Rico, and Carbo) to their fifteen, but we never felt like underdogs. After sweeping the A’s and now beating Cincinnati in the opener, we had proven we could play with anyone.
Pete Rose wasn’t convinced. Even after a zero-for-four day, and a 6-0 loss, he didn’t think too much of my pitching.
“We must have had fifteen line drives, but everything was right at somebody,” he told reporters inside the quiet Reds clubhouse. “I couldn’t have hit the ball any harder.”
In one at-bat during the game, Rose had held up his thumb and forefinger—forming a zero—so Pudge could see it.
“Nothing,” Rose said. “The guy has nothing.”
So did the Reds, and over my last six starts—including two in the postseason—I had now gone 5-1 with a 0.92 ERA and three shutouts. Not bad for a guy with nothing.
That night, like every night we were home during the postseason, my family partied deep into the night at our house in Milton. Friends, teammates—everybody was welcome. We had soul and disco on the stereo, dancing by the pool, and plenty of food and drinks. I remember three guys and two women showed up who I had never met before, but since they brought along some booze, and were friendly, I just said, “Come on in.” The next morning when the sun came up, they were still there, talking away. We never did figure out who they were.
In the middle of it all was my dad, sitting quietly in the corner of my basement rec room with a smile on his face. The last few months had been so special for all of us, but I imagine they were most special for him. He had seen me live out my dreams and his dreams at the same time, and his was a look of pure contentment. There were no words to describe it, but no words were necessary.
The miles between us, and the years, had melted away.
If Pete Rose or anybody on Cincinnati still doubted that we were for real, we changed their minds the next day. Bill Lee started Game Two for us and delivered his best performance of the year. He really had his sinkerball going, even after a twenty-seven-minute rain delay, and held a 2-1 lead through eight innings.
So much was riding on the game that Lee must have figured Darrell Johnson had him on a short leash. Sure enough, after Bill let up a leadoff double to Johnny Bench in the ninth, Johnson called on Dick Drago to close things out. Drago had been terrific against Oakland in the AL playoffs, but here he let up a single by Concepción to tie the game and a double by Griffey to give Cincinnati a 3-2 lead. Rawly Eastwick, the Reds’ nasty right-handed bullpen ace, got us one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth.
Moments earlier, we had been one out away from a two-zero lead in the series. Now, just like that, it was tied heading to Cincinnati.
Game Three, played in front of more than 55,000 at the Reds’ huge Riverfront Stadium, was a back-and-forth battle. Fisk gave us a 1-0 lead early with a homer off Gary Nolan to start the second inning, but then the Reds scored five unanswered runs against Wise in the middle innings. The Owl Man was the moon man that night, letting up home runs to Bench, Concepción, and Geronimo before being pulled midway through the fifth.
Jim Willoughby settled things down for us in relief, and Fred Lynn got us a bit closer with a sacrifice fly in the sixth. Then it was our turn to hit the long ball again. Bernie Carbo did what he did best, knocking a pinch-hit homer off Carroll in the seventh, to make it 5-3. Then Dwight Evans smashed a two-out, two-run bomb in the ninth to tie the score and force extra innings.
What happened next will always be known in Boston as “The Armbrister Play.” In the bottom of the tenth, with the game still tied 5-5, Geronimo led off with a single, and light-hitting Ed Armbrister came to bat in the pitcher’s spot. Everyone expected a bunt to get Geronimo into scoring position, and that’s what Armbrister did—but after getting the bunt down he seemed to freeze in place as the ball bounced up in front of the plate. Fisk leaped forward to grab it and try for the lead runner at second base, but he had to literally push Armbrister away to get to the ball. Pudge wound up rushing a throw that sailed past Burleson at second, and as the ball rolled into center field Geronimo rounded the bag and headed safely to third.
After a long argument in which Fisk and Darrell Johnson insisted to home plate umpire Larry Barnett that Armbrister had interfered with Pudge’s path to the ball—claims that the TV replays strongly supported—the play stood. The Reds now had the winning run ninety feet away, and three batters later Geronimo scored easily on a single by Joe Morgan over a drawn-in outfield. Cincinnati had a 6-5 win, but none of us in the visitor’s dugout or the majority of fans watching the game felt they deserved it that way.
“Of course he interfered with me; you all saw it,” Pudge told reporters after the game. “He stood right under the ball.”
