WALK PAST ANY LITTLE LEAGUE field in the Boston area during the mid-seventies, and there was a good chance you’d see at least one kid on the sidelines twisting his or her body and looking to the sky while pitching. Few dared to try baseball’s most famous delivery in real games, other than the wiffle-ball variety, because they knew nobody but the great El Tiante could turn themselves into a human pretzel and still throw strikes. But it was always fun to try, chomping your imaginary tobacco and picturing yourself on the mound at Fenway Park—the game on the line and the crowd chanting your name.
Ninety-nine wins between 1972 and 1976, including three in the dramatic postseason run of ’75, had helped make Luis Tiant the most popular pitcher in modern Red Sox history. But the death of his parents and Boston owner Tom Yawkey, who had supported him in salary disputes with management, weighed heavy on Tiant’s mind. In 1977 he sat out much of spring training while haggling over another contract, and when he returned the magic seemed to be gone from his right arm. The head bobs and hand shakes and leg swivels that made up his wondrous windup were still there—but not the results.
For the first time since his 1-7 debut with the Red Sox six years earlier, Tiant’s ability was openly being questioned in the summer of ’77—in newspapers, on the radio, even occasionally in the stands. Luis’s mysterious age had finally caught up with him, the skeptics said, or he was too concerned with his contract to focus on his job. His kids, already used to standing out as Black faces in a white neighborhood, were dealing with more challenges too. And even when Tiant rebounded to pitch strongly down the stretch in a three-way pennant race with New York and Baltimore, it was unclear whether the turnaround was a true return to form or a last gasp.
By the spring of 1978, while his Red Sox teammates and manager Don Zimmer still openly professed their confidence in Tiant, it was clear that the team’s new executives no longer viewed him as Boston’s ace. Big-name pitchers were acquired and slotted into the first and second spots in the rotation, and rubber-armed relievers were brought aboard as further insurance.
For the Red Sox to overtake the world champion New York Yankees in the American League East, the experts insisted, El Tiante would need to be a piece of the puzzle. How big a piece he could be was still unclear.
IT WASN’T JUST THE Yankees causing me trouble.
Boston has the world’s most passionate baseball fans, and they have always shown me love and respect. But some things I dealt with living in and around that city during the 1970s were not easy to handle, no matter how much people saw me smiling and joking. It wasn’t always easy trying to bring up a family in the Boston area as a Black and Latino man then, even if your last name was Tiant.
Where we lived, in Milton, was almost all white. Most of the people were great to us, but some weren’t—and the bad ones passed it down to the next generation. That was hard on my kids. Isabel used to come home crying from school because the other students made fun of her, saying things like “all you eat are beans and greasy stuff.”
Luis Jr. was older, but he got it too.
“When we moved to Milton, I was about to turn twelve,” he remembers. “Even though I had been traveling all around the majors with my dad in the summers, when he played in Cleveland, Minnesota, and then Boston, making a permanent move to the United States and going to school there was different. That’s when you get hit with that racism, and I got it from both ends—because I was Hispanic and I was Black. I was prepared after hearing the stories about what my dad had been through, but it was still tough.
“The hardest thing was experiencing it in your own neighborhood. Guys would drive by and yell the ‘N word’ when we were out cutting the grass. I’m not sure if they knew who my dad was when they did it, but it probably would not have mattered. You grow up and get a wake-up call pretty early about that kind of stuff.”
I always told my kids, if somebody makes fun of you because of who you are, you kick their ass! So, one time in middle school a bigger kid really got on Luis Jr., and he beat him up. Then he came home and told me what he did. I was sorry it happened, but I was proud of him for sticking up for himself—and told him so.
The next day I walked to the corner to meet Luis when the school bus dropped him off, but it went by without stopping. I thought something might be wrong, so I went to the school; it turned out they were punishing him because of the fight—keeping him after school. So I went to see the principal.
“What happened to my son?” I asked him.
“He got in a fight.”
“Do you know why? Because I talked to my kid first, and he told me everything.”
“Yes, we know why.”
“Then why are you punishing him, but you’re not also punishing the other kid? Because he’s white?”
The principal didn’t say anything, but I could tell I had caught him.
“If you permit that shit here, you’re a racist,” I said, raising my voice. “I tell you something right now. This is the last time you punish my kid like this. If you do it again, I’m going to come here and beat your ass. Then I’m going to bring in the television cameras and the newspaper reporters, and you’re going to get fired.”
That was one way being a pro athlete could help you out, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
Sometimes, like Luis Jr. remembers, the trouble even came to our house. There used to be these kids who would pull down our driveway when we were inside, throw bottles at our house, and then take off. I’m sure they knew who we were, one of the only Black families in town.
