AFTER 295 VICTORIES, 746 GAMES, and nearly 4,300 innings spread out over twenty-three professional seasons—plus nearly that many years of winter ball—it was finally over. The world of pain-reducing whirlpools, shower-defying cigars, and good-natured clubhouse pranks was in the rear-view mirror.
There would be old-timer’s contests, an old-timer’s league, and numerous ceremonial first pitches to come, but the fiercely physical and ultra-competitive portion of Luis Tiant’s baseball life was ending. Now he needed something to take its place—a way to channel all the energy and emotion that he once carried to the mound into another activity.
Tiant found plenty to do with the second half of his life. He added to his ever-growing circle of friends and admirers and showed that he was as adept at teaching baseball to others as he was at playing it. Graying gracefully alongside his beloved Maria, he watched with pride as his children grew and started lives of their own—including a “third son” who, while never officially given the Tiant name, was as beloved as anyone who did. Even talk of his age stopped; at fifty, and then sixty, Tiant maintained the bright-eyed, wrinkle-free appearance of a much younger man. He got the last laugh there, too.
Through it all, however, he never stopped loving or missing the city where his dreams as a pitcher and a family man came true. Where he built a home, and a life, that made his parents proud. Things were said and egos bruised as Tiant left the Red Sox, which made the possibility of his returning to the team as a coach or in another capacity highly unlikely under the same ownership group. So for twenty-plus years while the Yawkey name topped the letterhead at Fenway Park, Luis was a legend in exile. Loved, but at a distance.
Considering the limitless supply of baseball wisdom and wit that the franchise was denied during this period, and the pitchers from all skill levels and backgrounds who could have learned from his challenges and triumphs, it was an organizational grudge of epic proportions, the full costs of which cannot be measured. How, for instance, could Luis Tiant have helped Oil Can Boyd deal with the dual stresses of being a great young pitcher and a charismatic man of color, in a city where racial tensions still ran high? Could he have provided wise counsel to Bret Saberhagen on how to reinvent oneself after serious surgery?
We will never know, which is perhaps just as well. For in the time he has been given to make an impact on those wishing to ply their trade at Fenway Park, he has more than exceeded expectations.
YOU’VE BEEN DOING SOMETHING all your life, reach the top of your profession, and then come to a point when you can no longer meet the standards you set for yourself. What comes next? How do you move on—and how do you let go?
Some people never figure that out, but for me the answer felt obvious.
Since I was a little boy, throwing around homemade balls with my friends or watching my father from a dugout bench, baseball had been my life. My days and nights were always wrapped up in the next game, the next workout, the next season, the next pitch. When I wasn’t playing or practicing baseball, I was thinking about it—sometimes too much. It was my profession and my salvation; it provided me with the freedom and courage to visit new lands, fight injustices, become a man, and find my voice. Through the game, I met many wonderful people and had many great experiences.
An inheritance from my father, baseball is what connected me to him as a boy and as a man. It sometimes seemed like a wedge between us, but in the end, it was a powerful force that kept us linked even when circumstances beyond our control forced us apart. My love for the game is what led my mother to advocate on my behalf and convince my father to let me pursue a career in pro ball. It also gave my parents the strength to make the most agonizing decision of their lives: telling me not to come home to Cuba. They sacrificed fifteen years with their only child so that I could achieve my goals.
Baseball, in large part, is what provided me with the opportunity to make their last months among the happiest of their lives. Through the game, and my success at it, I was able to show them that their sacrifice had been worth it. My dreams, and my father’s dreams before mine, had all come true.
Because of baseball, I was able to raise my children in a beautiful home, give them a fine education, and teach them the meaning of hard work and dedication. The game brought me lifelong friendships, fame, and fortune (relatively speaking). And, most importantly, my love for just being around ballparks is what drew my eye one day to a beautiful left fielder in a softball game—and nearly sixty years of happiness with my wife and best friend, Maria Navarro Tiant.
All of this made my decision regarding the next stage of my life an obvious one. When I finally hung up my spikes as a professional ballplayer in 1983, after a 15–6 summer in the Mexican League, what I wanted to do next was clear: share with others all that the game had given to me.
In a way, I had already been doing this unofficially for years. I often took younger players aside to work with them on different things when I was in the majors, even if they were not on my team. Scott McGregor remembers one time when he was still establishing himself as a key member of Baltimore’s great pitching staff, and I checked in after hearing he was having a tough time.
“We were playing the Yankees in Baltimore in ’79,” he recalls. “I had pitched a game, and my elbow must have been a little bit sore or something like that. It was written up in the paper, and the next day I’m out on the field during batting practice and Luis comes out and yells at me.
“‘Hey amigo!’ he shouts, then comes over.
“‘Your elbow still sore?’
“‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘it’s still a little sore.’
“Then he immediately tells me what to do, how to fix it, where to ice it.
“‘You’re on the other team,’ I say. ‘What are you telling me this stuff for?’
“He just smiled.
“Here are the Orioles and the Yankees, battling it out for the AL East, he and I are not even close, and he’s coming over and telling me what to do to help my arm. I already knew Luis’s reputation, but I remember thinking at the time, ‘This guy really is pretty special.’ He just cared about people, and he cared about the fraternity of pitchers.”