Roger Angell of the New Yorker called the play “mind-calcifying,” but Darrell Johnson might have had the best line about Barnett’s decision:
“Collision? I thought it was collusion.”
During the course of the next week, Barnett received more mail than anybody on either team—most of it negative. He also got at least one death threat. Meanwhile, we were down two-games-to-one, making Game Four a must-win for us. If we lost, Cincinnati would only need to take one of the last three contests to clinch the World Series; if they lost, it guaranteed the series would come back to Boston for at least one more game—the sixth.
I got the start for us in Game Four, and right away I could tell my stuff wasn’t nearly as sharp as in the opener. In the first game they barely touched me; this time they hit me early and often.
Leadoff man Rose worked the count to three-and-two, fouled off three pitches, and then grounded one past me into centerfield for a single. Griffey followed this with a first-pitch smash to deep left-center field, scoring Rose, but I got lucky when a beautiful relay play from Lynn to Burleson to Petrocelli at third nabbed Griffey trying to leg out a triple. The luck was because of what happened next: a walk to Morgan and, after a groundout by Perez, another run-scoring hit—this one a booming double by Bench to the center-field fence just between Lynn and Evans.
It was 2-0 already, but it could have been much worse were it not for that great relay. I managed to stop the bleeding for a while, getting the next seven men out, and we were still down two when we came up in the top of the fourth. Big innings were becoming our specialty in this series, and now we had another one just when we needed it.
Fisk and Lynn singled off Reds starter Fred Norman, and after Petrocelli popped up, Evans had his second huge clutch hit in as many games—a triple off the center-field fence that scored Pudge and Freddie to tie the game. Burleson then doubled in Evans, knocking out Norman, and after Pedro Borbon came on in relief, I singled up the middle to move Burleson to third. That kept the string going, and Rooster and me both soon scored on singles by Beniquez—who played left field in the games at Cincinnati—and Yaz. That made it 5-2.
If I had my Game One stuff, that lead would have felt really safe. But on this night, it took all I had to keep the Reds from tying things back up. Maybe it was because the mound was a little higher at Riverfront than Fenway, and my control was a little off as a result. Whatever the reason, it was a struggle all the way.
I got the first two outs in the bottom of the fourth, but Foster got an infield hit and reached second when Doyle’s off-balance throw got by Yastrzemski at first. Concepción brought in the runner from scoring position again with a bloop double that landed between three guys, and then he scored on Geronimo’s bloop triple to right—cutting the lead to 5-4.
Darrell Johnson could have pulled me right then, but he didn’t. He probably realized that we should have caught one of those ugly bloopers and wanted to give me a chance to get out of the jam. I did, striking out pinch-hitter Terry Crowley, batting for Borbon. Geronimo was stranded on third, and we were still on top.
“In that game at Cincinnati, the big thing about Luis was he would battle out of any situation,” Petrocelli remembers. “He would give up a couple hits, and then he would really start to bear down against the next man and get the big outs. On one of those bloop hits, he got a little upset at one of the young outfielders—Juan Beniquez—who had started after the ball, and then hesitated. Luis felt that if he would have kept going, he could have caught it before it fell in. But he got over it fast.”
Rico’s right. It’s easy to lose your cool in a tight ballgame like that, and it happened to me again the next inning. I walked Rose leading off the fifth, and after a deep flyout by Griffey, a couple guys started warming up in our bullpen. Now I figured I was probably one more baserunner from being pulled, and after three straight balls to Morgan—the first two of which looked pretty good to me—I went crazy. Pudge and Stan Williams saw me stomping around the mound cursing to myself about the calls and ran out to settle me down. Morgan still walked, but I came back to get Perez and Bench.
From that point on, I protected that one-run lead like it was my fourth child. A lot of my pitches weren’t doing what I wanted, and between the fifth and the eighth the Reds got two hits, two walks, some loud lineouts, and smashed two balls to the deepest parts of the ballpark. All they had to show for it was four more zeros on the scoreboard, and with Clay Carroll and Rawly Eastwick shutting us down, it stayed 5-4 heading into the last of the ninth.
By now I was nearing one hundred and fifty pitches for the game, not that I was keeping count. Was I tired? Sure. But here is how I looked at the situation. When you come to this time of the season, you’ve played for five and a half months—plus another one and a half months of spring training. Your whole body is tired. At that point, everything is mental; you’ve worked all year to get to this situation, and you’re not going to mess around. You want to be there, and you don’t want nobody taking your spot.