One day I looked out the window and saw their car, so I decided to go after those motherfuckers. I jumped in my car, started chasing them, and when they turned into a little supermarket, I pulled in right beside them. Then I got out and went over to the driver’s window.
“Get out of the car.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean get out of the fucking car. Why did you throw bottles at my house?”
“No, no, it wasn’t us!”
“I saw your car, and now I’m going to kick all your asses.”
There were four kids. At that time, I had a gun, a nine-millimeter, that I brought with me. They looked nervous and kept saying it wasn’t them. They wouldn’t get out, and I didn’t want to force them, just scare them.
“I’m going to let you go this time, but if I see you again, I won’t.”
I knew all the police in town, so the next day I went to the station and explained to the chief what happened. Then I told him, “If I see these motherfuckers again, doing that shit, I’m going to shoot them.”
The chief tried to calm me down and told me I’d get in trouble if I really went after the kids.
“I don’t give a shit,” I told him. “If they do that to me at my house, and to my family, I’m going to protect them.”
In the end I did the smart thing. I got these big blocks and put them up at the top of my driveway. I painted them white, and those punks didn’t come back again.
The crazy thing is, sometimes even helping someone could lead to problems. There was this old guy who lived across the street, and I’m guessing he was one of those people who didn’t want us moving into the neighborhood four years before. Just before I left for spring training in 1978, New England was hit with the huge snowstorm everybody calls the Blizzard of ’78. There were two to three feet of snow, lots of people lost power, and anyone who couldn’t shovel was stuck inside their homes.
I got out my snowblower, cleaned up my driveway and everything, and then looked over at the old man’s house. There was snow everywhere, real heavy stuff, and I knew he couldn’t move any of it with a shovel. It was just him and his wife living there; their two daughters were grown up. So I went over with my snowblower and knocked on his door.
“I’m going to help you,” I said.
“No, you don’t have to do that.”
“Look, I know you can’t do it. You’re going to have a heart attack if you try. Let me clean it.”
So I cleaned it. Later on I looked out my window and saw the guy’s garage door was open, so I went over to tell him. Nobody answered the front door this time, but I could see him looking out. Maybe he didn’t recognize me, I don’t know, but suddenly there were two police cruisers coming down the street—one from each side. Once they got close, the cops saw who it was and rolled down their windows. They knew me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked one of them.
“Someone called and said a Black guy was knocking on their door.”
“His garage door was open! I didn’t want anybody to get inside his house, so I went over to tell him!”
“Don’t worry about it. Just go home.”
After that, I never spoke to the old guy again. But I did get a little revenge. When I went to sell my house, he and his wife wanted to buy it for one of their daughters. I said, “No way I’m selling it to you,” and in the end I sold it to a dentist.
A Black dentist!
Eventually everyone got shoveled out and down to Florida. I was determined to show that I still had gas left in my tank after the 1977 season. It had been a bad year for me, and I won’t make excuses for it. But there was a lot of stuff I was dealing with after the death of my parents, and now I felt like my mind was in a much better place.
“What’s done is done,” I told Joe Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald. “I’m going to spring training the way a rookie goes. I’m going down there to win a job. I’m not going down like a veteran who knows he’s made the team. I’m going to work hard, and I’m going to show everybody that I can be the Luis Tiant I was two years ago.”
Teammates like Fisk, Yaz, and Dwight Evans all told Fitzgerald and other sportswriters that they thought I would bounce back and have a good year. So did the manager, who really got my juices flowing when he said he was going to stick with a four-man rotation. I never felt right or pitched well on four days’ rest, which I did for much of ’77 when Zim used five starters.
“Luis is going to pitch winning ball this year for this club,” Zimmer said shortly before the regular season. “I’ve been saying this since the end of last season, and if he doesn’t do it, then a lot of people can laugh at me.”
There were lot of reasons for Zim and the rest of us to be optimistic, besides coming off a ninety-seven-win year. About a year after Mr. Yawkey died, the Red Sox were sold to a group headed up by two of his closest advisors, team vice president Haywood Sullivan and team trainer Buddy LeRoux. Mr. Yawkey’s widow, Jean, was the third senior partner, and since she had all the money, she had the final say. Mrs. Yawkey didn’t like general manager Dick O’Connell, so he was fired, and Sullivan took over as GM. Originally a backup catcher for the Red Sox in the fifties, and later a big-league manager, Sully knew the game and didn’t waste any time getting us just what we needed. By the time he was done, we’d have ten new players on our twenty-five-man roster, including six new pitchers on an eleven-man staff.