As much as moments like that made people like Scott feel good, they did even more for me. My first wish would have been to sign on after my playing days as a coach with the Red Sox, either at the major or minor league level. But the way things had ended between me and the team made that impossible. I still felt great love for the organization and its fans, but when I made it clear I was looking for a coaching job, they never called.
If I wanted to be involved with the game on an official basis, I would have to go elsewhere.
The Yankees were much more welcoming. The offer to scout for them in Latin America was still there, and I did it for a few years, but I found that I really liked working one-on-one with players more than evaluating or finding them. When the Yanks hired David Hirsch as their new farm director years later, I got my opportunity (or so I thought). Hirsch had been the general manager and owner of the Portland Beavers when I played there back in ’81, and he remembered the job I had done sharing my twenty-plus years of experience with my Triple-A teammates.
“He was the best influence on young players we ever had there,” Hirsch told Peter Gammons. “The job he did there was that of a pitching coach. His discipline and character were a tremendous influence.”
Hirsch hired me to be pitching coach of the Class A Fort Lauderdale Yankees, working with manager and former big-league catcher Barry Foote. I made headlines before the season even started when I shaved off my famous Fu Manchu mustache and beard to comply with George Steinbrenner’s rule that nobody in New York’s minor league system have facial hair. I didn’t mind doing it, but I knew Maria would be upset because she really liked me with the mustache.
The funny thing is, the Yankees decided to reassign me to Mexico as a scout less than two weeks later, so I shaved it for nothing. That’s the last time I did that; the Fu Manchu, which has since turned gray, is here to stay.
I was sorry I didn’t get to stay with Fort Lauderdale, but another opportunity to coach in Florida came up in 1984. In the past people were always bugging me about my age and my funny-looking body, but a lot of these new players I was working out with were older—and funnier looking—than me. These weren’t minor leaguers; they were campers, aged thirty and up, who plunked down $2,550 in 1984 dollars to spend a week at the Sox Exchange Baseball Fantasy Camp in Winter Haven.
The camp took place just before Red Sox spring training got underway at Chain O’ Lakes Park, and it was a blast teaching the game to lawyers, police officers, real estate executives, doctors, and industrial engineers, all of whom were excited to learn and loved hearing old-timers tell tall tales. Besides me, former teammates and rivals like Dick Radatz, Jim Lonborg, Mike Andrews, and George Scott were also instructors at the camp, where the highlight was the “Campers vs. Pros” game on Saturday—in which campers wearing home white Red Sox uniforms had a chance to hit against real big leaguers.
I had so much fun I’ve gone back almost every year since and was also involved with other Fantasy Camps in Reno and Los Angeles. I’ve developed great relationships with campers, many of whom also return again and again. Guys like Sox Exchange camper Paul Medici have become family friends through the decades.
“I have always been a Red Sox fan as long as I can remember but became a Luis Tiant fan during the 1975 World Series,” says Medici. “I met Luis at my first Fantasy Camp in 1984. He was looking for someone to go to the dog track with him, and I said I’d go. That was the start of a thirty-five-year friendship in which I got to know Luis Tiant the person, not just the baseball player. Luis was so accommodating to all the campers—signing autographs, taking pictures, and talking about the Red Sox and baseball.
“He has a true passion for the game, and in all the years I’ve known him, including when we’ve gone out with our wives on numerous social occasions, he has never turned anyone away without an autograph. Luis is a loving husband, father, grandfather, and friend, and a person who always ends a conversation by saying, ‘I love you.’”
Fans definitely don’t want my autograph because of my acting skills, but I did get to play myself on the TV show Cheers—which was set at a Boston bar of that name about a mile from Fenway Park. The fictional owner and head bartender at Cheers was Sam “Mayday” Malone (played by Ted Danson), a former Red Sox relief pitcher from the 1970s who drank himself out of baseball. Although Cheers is fancier than a typical “sports bar,” if you look carefully around the walls during the show, you might catch photos of me, Bill Campbell, Fred Lynn, and the 1978 Red Sox team photo.
In the episode I’m in, I play a former teammate of Sam’s who is shooting a beer commercial with him. The ad starts with me talking about how great the beer is, but because of my Cuban accent I’m having trouble pronouncing the name. This goes on a while, and then a manager steps right in front of the camera.
“Bring in Malone!”
Then Sam comes in to “relieve me” and finish the ad.
I thought it was really funny, and I must have done OK because a couple years later I was asked to appear in one of those “Less filling! Tastes great!” ads for Miller Lite, and I have since been interviewed for a bunch of baseball documentaries, including Lost Son of Havana—a film about my life in the United States and Cuba (see the last chapter).
During the 1980s, when I was waiting for a coaching position to open up for me in pro ball—the Red Sox were still not calling—I kept myself busy. In 1986 I pitched some games in the Equitable Old Timer’s Series, which raised funds for needy MLB veterans who had played in the pre-pension era. At Fenway, the first of the twenty-six big-league ballparks the series visited, I was happy to hear the LOO-EEE! LOO-EEE! chants again, even if just for a few hours.
Sometimes, after all those years of traveling by bus, train, and plane, it was nice just to hang around the house playing catch. During the mid-1980s, when our family was doing some major renovations on a new home outside Boston, I developed a friendship with Mike Dunn, the teenage son of our landscaper/contractor.