In his autobiography, Don Zimmer—then our third-base coach—wrote that, “Once you got to the ninth inning, you could sit your bullpen down. Tiant was his own closer.”
That’s just how I felt about it. I’d kill somebody before coming out of a game like that. Other players may feel differently, but me, I had to be in there pitching. As long as my arm was OK, I was going to do whatever it took to win. Rest? That was for winter.
So even when Geronimo singled leading off the ninth, and Armbrister bunted him to second, I was determined to keep going. Rose was up next, and he had already singled, walked, and hit a wicked liner to second. I didn’t want to walk him, but I had to be careful because he was heating up and could tie the game with another single. So I gave him five straight outside fastballs, and he took them all to work a walk.
Rookie Jim Burton, a lefty, was warming up in our bullpen. Ken Griffey, a left-handed batter, was due next. Managers always like a lefty-on-lefty pitching matchup, but there was no way I was coming out of that game. I knew it, my teammates knew it, and the manager knew it.
Or did he?
I looked over at our dugout. Stan Williams was on his feet, clapping for me as always, but Darrell Johnson was walking out to the mound. I couldn’t believe it.
“What the fuck is he doing?” I yelled to no one in particular.
Fisk started coming out, too; he heard me, and yelled back: “What the fuck is he doing? He knows he’s not going to take you out.”
Now I turned to Fisk.
“I don’t know what shit he’s going to tell me. But he better do it quick.”
By now Johnson had reached the dirt by the edge of the mound. I looked at him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What do you guys think? I got a left-hander down here, Luis.”
He meant Burton, in the bullpen.
“Get the fuck out of here! I don’t want to hear any more shit. I don’t want to talk to you!”
Fisk was laughing and looking over to Yaz at first base. He was laughing too.
Then Johnson asked me about Griffey.
“Can you get him?”
“Sure I can. Now get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to talk to you—I don’t want to talk to nobody!”
The funny thing is that Johnson had a microphone in his pocket, which was recording our whole conversation. NBC was getting audio of both managers talking to their players to use in the World Series highlights video coming out later. Whatever sound they got from Johnson and Sparky would be used in the video, but not heard live during the game.
If you watch the video—you can find it on YouTube—you’ll see that every time I open my mouth, they drown out what I’m saying to keep it clean. It’s pretty funny.
When Johnson finally left, Ken Griffey stepped in. He worked the count full and then smashed a line drive to center; Lynn turned his back to the plate, ran straight toward the fence, and caught the ball over his shoulder at the edge of the track. It was an incredible play at the most crucial moment—if he doesn’t catch it, we lose—but it was no surprise to anybody on the Red Sox. Freddie had been doing that for us all year.
“Luis absolutely loved his defense,” Lynn remembers today. “Pitchers back then, unless they were Nolan Ryan, didn’t try and strike everybody out. They wanted you to hit the ball and let the defense do what they do. Their job was to put the ball where we wanted it to be put, so the defense could make the plays for them. Luis did that as well as anyone.”
Now, with two outs, it was up to Joe Morgan. He took ball one, then swung at my 163rd pitch and popped it up sky-high to first. Yaz caught it, my teammates all mobbed me on the mound, and we had tied up the series—guaranteeing at least one more game in Boston.
“The pitch I hit for the last out was the best one Tiant threw me all night,” Morgan said, “and that’s what was bad about it.”
Before we even left the dugout, I was already giving my first postgame interview—to a sportscaster for a Providence, Rhode Island television station. It was Tony Conigliaro, covering the series as part of his first post-playing job. It was great to see Tony C, even if he couldn’t be in uniform.
Then it was on to the clubhouse, where I found out just how many pitches I had thrown. A reporter asked if I was tired after throwing that many.
“I don’t care if it’s 3,000,” I said, puffing on my victory cigar, “as long as I win.”
I wasn’t just blowing smoke; the number really was not a big deal to me. The year before, when I had that fifteen-inning game against Nolan Ryan, I figured I threw about two hundred pitches—and that wasn’t the World Series.
“Guts, guts, guts,” Yastrzemski said about my performance. “I’ll tell you, I’d let him pitch to the whole world the way he battles.”
Yaz was a pretty good battler himself; he had barely hit .200 the second half of the regular season after severely pulling ligaments in his shoulder, but now that the chips were down he was pushing past the pain—hitting well over .300 and making one great defensive play after another in the postseason. That’s guts.