First was free agent starter Mike Torrez, a big, strong right-hander who had helped the Yankees to the championship the year before. He was good for at least fifteen wins and close to 250 innings every year, and had shown he could do it in the postseason with two wins (including the clincher) in the ’77 World Series against the Dodgers. By signing Torrez we were also weakening the Yanks, which was a great bonus. Lefty Tom Burgmeier—a reliable veteran who could go long or short relief; and righty Dick Drago—our bullpen stopper back in ’75, before we traded him to the Angels—were both brought in to lighten Campbell’s load in the bullpen.
One player Zimmer had talked about getting for a while was Angels’ second baseman Jerry Remy. Although mostly a singles hitter, Remy had a good glove, was a great bunter, and could steal you thirty to forty bases a season. Denny Doyle had done a real solid job for us at second the past three years, but he wasn’t fast and turned thirty-four over the winter; Remy was only twenty-five. Zim figured having a young, scrappy guy at the top of the order who could get himself in scoring position with Rice, Yaz, Fisk, and the other big boys coming up would be a great fit. He also thought that because Remy grew up outside of Boston as a huge Red Sox fan, he’d be extra motivated to do well. Sully agreed, so we traded for Remy and released Doyle.
Our last move was the biggest. Just before Opening Day, Sully swung a deal with Cleveland that cost us Rick Wise and two top prospects but got us one of the league’s best young guns: Dennis Eckersley. Eck was just twenty-three but had already thrown a no-hitter, made an All-Star team, and had a two-hundred-strikeout season. He was a tall, lean right-hander from California with a great fastball, tons of hair, and loads of self-confidence.
Fans loved Eck’s energy on the mound, where he had a high leg-kick and liked to pump his fist after strikeouts. In the clubhouse he was a colorful guy with his own “baseball language” that reporters and fans quickly picked up on. Strikeouts were “punchouts,” a pitcher with a good fastball had “cheese,” and bad hitters were “lambs.” If you punched out lots of lambs with your cheese you made more “iron”—money. He liked to have fun, but Eck earned our respect because he always told it like it was; if he made a horseshit pitch that cost us a game, he owned up to it.
I was excited to be part of a starting rotation with Eckersley, Torrez, and Lee, but that would have to wait. On March 17, two weeks before we swung the deal for Eck, I was hit on the index finger of my pitching hand by a line drive off the bat of Detroit’s Steve Kemp. My finger hurt so bad at first, I thought it was broken, and if it was that could have been the end of my career. The index finger is crucial for pitchers because you need it for pressure when holding all your pitches. Luckily, it turned out to only be a dislocation, but I still needed to spend a month on the disabled list.
My first time pitching in the regular season, on April 18, was also my first relief appearance since 1972. The fans gave me a big hand when I came in to start the seventh inning at Fenway, with the Brewers beating us 6-5, and I pitched three hitless innings as we came back to win, 7-6, on a Fisk double in the ninth. It felt good to be out there, but I thought it would take me awhile to get up to my top form.
I was wrong. After pitching five decent innings in my first start, against the Indians, I went into Texas on April 28 and had a perfect game going into the sixth. I wasn’t blowing guys away, but it was a seventy-degree night, and I always liked pitching in warm weather. Although I tired a bit in the later innings and left the game with the score 3-3, I felt good about my progress.
Then my luck went bad again. I was up 5-3 in my next start, against Minnesota, but after a thirty-eight-minute rain delay, I lost my control and blew the lead—although we did come back to win. My next time out, against Kansas City, I felt I had my best stuff of the season. But I pulled a muscle in my right hamstring fielding a bunt and had to come out in the third inning.
“I had felt something back there last week,” I told reporters after the game, “but it wasn’t until tonight that it popped. I’ve been trying to stretch it (the muscle) and now it’s popped.” Bill Campbell, our great reliever who was nursing a sore arm, walked by me in the clubhouse while I was talking about my hamstring. He looked like he felt bad for me, but I just laughed.
“Watch,” I said to him. “Tomorrow I’ll probably fall out of bed and bust my head.”
Why was I joking around? First off, the doctor told me it wasn’t serious and that I probably wouldn’t even miss a start. Plus, even though all this stuff was happening to me, we were still winning. Somebody was always stepping up. That night, after I had to come out, Bob Stanley pitched the last seven innings to get the 8-4 win. It was our sixth straight victory and the fourth in the five games I had appeared in.
The doctor wasn’t quite right about the timing. I wound up missing more than two weeks, and when I finally got back on the mound on May 22 at Detroit, I felt so strong I could throw the ball through a wall. That’s not always a good thing; if your arm feels too strong, and you throw too powerfully, you can leave the ball up and have a hard time finding the strike zone. That’s why I liked pitching every fourth day because you don’t have time to get too well-rested.