“I was on my father’s crew, and I was so excited when I found out we were going to be working on Luis Tiant’s house,” Mike Dunn recalls. “I brought my glove with me that first day, and every day after that, Luis and I would play catch. He told me he had developed that funny twirl in his delivery because when he was younger, he had a shoulder injury, and he had to develop that delivery to relieve pressure and pain on the shoulder. At different times we would sit down, and he would cry about his parents. He was telling me stories about when he was younger and how it had been fifteen years that he couldn’t see his mother and father; and even years later, it bothered him to talk about it. He was an only child but had a lot of cousins and uncles and aunts in Cuba that he had not physically seen for twenty years. That really, really took a toll on him.
“One of his sons, Danny, was about my age. Luis was so nice to him. Every time Danny would walk by, Luis would pat him on the head or on the back. You could tell there was a wonderful relationship between them. And even though Luis always gave me $100 to buy pizza or subs for the crew, his wife Maria would cook something for the guys too. Cakes or pies, or eggs and cheese and coffee.”
There would be less time for catch starting in 1987 when I traded in my baseball jersey for a suit and tie and made the rounds regularly in Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and other Boston neighborhoods as a personal assistant for Massachusetts State Treasurer Robert Q. Crane. I visited pharmacies, liquor stories, and supermarkets to publicize the Mass. Lottery, spoke Spanish in neighborhoods where residents felt more comfortable with it, and rode school buses with kids in Lowell to help soften some of the tension around desegregation in that city. Anything I could do to help Treasurer Crane better understand minority communities, and their needs, I did.
Everywhere I went people would wave, shout hello in Spanish or English, and ask for a handshake or an autograph. It seemed crazy that even though I was still very popular in the area, the team where I gained my fame didn’t want me. If I thought about it too much, I would get really angry—so mostly I pushed those thoughts away and enjoyed the good feeling I got from meeting everybody in my travels.
Still, I never felt very comfortable making my living in a suit. I wanted to be back in uniform. And in 1989 there was one more chance to play ball on a regular basis, as part of the newly formed Senior Professional Baseball Association (SPBA). The thirty-five-and-older (thirty-two for catchers) league had eight teams based in Florida made up of former big leaguers, minor leaguers, and a few semi-pro players. Each team would play a seventy-two game, three-month schedule beginning right after the World Series and ending near the start of spring training. League owners hoped they could turn a profit and draw more baseball fans south for longer visits.
There were big names on every club, starting with Hall of Fame managers like Dick Williams and Earl Weaver and going down through sluggers like Dave Kingman and Graig Nettles and pitchers like Vida Blue and Rollie Fingers. I was selected to play for the Winter Haven Super Sox and told a reporter one of the reasons I was most excited about joining the league was that it was hard to give up the adrenaline rush you had with a game on the line and the crowd chanting your name.
“You never forget it; there’s nothing like the big league,” I told one reporter. “And after it’s over, it’s hard to adjust.”
During my time in the SPBA, I was part of what might be one of the strangest deals in professional baseball history. When Winter Haven owner Mitchell Maxwell traded me to the Gold Coast Suns at my request, so I could play in Miami, it presented a problem: he and Suns owner Richard Berrie could not agree on a player that Maxwell needed or was willing to go to Winter Haven. Since Berrie was a novelty merchandiser, however, he had something else to offer—five hundred teddy bears. The bears were distributed to children at the Winter Haven ballpark that night.
I guess as much as fans like old-timer’s games, having four of them every few days was overkill. The SPBA almost never drew well and folded early in its second season. By that time, however, I had finally drawn the interest of another MLB club looking for a minor league pitching coach: the Los Angeles Dodgers. Some of my friends in their organization spoke up for me—Lou Johnson, John Roseboro, and Reggie Smith—and that got the wheels moving.
The Dodgers assigned me for the 1992 season to their Class A team in the Gulf Coast League, in Kissimmee, Florida. It felt great to be putting on a real big-league uniform again—and not just for an old-timer’s or senior league game. I was comfortable, like I was back where I belonged. The Dodgers were the classiest organization in baseball, the team that paved the way for integration to take hold, and they were still working hard to make their players good people—not just good ballplayers.
“They won’t tolerate discrimination,” I explained to sportswriter Gordon Edes about an incident that occurred during the Arizona Instructional League after I first joined the organization. “There was a fight between an Afro-American and a Spanish kid, and they sent them both home. Reggie Smith talked to the Afro-Americans, Chico Fernandez and I talked to the Spanish kid, somebody else spoke to the white kids, then we brought them all together into one room.”
I wound up staying with the Dodgers organization for four seasons, eventually coaching pitchers for several different teams at the Class A and Double AA level.
Here’s one funny story. Back when Tommy Lasorda was still managing the Dodgers in ’95, we were at spring training at Vero Beach when he noticed something he did not like in relief pitcher Rich Linares’s delivery. Tommy was one of the early managers to master Spanish, so he went out to the mound to pass on some instructions. He spoke for about a minute, en español, and Linares just kept looking at him all confused.
Finally, knowing Linares was a Los Angeles-area native, I spoke up.
“Tommy, I don’t think he speaks Spanish.”
One of my favorite pitching prospects who was a native Spanish speaker was a young left-hander from the Dominican Republic named Jesus Martinez, whose two twenty-game-winning older brothers, Ramon and Pedro, were also pitchers in the Dodgers system. Jesus was a great talent as well, a tall, thin left-hander and a terrific kid who worked very hard. He toiled in the minors for ten seasons, but I’m not sure he had the killer instinct that his brothers had out on the mound. Jesus never made it into a big-league game, although he was called up to the Dodgers in September 1996.