Darrell Johnson, who had already told writers that I averaged 133 pitches a game, was asked if he ever thought about taking me out after I went way past that total.
“I went out to talk to Luis, discussed the situation with my catcher, and saw no reason not to let him finish what he started. Luis is a very strong man.”
Then the big question, again to me: Would I be able to come back and pitch a seventh game?
“You better believe it.”
The importance of our pulling out Game Four was made clear the next day when the Reds beat us 6-2 at Riverfront behind a great performance from Don Gullett. The big blows were two home runs off our starter, Reggie Cleveland, by Tony Perez—the second one a three-run job in the sixth to knock out Cleveland. Perez’s first hits of the series broke his zero-for-fifteen slump, and Gullett cruised from there. Of the five hits he allowed, three came with two outs in the ninth.
We were now down 3-2 in the series but still felt good about our chances with the last two games at Fenway. Bill Lee was set to pitch Game Six and me the finale if it got that far. But when more rain postponed the series for two days, Darrell Johnson decided to make a switch. He called me into his office and looked at me across the desk.
“You’re going to pitch the sixth game.”
“Why?”
“I want you in there.”
“Goddamn it, it’s supposed to be Bill Lee’s turn. I threw all those pitches the other day.”
“I know, but I want you to pitch.”
“OK, I’ll pitch.”
That’s his job as manager; I’m not the one who is going to decide. But I felt bad for Spaceman, who was a great competitor, had pitched terrific in Game Two, and I figured would take it hard. I was right; Lee was pissed then, and he’s still pissed now.
“Johnson should have let me pitch Game Six and Luis Game Seven,” Lee says today. “Luis could have used the extra rest, and that’s all I wanted for him. Besides, how could you not want Luis Tiant pitching the seventh game of the World Series?”
I appreciated the compliment, but it went both ways; I was confident that he would do a great job in the seventh game. Starting Game Six was fine with me, even more so after a third straight rainout got me that extra rest Bill was so worried about.
In the end, the game I did pitch in turned out to be one of the best in World Series history.
We got off to a fast start; after I got the Reds out in the top of the first, Lynn hit a three-run homer off Gary Nolan deep into the right-field bleachers in our half of the inning. There was a lot of pregame talk about how far I could go after my heavy workload during the past month, but I felt strong—and had much better and faster stuff than in Game Four. I allowed two hits and no runs over the first four innings, making it forty straight innings at Fenway Park since I had allowed an earned run. My ERA in my last six home games, covering forty-nine innings, was now 0.18.
I knew streaks like that couldn’t go on forever, especially against the Reds. In the fifth, they broke it. Armbrister walked, Rose singled him to third, and then Griffey hit a ball to dead-center that Lynn leaped for and just missed—slamming off the concrete wall and falling to the ground as Griffey reached third with a two-run triple. The whole park went silent as everyone waited to see if Freddie would be okay. He didn’t move for a while, but then he got up, stretched a bit, and stayed in the game. Tough kid.
It seemed like every time I was in a jam during this series, Morgan and Bench were coming up. Now here they were again. I got Morgan to pop to third, but Bench slammed a single over Yaz’s head in left field—the first hit anyone had off the Green Monster in three games. It was now 3-3, and with us doing nothing against four Reds relievers, it stayed that way until the seventh.
Now my magic was running out. Griffey and Morgan led off the Cincinnati seventh with singles, and after Bench and Perez flew out, Foster hit a two-run double to center that made it 5-3. That was the Reds’ tenth hit, and when Geronimo led off the eighth inning with a first-pitch homer on a hanging slider—the one real bad mistake I made that game—I had no reason to argue when Darrell Johnson came to take the ball from me.
The crowd gave me a standing ovation as I walked off, but I knew it was more for what I had done over the past several weeks than on this night.
It looked like the World Series was over, with the score 6-3 and Rawly Eastwick now into the game for Cincinnati, but we still had one more comeback in us. We put two men on with two outs in the eighth, and Johnson sent Bernie Carbo to the plate to pinch-hit. Carbo, a former NL Rookie of the Year with the Reds, had already hit a big pinch-homer against his old teammates in Game Three. Now, after a few real ugly swings, he did it again—stunning Eastwick and the whole ballpark with a shot into the center-field bleachers. That tied it at 6-6, and Fenway shook as loud as it ever did. Mighty Joe Young’s papa had come through.