I left plenty of balls up that night, walking six and letting up eight hits, but I gutted through. In the end, I got a 156-pitch, 9-3 win in front of a wild crowd of more than 52,000 at Tiger Stadium excited by their team’s surprisingly good start. We had some injuries in our bullpen, especially Campbell, so Zim was happy to let me keep going until I asked out. The way I felt that night, he knew that wasn’t ever going to happen.
So did my teammates.
“Luis was not going to go out there and try and go five innings; he was going to try and go out and complete the game,” remembers Jim Rice. “Once he started a game, he had to be VERRRRRRRRY bad for you to take him out—because he wasn’t going to come out.”
That victory at Detroit put us in a first-place tie with the Tigers atop the American League East, one game ahead of the Yankees. It was only my second win of the year, but it got me rolling. I won my next four starts, two by shutout. I was really starting to feel good again.
“It’s no longer a question of his coming back,” Zimmer said after I beat the Mariners, 3-2, in early June, “only a matter of how many games he wins.”
Pudge was more precise when I shutout the A’s on a four-hitter my next time out: “He’s as good now as he’s ever been.”
By the time I beat the Orioles on June 24, letting up three solo homers but getting the big outs when I needed them, I was 7-0 with a 2.84 ERA. The team had won my last nine starts, and my record put me in good company with the rest of our rotation: Torrez was 10-3, Eckersley 7-2, and Lee 8-3. Stanley, Drago, and Burgmeier were all doing a great job in relief, and with our lineup, we were in almost every game we played—and winning most of them. That’s the night I first told reporters, “This is the best team I’ve ever played on,” and I still feel that way. Just look at Zim’s preferred batting order:
1. Rick Burleson (SS)
2. Jerry Remy (2B)
3. Jim Rice (DH)
4. Carl Yastrzemski (LF)
5. Carlton Fisk (C)
6. Fred Lynn (CF)
7. George Scott (IB)
8. Dwight Evans (RF)
9. Butch Hobson (3B)
All nine guys had been an All-Star at least once by ’78 except Hobson, and he was a thirty-homer, one-hundred-ribbie guy batting ninth. Six of them won at least one Gold Glove in their careers, and a bunch had three or more. Rice, Yaz, and Fisk are all in the Hall of Fame. Lynn, Yaz, and Rice were MVPs. You get the idea; it wasn’t quite the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, but it was damn close. We had everything—decent speed, great power, strong defense, and clutch hitters with postseason experience.
Our first series against the Yankees, from June 19 to 21 at Fenway, was the most hyped-up regular season series of 1978. My start against Ken Clay on the 19th drew a 14.3 rating and a 28 percent audience share on NBC’s Monday Night Baseball, which means twenty-six million people watched at least part of the game. That was the most to watch a regular season baseball telecast in prime time since April 8, 1974, the night Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth. We were the hottest team in sports.
The only problem was that our manager wanted all his best guys out there every day. Don Zimmer was not big on resting players, and after coming up short in the ’77 AL East race, he was determined to build such a big lead this year that we couldn’t blow it. That’s not a formula for success; during a long season, guys are going to need a break. Zim couldn’t identify with that. He was a gamer, going back to his playing days with the old Brooklyn Dodgers when he had returned to the field after two serious beanings—including one that almost killed him. Guys who didn’t want to come out, even when hurt, were his kind of players.
Jim Rice fit this type. Jim Ed never came out, playing through a bunch of nagging injuries and getting into all of our 163 games in ’78. The reigning home run champion with thirty-nine the previous year, he was even better this time around—batting .315 and leading the majors in hits (213), home runs (46), RBI (139), triples (15), and slugging percentage (.600) to take home the MVP award. His 406 total bases that year made Rice the first player since Aaron in 1959 to top the four-hundred-mark, and it seemed like every one of them came at a big time. Jim Ed was quiet, reliable, and never complained; a “manager’s dream” as Zimmer put it.
Rice was superhuman that summer, but most guys liked to take a breather now and then. Two of our best backups were fourth outfielder Bernie Carbo, who was still probably the top pinch-hitter in the game; and Bob Montgomery, an excellent backup catcher. Monty hardly played unless Pudge was on the disabled list because Zimmer wanted Pudge in there controlling the game, and he knew Fisk would never ask for a day off. In 1977 Fisk had been behind the plate for 151 games, and in ’78 he would catch 154 more. Montgomery? He got into a combined twenty-seven games during the two seasons.
As for Carbo, he was a crazy character who never meshed with old-school guys like Zimmer. In fact, I think the only guy Zim had a tougher time with than Bernie was his close friend—original “Spaceman” Bill Lee. So as soon as Zim had a chance in ’78, with us on top by a good margin in our division, he convinced Haywood to sell Carbo to Cleveland for next to nothing right at the June 15 tradeline. We didn’t even get a player in return, just some small cash. That left Bob Bailey as our top power threat off the bench, and Bailey couldn’t get around on a fastball anymore. Jack Brohamer, a reserve infielder with a decent bat, and Fred Kendall, a starting catcher the previous six seasons in San Diego and Cleveland, also rarely saw action.