Sadly, he died of cardiac arrest in March 2018, just after his forty-fourth birthday.
“Jesus loved Luis dearly,” says Pedro Martinez, looking back. “When Luis worked with Jesus, that’s when I got to first meet him in person. Luis is a legend, someone we respect and someone we look up to. It’s hard to imagine, when you look at him, so many things he did that were great for baseball, in his time.”
By the time Jesus was joining his big brother Ramon on the ’96 Dodgers, I was finishing up my latest challenge: serving as pitching coach for Team Nicaragua at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. I got the position after meeting Nicaragua’s minister of sports the previous December, when touring the country with a group of retired big leaguers. We hit it off, and the next thing you know he was offering me the job.
Coaching a national team was something totally new to me, but I enjoyed it a lot, and we made a lot of people take notice of us in Atlanta. We got all the way to the bronze medal game, which we lost to the United States. Two more wins and we could have had gold. Since my homeland of Cuba did win its second straight gold at the ’96 Games, and my adopted home of USA took the bronze—I was proud even without winning a medal. But it would have been great!
The next year, 1997, was a big one for me and my family. I was inducted into the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame along with my former teammates Carlton Fisk, Rico Petrocelli, and Dick Radatz (Dick and I were together in Cleveland after he left the Sox), former general manager Dick O’Connell, and the guy just ahead of me on Boston’s all-time chart for pitching victories, Mel Parnell. It was a great honor to be enshrined, joining all-time greats like Ted Williams, Yaz, Cy Young, and Bobby Doerr, and I used the enshrinement ceremony as an opportunity to say how much I still wanted to work in the Red Sox organization.
The GM at the time, Dan Duquette, had grown up as a Red Sox fan and always said he was looking out for me and wanted to get me a job. But the Yawkey ownership was still in power at Fenway, and so there were no offers coming. I wasn’t going to sit still waiting. My stint with the Dodgers was now up, so I took minor league coaching job in ’97 with the Chicago White Sox at Sarasota.
Then I received a surprise phone call. The Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), the largest school of its kind in the country, was interested in building up its Division III baseball program. They were looking for a head coach, and the president, Richard Rowan, asked if I wanted to come up to visit and see their campus. We were living in Fort Lauderdale at the time.
At first it seemed strange to me; why would a school full of artists, not known for sports at all, try and beef up its baseball team? But when Maria and I drove up there and saw the SCAD campus, and met with President Rowan, we fell in love with the place. The president knew his baseball and was a fan of my career, so that was a big plus. It turns out he interviewed ten former major league players for the job before offering it to me.
President Rowan was a great man and really took care of us. We signed a four-year contract and set up our home in a beautiful complex right outside campus on a golf course. It’s funny; some people thought I would have trouble coaching college players because I didn’t go to college myself. But I wasn’t teaching them how to go to college; I was teaching them how to play baseball. Plus, I had my son Luis Jr., who had been a shortstop at Boston College High School and then played in the Park League, with me as an assistant coach.
“You always want to play ball with your dad as a kid, and I never got the chance because my dad was in the majors,” says Luis Jr., who had been a pitcher in middle school before hurting his arm. “So this was the next best thing—I got to coach with my dad. I left everything behind in Miami and went to coach the SCAD Bees with him for two years.
“We split duties; I took care of most of the administrative stuff and the recruiting. I used to have to remind my dad he was the coach and not a ballplayer. He wanted to make the experience as fun as possible for everybody. To this day, I keep in touch with a lot of the SCAD players. They were all great kids, and a lot of them graduated and have careers in graphic arts and architecture.
“You had the dynamics of college baseball and the student-athlete mentality and dealing with parents. It becomes a little stressful, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Luis Jr. and I went out and recruited kids from all over—California, Miami, everywhere. Not too many top ballplayers were also top artists and students, but we found them. Over time, we turned out to be a pretty good team. We beat a Division I school and we beat the shit out of Northeastern and MIT up in Boston. They never wanted us to come back up there!
After never going to college myself, it was great to be on a real college campus with my family. It had always been one of my dreams.
“Dad loved Savannah,” says Danny Tiant, who played baseball at Canton High, Bridgewater State University, and Central Florida University. “When I came to visit them, it felt just like we were at Fenway Park. It was like he was the mayor. Everywhere we went it was ‘Hey LOO-EEE!’ and hugs and kisses and smiles or ‘Hey Coach, how ya doing?’ Everybody called him Coach.”
Because the kids on the team were all too young to remember my career, I wasn’t sure how much they would know about me as a player. I wanted them to respect me, but not just because I was a former big leaguer. In the end, things turned out pretty good. Sometimes I had to come down on them hard about staying out late or partying too much—we had this big field where Luis Jr. and I made them run laps until they puked for breaking team rules—but they were good kids, and I came to really love them.
“I played at SCAD for two years before Coach Tiant took the job, and I had not heard of him before,” says Tony Blankenship, shortstop and captain of the Bees, and later a minor leaguer with the White Sox. “When I started researching him, I was blown away at his accomplishments. On paper, he was an amazing player. But after meeting him and working closely with him my junior and senior year, I learned that his character as a person dwarfs any on-field accomplishments he achieved.