That’s where the score stayed until the twelfth inning, thanks largely to another incredible defensive play. In the Cincinnati eleventh, with one out and Griffey on first, Joe Morgan hit a fly ball that Evans tracked to the right-field corner and then leaped and caught one-handed just before it reached the seats. Dewey hit the fence, spun around, and threw the ball back in to double-up Griffey—already well on his way to third with what he figured was the go-ahead run.
I saw that play on TV, from our team whirlpool where I had gone during extra innings for a good soak and a cigar after my long night’s work. I was still in there around 12:30 a.m. when Pudge led off the bottom of the twelfth, and when he hit Pat Darcy’s second pitch off the left-field foul pole for a game-winning homer, I jumped out of the water and started running down the hall to get onto the field and celebrate with my teammates.
Then, when I got into the dugout, I suddenly realized something—and stopped just in time.
“Goddamn!” I yelled. “Somebody get me a towel!”
I was so excited, I had almost run out onto the field in just my jock strap! It’s a good thing they didn’t have the camera zoomed in on the dugout like they do today. The TV fans would have had SOMMMMMME treat.
In the next morning’s papers, more than one sportswriter half-joked that rather than try and top Game Six, they should cancel the finale of the World Series and declare it a tie. Of course that couldn’t happen, and so Bill Lee took the mound against Game Five hero Gullett to decide a winner at Fenway. Sixty-nine million people watched on NBC, the largest television audience ever for a sporting event.
Just like the night before, we took an early 3-0 lead, but we also blew chances to score more runs and left a bunch of men on base. You can’t get away with that against a team like the Reds, and eventually they made us pay. In the sixth, with Lee still cruising along with a shutout, Rose singled and then made one of those key plays that can make or break a series. With one out, Bench grounded what looked like a double-play ball to short. Burleson threw to Doyle to get Rose at second, but Pete’s hard slide into Denny forced him to throw wildly to first for a two-base error.
Lee should have been out of the inning but now had to face Perez. He had held Tony hitless through almost two games, and as a pitcher when you’ve got a guy in your pocket like that you don’t want to try anything different. But the Spaceman has his own way of doing things, and so he threw a big slow curve to Perez that he called the “Leephus” pitch. He had thrown it to Perez once before, for a strike, and he thought he could get it by him again. But this time Tony had a better feel for it as it came in and crushed the hell out of it for a homer over the Green Monster. Now it was 3-2.
Still, Lee had a chance to be the hero. Then he developed a blister on the thumb of his pitching hand in the seventh inning and had to leave. Rogelio Moret relieved and gave up a game-tying single to Rose, but Jim Willoughby came in to get Bench with the bases loaded. The score was 3-3, and it stayed that way as Willoughby retired all four men to face him.
Then Johnson made a decision that fans would second-guess all winter. With two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the eighth, he pinch-hit for Willoughby with Cecil Cooper—who had been struggling badly with a .056 average in the series. Coop stayed in his rut, fouling out to third, which now left the ninth inning in the hands of rookie lefty Jim Burton. Two walks and two groundouts later, Morgan just got his bat on a good two-strike, low-and-outside slider from Burton and slapped a soft, sinking liner into center that landed in front of a charging Lynn for a single as Griffey scored.
That was it. We went in order, with Yaz making the last out on a fly ball to Geronimo in center; the Reds won the game, and the series, 4-3.
The cumulative totals show just how close the series was. We had sixty hits, the Reds fifty-nine. We scored thirty runs, the Reds twenty-nine. A record-tying five games were decided by one run, two in extra innings and two in the ninth. In the end the Reds were just one bloop hit better. Give us a healthy Jim Rice, and I bet things would have ended differently.
The day after Game Seven, the Boston Globe ran a tribute on its editorial page—a place you almost never see sports stories. Here is how it described the two teams:
“It was a contest between middle America with the glittering 56,000-seat Astroturfed Riverfront Stadium and Sparky Anderson running his clean-cut short-haired pitchers in relays from the bullpen and New England with its feisty old Fenway Park, misshapen but cozy as a living room with real grass and seating for 35,000 (not counting the fans on the billboards), and stoical Darrell Johnson waiting and watching as an ageless Cuban showed what it means to pitch from the heart.”
I liked that image of me pitching from the heart. It was true because at that time I felt I had so much in my heart to give—so much to be thankful for. That’s why that was my happiest time in baseball. Not just our making the postseason, but finally having my family all together.
That was my World Series trophy.