For a while it didn’t matter. The starting nine were going great, the pitchers were too, and we hit the All-Star break with a 57-26 record (34-6 at home) and a nine-game lead over second-place Milwaukee in the AL East. The Yanks were eleven-and-one-half games out, the Orioles thirteen back, and our .687 winning percentage translated out to 111-51 over a full season. Everybody figured we had the division all wrapped up.
Part of the reason for our great first half, I believe, was because so many guys on the team that were assembled the previous winter knew each other well. Since Scott had originally come up with the Red Sox in the sixties before we traded him to Milwaukee, the only guy in our starting nine who was not developed in our farm system was Remy. Many of the younger guys came up together in the minors, and us older dudes had played with and against each other for five or more years.
Overall, we had a lot of mutual respect for one another. We were not going to be the greatest friends, or go out on the town every night in one big group, but we were happy to play with each other and knew when we played as a unit that we could beat anybody. “Right now, this team is the closest I’ve ever seen a Red Sox team,” said Yaz, then in his eighteenth season.
My job, as always, was to keep things loose. This extended from the clubhouse into the dugout where I was what they call a bench-jockey. I’d yell at guys on opposing teams, all in good fun, and would make sure our own guys got some ribbing too.
One day Yaz was at the plate, got jammed on a pitch, and broke his bat into three pieces. The bat boy went to put it in the back for scrap, but I said, “Give it to me!” Then I taped it up, got some string, and hung it up in the bat rack. Yaz could see his “fixed” bat from left field, and he cursed me out when he came in. But he was also laughing, which helped him get over getting jammed. The next time up, he got a hit.
Yaz and other guys on the team would do similar things to me. One time a batter took me real deep, and when I came into the dugout everybody moved away from me like I was contagious. I just put on my jacket, sat down in the corner, and drank a cup of water. Then one of them came over to me, holding a ball.
“How do you do it?” he asked, all serious. “Do you grip the ball with one or two fingers?” He really seemed to want to know how to give up a long bomb like me.
I told him what he could do with his ball.
We sent seven members of our starting lineup to the ’78 All-Star game in San Diego—Burleson, Evans, Fisk, Lynn, Remy, Rice, and Yastrzemski—another sign of just how great a club we had. Then, when the regular season started back up, we quickly went on another winning streak to get our record up to 62-28 on July 19. The Brewers were still nine games back, the Orioles twelve and a half, and the Yankees fourteen games back. The only thing keeping New York from falling off the map altogether was their great young lefty pitcher, Ron Guidry. “Louisiana Lightening” was 14-1 with a 2.11 ERA after his win on July 20; without him, the Yanks were a .500 team.
Red Sox fans were probably thinking, “It can’t get any better than this.” They were right. Over the next two months, everything that went right the first half of the season began going wrong—starting with our health.
Injuries started hitting the team all at once in July; Burleson hurt his ankle, Remy cracked his wrist, Evans started having dizzy spells after a beaning, and Hobson developed problems with bone chips in his elbow. Fisk played with two broken ribs most of the second half and still caught 154 games. Yaz had back trouble that landed him in the hospital in August, along with wrist issues, and both greatly sapped his power; in a seven-week span from mid-July to early September, he hit just one home run.
The Yankees, meanwhile, had worked through their own injury problems and were starting to get healthy—and win. New York’s hot-headed manager Billy Martin resigned in mid-July; under his successor, the much calmer Bob Lemon, the Yanks quickly turned their season around. Guidry kept doing his thing, raising his record to 20-2 by September 4, and other pitchers like Ed Figueroa and Catfish Hunter started winning consistently. New York’s heavy hitters like Jackson, Graig Nettles, Lou Piniella, and Chris Chambliss were heating up too.
A major part of our problem was the same thing that happened when we blew our big September lead in 1974: we completely stopped hitting. Lynn (.332 average at the All-Star break), Evans (.286), and Yaz (.298) dropped way down in the second half as injuries and the lack of rest Zim gave them earlier in the season took its toll. It hit the whole lineup; seven of our regulars had their averages fall after the break, and as a team we hit only .250 in the second half compared to .283 in the first. Nobody felt it worse than George Scott, who went through a 2-for-42 slide at the plate in July and August and then a 2-for-43 dip in September.
The pitching slipped too, although not nearly as much. Our team ERA was 3.46 in the first half, 3.62 in the second, but because of the drop-off in run support we lost a lot of the games we had been winning earlier on. Torrez, 11-4 at the break, went 5-9 in the second half—including one stretch of eight straight winless starts. Lee, who like me started 6-0, went from 9-3 in the first half to 1-7 in the second before Zimmer pulled him from the rotation and then stopped pitching him altogether. That was a situation where Zim let his personal feelings override what was best for the team because Lee was still a strong veteran pitcher who we really could have used down the stretch.