“During this time, in my early twenties, I was trying to learn what being a man was all about. With my own father, who I was never close with anyway, in prison back in Ohio, my time with Coach Tiant was a godsend. You could tell that he came from a life of more serious consequences. Sometime when he’d come out to talk to a struggling pitcher, he’d tell them, ‘Relax. OK? You’re tight. For what? If you don’t pitch good, they’re not gonna drag you in the street and shoot you, right? So fuck it, throw strikes!’ It broke the tension, it calmed everyone down, and put things in perspective.
“Coach was hilarious! He’d get on guys, talk trash, and laugh with us. He really enjoyed being around young guys who played the game because we loved it. We had some talented players, for a DIII college, but no big-league prospects. Just young men who wanted to play. Coach brought a genuine joy to the dugout. At any point during practice, you might catch him giving someone a powerful life lesson or ragging on them and chuckling as the rest of the guys fell over laughing. It was amazing to be a part of, and I never wanted practice to end.”
Bradley Hesser, our third baseman, says the most important thing he learned playing for me and Luis Jr. was respect.
“Coach Tiant talked about it often and even talked about it last year when we met up with him at Fenway for my fortieth birthday,” says Hesser. “If you give respect, you will get respect. He also constantly talked to us about getting our ‘paper.’ He said that baseball should be second to getting our degree as no matter where we go or what we do, no one can take it away from us. He took great pride in watching us develop into better men year after year.”
I’m amazed how much these kids remember from some of our games. Here’s a good story from Bradley:
“In the spring of 1998, in Coach Tiant’s first year as our coach, we made a trip to Boston to play MIT. This was a big deal as it was his first trip back to Boston in a baseball capacity outside of the Red Sox. We were at the field going through warmups and had started taking batting practice. I was the number-three hitter, and as I was preparing to take my time at the plate, one of the TV stations told Coach Tiant he should throw BP for them to get some video. So as I enter the box to take BP, Coach Tiant goes to the mound to throw. I happen to hit one over the fence, and then he throws the next pitch at me.
“‘Boy you knew it was coming!’ he says, laughing. ‘You hitting like that is making me look badddd!’
“All of this because of the cameras and because, well, Coach Tiant wanted to remind us of the fun we can have playing a game.”
Maybe one reason I connected so well with the SCAD players is because Maria and I had raised two sons and then helped raise a third who has become as much our child as Luis, Danny, and Isabel.
Johnny Papile.
Danny likes to joke around, calling Johnny “my white brother from another mother.” But there is no question, they are brothers, and he is our third son.
Johnny’s father, Leo, was an MDC police officer who spent thirty-eight years on the force and lived in Quincy, the next town over from us when we were in Milton. I always got along great with cops, so I got to know Leo, and at one point I heard that his wife had passed away from cancer. Johnny was still a young kid and was a big fan of mine. So we arranged for me to meet him, and after that he became like a member of our family.
“The first time I ever saw a major league baseball game was in 1967,” Johnny remembers. “I was nine years old, and my uncle took me to see the Red Sox play the Indians the last week of the season. Luis was pitching, and even though I was a Boston fan, I fell in love with that great motion of El Tiante. He became my favorite non-Red Sox player, and when he joined the team in ’71, I couldn’t believe it. I went to watch him play as often as I could.
“When my mother passed away, in 1973, my dad got totally absorbed in his work. My brother was already out of the house, and I was often home alone. With my father’s blessing, the Tiants started giving me meals, taking me to and from school, and basically adopted me as their fourth child. This was during busing, and my father was dealing with crazy stuff every day. One time he got hit with a brick in Southie, and he heard the ‘N word’ and everything else all the time. But here was his kid, in the middle of busing, sitting with the Tiant family at ballgames. The whole thing was incredible.”
It gets better.
“One Christmas break during college, I went down to visit the Tiants in Mexico City,” Johnny explains. “Luis and I were walking to the store one day, and I literally fell in love at first sight with a girl who was visiting the daughter of Luis and Maria’s neighbors. Luis helped me to meet her, and we wound up getting married. Maria—who I call Mom—walked me down the aisle.”
In the end, Johnny says only one bad thing has come out of his joining our family.
“After the Red Sox let Luis go to the Yankees, and would not give him the respect he deserved, I vowed to never root for them again. Since that point, I’ve been a Yankees fan.”
We forgive Johnny for that, but we’re sure to rub it in when we can.
In early 2002, after nearly eighty years of Yawkey family control, the Red Sox were sold to a new ownership group headed up by John Henry, Tom Warner, and Larry Lucchino. Almost overnight the entire feeling around the team and Fenway Park changed, and they began reaching out to a lot of former players about getting more involved again with the club.
I was one of them. Dan Duquette had promised me that when new folks came in, he would bring me back to the Red Sox family. As soon as Lucchino took over as team president, Dan kept his word. I’ll always be thankful to him, and Larry, for that.
My first job with the organization was as a pitching coach with the Class A Lowell Spinners. Then I spent 2002 and ’03 as a radio color commentator for Red Sox games on the team’s Spanish Beisbol Network. For once I didn’t have to worry about anybody understanding what I was saying, and I had a great time with my partners including Uri Berenguer, the youngest broadcaster in the major leagues at the time. Still in his early twenties, Uri was a Panama City native and a pediatric cancer survivor treated in the Jimmy Fund Clinic at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—one of the official charities of the Red Sox. His uncle Juan Berenguer was a big-league pitcher whose career overlapped with mine, and Uri and I developed a special relationship.
“I was just starting my career, and El Tiante made it very easy to feel comfortable and confident,” remembers Berenguer, who is still doing Red Sox games for the Spanish Beisbol Network. “Luis was always very nurturing and genuinely caring. He always made me feel important, and I marveled at his endless baseball and life experiences—some that made me wonder how he was able to overcome so much adversity.”
Then he laughs.
“My one complaint about Luis as a broadcast partner is that he could never control his passion enough not to yell during home run calls. It got to the point where I had to learn to anticipate his joyous outbursts in time for me to mute his mic. Tiant’s passion and love for baseball is second only to the love he has for his family.”
After a couple summers yelling too loud for Uri, with whom I’m still close, I went back to doing what I love most—teaching. Over time, I’ve become more of a roving instructor for the Red Sox, both at spring training and throughout the season. My official title is now special assignment consultant. I meet with pitchers whenever I can at Fenway, and talk to them a lot on the phone as well.
“Luis Tiant is the personification of Cuban baseball, the epitome of old-school pitching, and a living, breathing icon of Red Sox baseball,” says Lucchino, now president/CEO emeritus of the Red Sox, and chairman of both the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Jimmy Fund. “To have Luis with the Red Sox to offer his insights, instruction, personality, and to serve as an example to our young pitchers and players—particularly, but not exclusively, to the Red Sox players of Latino heritage—has been a priceless asset to the team and a factor in its success in the 21st century. He is a jewel.”
It’s been a fantastic experience for me. I love having the chance to be involved with so many great young men—pitchers as well as position players—and feel good when I can help them.
“The Red Sox do a good job of keeping the old faces around; I’ve heard it through the grapevine that not every organization is like that,” says Lenny DiNardo, a Red Sox pitcher from 2004 to 2009. “When I was playing for the Sox, having guys like Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, Jim Rice, and Tiant around in the clubhouse was no big thing. They were a constant fixture, and that was not only a credit to them, it also gave us an idea of what we were playing for—and the hardships that the Red Sox went through in not winning the World Series in eighty-six years.
“These were guys who were extremely talented, with Hall of Fame careers, that didn’t get a chance to get a ring. So to have them around to sort of mentor us and tell stories and basically just stay around like foster parents or foster grandparents in the clubhouse was really valuable. I always appreciated it.”
I appreciated it, too, and when the Red Sox finally did win that World Series in 2004, they made us former ballplayers feel like we were part of it. I got a call shortly after the series asking me for my ring size, and that’s when I realized they were going to be giving me a World Series ring—which was incredible. They also invited me to be on a duck boat during the World Series parade, not just that year but also in 2007 and 2013. Pudge and I have thrown out the first pitches before several playoff and World Series games. That never gets old, believe me.
Sometimes I make a special connection to a pitcher that develops over a season. In 2017, I worked a lot with Rick Porcello after he had a tough first year with the Red Sox. He’s a good, good kid, and I told him he was too nice—he had to be meaner out on that mound.
“You’ve got the stuff to win twenty games,” I told him. He looked at me like I was crazy, and I said it again. “With your fastball, and your breaking ball, you have to win twenty! But you’ve got to be willing to knock a guy down once in a while. You’ve got to have that killer instinct, really go after those hitters, and then once in a while come inside to them. That’s how you become a good pitcher, not just by throwing hard.”
He did what I told him, and he started winning more. We talked after every game he pitched that year, and I kept reminding him. He kept winning, and as he got closer to twenty wins I told him if he didn’t get all the way there I was going to break his neck.
He did make it—and wound up going 22-4 and winning the 2017 Cy Young Award.
The first time he saw me after he won his twentieth, he came over and gave me a big hug.
“Thank you, Luis,” he said.
“Hey,” I told him, “You don’t have to thank me. You did it yourself. I didn’t pitch—you did. I’m just here to see if I can help you, or anybody else on the team who needs me.”
That includes batting advice. I always try and remind guys on the team what a great hitter I was—.417 in 1970, look it up!—so I like to see position players lend an ear to my advice too.
“When he comes to Boston, he talks about hitters and how he would try to pitch to a hitter’s weaknesses,” says outfielder Andrew Benintendi, one of the wonderful young players on the 2018 World Series champs. “It’s helpful, and it’s fun to pick his brain. He has this way about him where he just lightens the mood. He likes to have a good time.”
Because I still remember the challenges I faced learning a new culture and language when I first came to the United States, some of my most special connections on the current Red Sox are with Latino ballplayers dealing with similar issues.
“Since I had the opportunity to have met Luis in 2014, and especially now, he’s been like a father to me,” says righty pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez, 13-5 in ’18 and just entering his prime. “He’s in Boston most of the time, so before games and after games I have the opportunity to sit with him and chat. He’s taught me everything. I always listen to him and what he has to say; it’s been great to have the opportunity to have him on my side. I call him sometimes; I know if I need somebody to talk to, even in Spanish, I have him—and I have Pedro [Martinez].”