Eck, our most consistent starter all year, was 10-2 at the break and 10-6 after it, but his ERA was actually much better in the second half—another sign it was our offense slumping the most. Me? I struggled like everyone else mid-year; 7-1 at the break, I lost six of my first eight decisions after the All-Star game. My ERA stayed respectably under 3.50, and one of my two wins was the two hundredth of my career—a 4-2, complete game six-hitter against Nolan Ryan and the Angels at Anaheim Stadium on August 16.
But nobody was paying much attention to how we were losing, only how much we were losing.
After reaching our high point of 62-28 on July 19, we lost eleven of fourteen games (including a 2-8 road trip) to let the Brewers surge back to within four-and-one-half games in early August. Then, after getting back on track for a few weeks, we went through another slump just before and after Labor Day. Only a rookie pitcher named Jim Wright, who earned a regular spot in the rotation when Lee was pulled and then went 5-1 in July and August, kept things from being even worse.
The Yankees, meanwhile, kept charging, and as they passed the Orioles and Brewers to move into second place, the sportswriters started letting us have it.
Boston was one of the first cities with a lot of sports talk on the radio. Most of the guys on the air then were former newspaper beat reporters and columnists who could say whatever they wanted since they no longer had to face players in the clubhouse. Zim got it the worst; I remember him telling me that his wife cried when she heard some of the shit they were saying about him in the car as they drove home from games.
With me, like always, it was mostly cracks about my age. It reminded me of back in ’76 when I was 10-10 in July and the sportswriters were saying that I was over the hill—at thirty-five years old. Of course, they didn’t believe I was thirty-five; they probably figured I was closer to forty-five and about to fall apart. Then when I was 15-10 in August, I heard the radio guys saying I was doing well “for a guy my age.” I finished that year 21-12, so I guess they were right.
Now here I was two years later, slumping like the rest of the team, and again the “experts” figured it had to be my age. The Boston Globe published fan letters in the Sunday Sports pages, and one guy wrote in saying I should be pitching once a week to keep myself from wearing out. Even the New York Times, which was supposed to be the serious paper, had reporters writing crap like, “Tiant, who admits to being thirty-six years old.”
I’ll tell you something—that shit was getting old. I was doing just fine.
On September 6, after leaving my last start early with a pulled muscle, I was back on the mound to face the Orioles and red-hot Dennis Martinez at Baltimore. We both wound up pitching two-hitters, but I got the 2–0 win because I had Yaz—who hit a two-run shot in the seventh for his first home run since August 5. Yelling loud enough for all to hear, Fisk broke up the clubhouse by announcing that “a cripple and an old man” had been the difference-makers in the game.
“This was as big a lift as we could ask for,” Yaz said as we hugged in the clubhouse.
“It was a big win for me, a big win for everybody,” I replied. “The best I’d pitched all year.”
What both of us were hoping was that the momentum from that game would carry over to the next four—which would be played against the Yankees at Fenway Park starting the next night.
It didn’t.
The pressure was all on us; the Yankees were hot, we were struggling, and our lead was down to four games. We still felt like we could hold them off as some of our injured guys were healing up. But the Yanks were on some kind of a roll, and they whipped us in the first three games of the series by scores that still hurt to think about: 15-3, 13-2, and 7-0.
It was incredible; I never saw anything like it in baseball. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. We were outhit forty-nine to sixteen in the three games, committed eleven errors to their four, and none of our three starters (Torrez, Wright, and Eckersley) made it to the fifth inning.
On Friday night, after we made seven errors that led to seven unearned runs in the 13-2 game, I tried to spark some life into what was a very quiet clubhouse.
“All right, you guys, let’s go. What the hell’s going on here? Let’s get some music on. Forget what happened tonight, and start thinking about tomorrow.”
The speech seemed to help, at least for the night. Then when we lost the third game too, dropping our lead to just one game, I decided to take a more hands-on approach to picking up my teammates. I was scheduled to pitch Monday against Baltimore, as part of Zimmer’s new five-man rotation, but I certainly didn’t need the fourth day’s rest. I wanted to do what I could to try and stop this horrible slide now.
So I went to Zim’s office.
“Skip,” I said, “I want to pitch tomorrow [Sunday].”
“No, we need you in Baltimore to face Jim Palmer Monday night; those games are just as important.”