It's great to see Cuba once again making a name for itself in the major leagues. In the early 1980s, I believe, Tony Perez and I were the last two Cuban-born players in the majors from the pre-Castro days. Then there were almost no Cuban players for a long time, until in recent years a bunch, including stars like Jose Abreu and Aroldis Chapman, started to defect or get smuggled in—which of course was very dangerous. It was wonderful to see the deal the MLB signed with the Cuban Baseball Federation in 2018 that gives Cuban players a chance to sign with big-league clubs once they are twenty-five years old and have played six years in the Cuban Leagues. They are getting a chance to chase their dreams and help their families, just like we did, but now they can go back to Cuba without fear of being jailed or persecuted in any way.
Mike Lowell, 2007 World Series MVP for the Red Sox, is one of those guys who is old enough to remember hearing about me growing up, and I’m so glad that I helped to motivate and drive him as a man of color in the game.
“My father is the oldest of four boys, and his three brothers were all born in Cuba. So he grew up in Cuba from ages one to eleven, when he left,” says Lowell. “I knew a lot about Luis growing up, and I throw Tony Perez into that mix too. They not only came from Cuba and had success, but their color and the racial obstacles both of them had to deal with during that time was immense. So my eyes were opened to that fact.
“You kind of feel like there is a connection when you say ‘Cuban.’ Although I was raised in the states, my culture, my values, and everything I feel like I was raised with is based on a Latin family. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English, and I felt like I got the best of both worlds in that sense. So the talks about Luis and guys like that were pretty prevalent in my house.”
Today, if parents are smart, they are telling their children to be like Mike Lowell.
Another wonderful development I’ve had since coming back to the Red Sox has been my reconnection with the fans at Fenway Park. When the new owners turned Yawkey Way—now Jersey Street—into a free-standing concourse area that fans can use during ballgames, one of the concession stands they put in was the El Tiante Grille. You can come pick up a Cuban sandwich or beer, and I’m often there to shake hands, sign autographs, or just talk baseball. I’m also one of the former players who rotates through the “Legends Suite” high above the first-base grandstands, which is a great way for me to really get to talk to fans for more than just a minute.
Fenway may be non-smoking now, but I still find time to enjoy my cigars. For a while I even made a living at it. Around the same time I came back to the Sox, I started a cigar company with my sons: El Tiante Cigars. At first, we had a hard time getting people to realize these were real good cigars, not novelty items, but over time we developed a reputation for making an excellent product. Luis Jr. got out after a while, but Danny studied the field and really built up the company—which he renamed Tiant Cigar Group—wonderfully.
Like my coaching with Luis Jr. at SCAD, traveling to different cigar events became my and Danny’s father-and-son time for several years.
“I was sixteen when I had my first cigar at a high school party,” remembers Danny. “I don’t know where we got them—probably from my dad’s stash—but I lit one up. And it’s funny, I started to feel like my dad was inside me when I was smoking that cigar. My buddies were cracking up, saying, ‘You look just like your father.’ And I said, ‘You know, it’s funny, because I feel like him too.’
“That led to my love of cigars, and I think to the connection between him and me that we can still hang out and smoke them. I find it to be a great father-son bonding moment that we have. My mom smokes cigars once in a while. My brother got into it a little bit, but it’s not really his thing. My sister can’t stand it.
“My father always had a cigar in his mouth. That’s one of the arguments he and my mom have all the time. He’s not allowed to smoke cigars in the house anymore, and he always brings up how he was able to smoke them back in the day. She’ll say, ‘No you didn’t,’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes I did.’ They always go back and forth on it. But I’ve come across pictures of my dad holding me in his lap, and he’s got a cigar in his mouth. He was always smoking then. I’d say mom put that rule down in the last ten to fifteen years.”
And I’m smart enough to follow it. Maria and I have been married nearly sixty years, which is a pretty good record. If there is a Hall of Fame for marriages, I’d put us in it. We have been blessed with wonderful children and grandchildren, and we spend as much time with all of them as we can. Family is everything,
Charity work is also very important to me. Like I mentioned, I’ve done a lot of appearances for the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through the years, visiting young cancer patients at the hospital or at Fenway and taking part in events like Jimmy Fund golf tournaments and the annual WEEI/NESN Jimmy Fund Radio-Telethon. Cancer is the disease that killed my father, and anything I can do to help fight it, I’ll do. Sometimes I’ll be out at an event, or just having dinner or something, and a mother or father will come up to me and thank me for visiting with their child in the hospital years ago. I enjoy hearing that, but what’s even better is hearing what those kids are up to today if, God willing, they got better.
I’ve had my own health challenges in recent years. In 2003 I learned I had type 2 diabetes, a condition that affects more than thirty million Americans and can cause blindness, nerve damage, and death. I changed my diet to get healthier and started hosting Luis Tiant’s Swing for Diabetes, a golf tournament that in its first three years raised $600,000 for the American Diabetes Association. Diabetes has had an especially big impact on the Latino community, which is at higher risk along with other minority groups. If I have a chance to make an appearance or play in a tournament to help raise awareness or money for the cause, I’m there.
And, of course, there is always time to watch or talk baseball—and always time to pass on what I’ve learned in a lifetime of observing the game.
What are the some of the most important things?
Jim Rice, my longtime teammate, friend, and golf partner, is one of those guys who says I’m funny even when I’m not trying to be. I’m not sure what to make of that.
“It’s very hard to see this guy unhappy,” says Rice. “He’s always willing to make someone else happy or make someone else smile. A lot of times, you walk in a room, and some of the things he says, you just start laughing. Then again, sometimes you look at him like I’m looking at him right now, and I’m laughing.”
One thing that would make a lot of people happy, based on what they tell me, is if I could get into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I’m not going to say much about this except that I feel based on the numbers I put up that I belong. Plenty of other people do too, yet I never received more than 30.9 percent of the vote during my fifteen years of eligibility (75 percent is needed for enshrinement), and I have been nominated but not elected several times by the Veteran’s Committee.
I can’t explain it, and I know plenty of people don’t agree with it.
“While it’s always gamesmanship to compare this guy from this era to that guy in that era, Luis Tiant pitched in pretty much the same era as [Hall of Famers] Don Drysdale and Catfish Hunter, and the similarities in numbers are striking,” says Steve Buckley, who has covered the Red Sox as a beat reporter and a columnist for more than forty years. “Pitching is so hard, and I know with guys who can last for a long time, they just call it ‘putting up the numbers,’ but it’s hard to just put up the numbers as a pitcher. That’s why I’m sympathetic to the plight of Jim Kaat and Tommy John and Luis Tiant.”
I’m with Buck on that last part—Tommy John and Jim Kaat belong in the Hall of Fame too.
Rico Petrocelli played with and against me for fifteen years. Here’s his view on the subject:
“To me, Luis is absolutely a Hall of Famer. They are always looking at the numbers, and he’s got them. He got into the playoffs, and the World Series, and pitched great in both. He didn’t win a Cy Young Award, but he was pretty close. There are other pitchers in there who didn’t win Cy Young Awards, and remember he won 229 games—plus twenty or more four times. And how about those earned-run averages? They were just incredible. You throw those 1.60 and 1.91 ERAs up on a plaque—I mean, c’mon!”
One longtime Red Sox fan, college English professor Albert DeCiccio, feels so strongly about this subject that he’s written a thesis that he calls Prime: The Luis Tiant Story.
Here’s a portion of it:
prime
prim/
adjective
1. of first importance; main.
2. of the best possible quality; excellent.
3. a state or time of greatest strength, vigor, or success in a person’s life.
Luis Tiant is a prime example of a player who should be in the Hall of Fame. In two decades, Tiant won 229 games and compiled a 3.30 ERA. He struck out 2,416 in 3,486 1/3 innings. While he was named to just three All-Star teams, Tiant finished in the top six of Cy Young voting three times and in one season was fifth in MVP voting, because of an AL-best 1.60 ERA.
In 34 2/3 postseason innings, the lost son of Havana was 3-0 with a 2.86 ERA, helping the Red Sox make the 1975 World Series among the greatest of all time at precisely a time when baseball needed it most. In Game 4 of that fall classic, Tiant threw a remarkable 163 prime pitches in a complete game effort that helped the Red Sox tie the Series and that gave the team a belief it could beat the Big Red Machine that featured Hall of Famers Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan as well as the hit machine, Pete Rose.
On December 10, 2017, Tiant learned that, while he fulfilled the dream of his father, Luis Tiant Sr., he did not get into the Hall of Fame again. Prime: The Luis Tiant Story details the mistake Major League Baseball continues to make in not enshrining Tiant in the Hall of Fame. Among other accomplishments in a premier pitching career, I detail the nine heroic innings Tiant hurled—yielding 9 hits and 4 runs—to win Game 4 of the 1975 World Series.
Just as his 2 wins in that World Series, his 163 pitches in Game 4, and 229 career wins are prime numbers, Luis Tiant, as a man and as a baseball pitcher, epitomizes the definition of prime. He is certainly “of the best quality”; he is “excellent.” Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” so Tiant still has hope. There is a place in Cooperstown for El Tiante, with a plaque bearing all his prime accomplishments and a clause stating, “Of first importance to Tiant was honoring his father’s lesson by finishing what he started.” When he finally enters the Hall of Fame, Tiant will have baseball immortality, and he will have finished what his father started.”
I am deeply grateful for fans like Professor DeCiccio, media members like Steve Buckley, Peter Gammons, and Dan Shaughnessy, and the many, many teammates and opponents who have voiced their support for me over the years. Carlton Fisk called me the best pitcher he ever caught, and he was behind the plate for twenty-four years in the big leagues. That’s a pretty good endorsement.
So it this one, from longtime pitching coach and teammate Stan Williams:
“It’s a complete sin that Luis Tiant is not in the Hall of Fame. Luis was the best right-hand pitcher I ever saw, and I pitched in St. Louis one year [with Bob Gibson].”
I’m not sure what’s going to happen with future voting, and I’m not going to get my hopes up. If it happens, it happens. It would be an honor to be enshrined beside teammates like Pudge, Yaz, Jim Ed, Catfish, Reggie Jackson, and the many other great players I suited up with and against.
But I do know this. Whether or not there is ever a bronze plaque with my face on it in a museum in Cooperstown, New York, I feel I have led a Hall of Fame life. I have been blessed beyond measure as a son, a husband, a father, and a grandfather. My friendships and my faith have taken me through very difficult days and helped me succeed when the odds were against me. I did not always win, but I always gave my best.
I fulfilled my father’s dreams, and my own.