How could he say that? The fourth game with New York was as big as they got—a two-game swing in the standings and a chance to keep ourselves in first place with a victory. Zim, as I’ve said, was old-school all the way. He wanted to stick with our set rotation, and since he also refused to start Bill Lee—Yaz had tried unsuccessfully to sway him on that one, but Zim used Lee to mop up in the Friday blowout—he was going with a rookie, lefty Bobby Sprowl, to try and prevent a Yankees series sweep.
“He’s got ice water in his veins,” Zim supposedly said of Sprowl in defending his choice. But whatever coolness the kid may have felt didn’t last long. He was gone after just six batters, having walked four and allowed an RBI base hit. Three runs were ultimately charged to Sprowl, who in bits of three more seasons never earned a single win in the major leagues.
Our fourteen-game lead was now completely gone, and we were tied for first with New York. It then took only six days and five more losses to fall three-and-one-half games behind the Yankees—with the last two of those losses coming in the Bronx during our last series there. We finally broke through with a win over New York on September 18, but we still needed to make up two-and-one-half games in the last two weeks of the season to catch them.
Many people have forgotten exactly what happened next, and they like to say we choked. We did not choke. While the Yankees went through the final two weeks with a solid 9-5 record, we went 12-2—including eight straight wins to close out the regular season.
I did my part. We had been beaten by the last-place Blue Jays, 5–4, on September 22, and when the Yankees won the same night, we were two games back with just eight to play. We could not afford to lose again, and heading into my start at Toronto, on September 23, I managed to say just what I felt:
“If we lose today, it will be over my dead body. They’ll have to leave me face down on the mound.”
No last rites were needed. I threw 142 pitches and kept twelve baserunners from scoring in a 3-1, complete-game win. “It was Tiant’s game, vintage El Tiante, the fourth game of the 1975 World Series El Tiante,” Peter Gammons wrote in the Boston Globe. “He was in more trouble than a Middle East border guard, but through one jam after another, Don Zimmer stood by him.”
Jim Rice, who homered that day, says such games never surprised him.
“You knew when you went out there and got Luis two or three runs, you had a chance to win a ballgame,” Rice recalls. “A lot of guys, you couldn’t give them two or three runs and have that kind of confidence. With him, you could.”
New York lost to Cleveland, so that win got us to within one game with seven to go. The final week of the season, as both us and the Yankees won every day and the Yanks clung to that one-game lead, the suspense grew.
On September 27, going against the Tigers at Fenway, I pitched six solid innings in a 5-2 win. It was a chilly night, and I had a good fastball that I used to get me out of some big jams. “This team has proven something,” I told reporters after that game. “They’ve turned it around. Now we just have to see what happens.”
For three days, what happened was three more wins by both the Red Sox and Yankees bringing us to the last day of the regular season. New York was playing Cleveland at Yankee Stadium that Sunday afternoon with red-hot Catfish Hunter pitching. We were facing Toronto at Fenway Park with me on the mound. If the Yankees lost, and we won, there would be a one-game playoff for the AL East title at Fenway the next afternoon (we had won a coin flip to determine the venue). If we lost, or New York won, they would win the division.
I was confident I’d do my part. So were the fans.
“You wanted Tiant to have the ball in those big games,” says Dan Shaughnessy, longtime Boston Globe sportswriter and columnist. “He was just a big-game guy, and he had a level of popularity that was very Pedro-esque in terms of what we saw later with Pedro Martinez. He was just such a joy to watch.”
Like I did before every start, I took the Santa Barbara medallion I always wore and fastened its chain in between two buttons on my uniform top to keep it from banging around when I pitched. Saint Barbara of Cuba is the patron saint of artillerymen, and I was taking her with me to battle one more time.
There were really two games played at Fenway Park that day. Besides watching us and the Blue Jays, fans were constantly looking over at the left-field scoreboard for any updates from the Indians-Yankees matchup. Our bullpen pitchers were also helping out with audio reports from the Bronx.
“We had a radio in the bullpen and were listening to the Yankees game,” reliever Tom Burgmeier remembers. “When the Indians got a few runs, Fenway just erupted.”
It did not take long to see—and hear—that it wasn’t Hunter’s day. The Indians scored twice in the first on an Andre Thornton homer, and after the Yankees came right back with a pair in their half of the inning, Cleveland chased Hunter with four more runs in the second. By the fourth inning it was 7-2, and Indians starter Rick Waits made it hold up.
Our game took a while longer to take shape. It was scoreless into the bottom of the fifth when Butch Hobson singled, moved to third on an error, and then scored on a Jack Brohamer groundout. A little later that inning, Jerry Remy doubled Brohamer in to make it 2-0. The way I was going, I felt pretty good about that score, and after my teammates got me some breathing room with late homers by Burleson and Rice, it was 5-0, and the chances for a playoff game were looking really good.
I wound up with a two-hit shutout, and near the end it was pure fun. The New York-Cleveland game was going into its last innings around the same time as ours, so while I was pitching in the eighth and ninth, I started intentionally taking long peeks at the Yankees score when I twisted my body around during my windup. Some fans picked up on it, and in the ninth inning the Jumbotron scoreboard behind the centerfield bleachers flashed a message that sparked a loud ovation:
FINAL
CLEV 9-NY 2
THANK YOU RICK WAITS
The final Toronto batter of our game was Roy Howell. I jammed him with a rising fastball, and he sent it straight up and to the left of third base. Brohamer settled under it in foul ground and was already jumping for joy by the time he caught it.
When he did, we had finally caught New York.
There would now be one more game between the two teams with the best records in baseball. The winner would finish 100-63 and fly on to Kansas City to start the AL Playoffs. The loser would go home for the winter with a 99–64 mark.
A few fans were starting to rush the field, so I hugged Pudge and sprinted off the mound and into the dugout before things got too crazy. In the clubhouse, as I iced down my arm and had a cigar, I touched the Santa Barbara medallion, still around my neck. She had come through for me again.
“They would not lose that day,” says Dick Johnson of the Sports Museum, who was at the finale. “It was one of the best-pitched games of Luis’s career, and that was no surprise because it meant so much. Gosh, if only that had been the playoff game.”
I wished so, too, and had already told Zimmer I’d be ready if he needed me against the Yankees. Who cares if I had no day’s rest? I’d have the whole winter to rest.
Mike Torrez was going to have his hands full with 24-3 Ron Guidry. If we lost that game, I knew that many people—even after our eight straight wins, and our ninety-nine wins overall—would always see us as chokers.
Torrez had been slumping for six weeks, but he was very confident going into the playoff. He really wanted to beat his former teammates, and early on he was as sharp as I’d ever seen him. Sharper even than Guidry, who we got in front of 1-0 on Yaz’s second-inning homer just inside the right-field foul pole. Gid had been almost unhittable all year, and would wind up with the lowest ERA in the league (1.74) since my 1.60 with the Indians ten years before. But on this day he seemed tired, and in the sixth inning we had him on the ropes.
Burleson led off with a double and was singled in by Rice. With two outs and men on first and second, Fred Lynn hit a line drive towards the right-field corner that Lou Piniella caught on the run just in front of the short fence out there. Baseball is a game of inches, and of preparation. Catcher Thurman Munson had told Piniella before the inning that because Guidry’s slider—a sharp breaking pitch that cut across the plate—was moving slower than usual, the left-handed Lynn might be able to get his bat around quick enough to pull it to right. So, when Lynn came up, Piniella yelled over to center fielder Mickey Rivers, and the two of them each moved six steps to his left. That put Lou in perfect position to make the play when Lynn did pull the ball, just as Munson predicted. If Piniella had not moved, Lynn’s hit would likely have rolled untouched to the corner and given us a 4–0 lead.
Instead, we let Guidry off the hook.
A game of inches. That’s all Bucky Dent’s home run in the seventh inning made it over the Green Monster wall by, but it was good enough to put the Yankees up, 3-2. Lynn called it a “fence-scraper.” Dent, who hit five homers all year, got this one with one of Piniella’s bats; Mickey Rivers gave it to him after noticing Bucky’s was cracked on the previous pitch, which he fouled off his foot. Dent only swung the new bat once, but that’s all he needed.
Why was that important? Well, if Rivers didn’t notice the crack in Bucky’s bat and switch it up, Dent might not have gotten as much on his swing. Plus, Rivers told me later that the bat was corked! I don’t know if it’s true, and when we were all interviewed for the “14 Back” documentary about the ’78 season and the playoff game, Rivers smiled and said there was no cork. I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Both teams scored two more runs, and in the bottom of the ninth, with New York up, 5-4, and two outs, everything came down to a few inches again. Yastrzemski was up with Burleson on third and Remy on first. Goose Gossage had come in for Guidry in the seventh, and we had hit him pretty hard. A single here would tie the game; a double could win it.
Gossage went to 1-and-0 on Yaz, then threw him a fastball that exploded at the last moment, rising up and in. A real sick pitch that fooled Yaz. He hit a high pop to third that Graig Nettles caught just off the bag in foul ground—the exact same play, in the exact same spot, that Brohamer made to end my win the day before. Nettles even jumped up just like Brohamer did, but this time the crowd was almost completely silent. The home team had lost.
The Goose got it right when he told someone that the American and National League playoffs that year, as well as the World Series, would soon be forgotten. “When people think back to the 1978 season,” Gossage said, “the only thing they will remember is that Red Sox-Yankees playoff game.”
They do still remember it, and in Boston, at least, I hope they also remember the one that came before it. The game that made it possible.