Luis Tiant, colorful 1970s pitching ace, dies at 83

Luis Tiant, whose confounding array of pitches and deliveries helped make him the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in baseball history, as well as one of the game’s most popular and colorful players, died Oct. 8 at 83.

The Boston Red Sox, for whom Tiant won 122 games in the 1970s, announced his death but did not say where or how he died.

Tiant, who was dubbed “El Tiante” and was the son of a Cuban pitching star of the 1920s and ‘30s, played 19 years in the major leagues. Early in his career with the Cleveland Indians, he had an overpowering fastball, which he relied on during a dominant season in 1968, baseball’s so-called “Year of the Pitcher.”

That season, Denny McLain won 31 games for the Detroit Tigers, while the St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson threw 13 shutouts, with a microscopic ERA of 1.12 - numbers no pitcher has approached since then.

Tiant was almost at the same level. He won 21 games for Cleveland, led the American League with nine shutouts, struck out 19 batters in a 10-inning game and recorded a league-best ERA of 1.60, which no AL pitcher has equaled in the past 56 years.

Like his father, Tiant had a deceptive pitching motion, twisting his body away from the batter, kicking his foot toward third base and looking up to the sky before delivering a pitch. When Tiant tossed a two-hit shutout against the Washington Senators in 1968, slugger Frank Howard quipped, “He threw everything at me but the ball.”

The next season, injuries almost derailed Tiant’s career. He was traded by Cleveland and released by the Minnesota Twins before he joined the Red Sox in 1971 and began a remarkable resurgence that made him a fan favorite in Boston.

“I still think he’s the most popular pitcher on any team in my 35 years of covering baseball,” Boston sportswriter Peter Gammons said in a 2009 documentary about Tiant, “The Lost Son of Havana.”

Lacking his youthful fastball, Tiant changed his pitching style, throwing a variety of pitches from different arm angles and adopting an even more elaborate windup, sometimes hesitating with one leg off the ground. He grew a drooping mustache that made him look like a western movie villain and sometimes taunted opposing batters, shouting, “Hit it, baby!”

“I knew I needed something different,” he said in the documentary. “I had to do something so I could hide the ball better … I changed my delivery completely.”

Tiant had a stocky build but possessed the balance and flair of a tightrope walker. He was often portrayed less in athletic terms than as a performance artist, or a conductor leading an orchestra. In 1975, New Yorker writer Roger Angell described Tiant “wheeling and rotating on the mound like a figure in a Bavarian clock tower.”

“His repertoire,” Angell continued, “begins with an exaggerated mid-windup pivot, during which he turns his back on the batter and seems to examine the infield directly behind the mound for signs of crabgrass. … The full flower of his art, however, comes during the actual delivery, which is executed with a perfect variety show of accompanying gestures and impersonations.”

In 1972, Tiant claimed the major league ERA title with a mark of 1.91. He won 20 or more games in 1973, 1974 and 1976.

One of his most indelible performances came in a losing effort in 1974, when he and the California Angels’ Nolan Ryan went head to head, pitching into extra innings. Ryan walked 10 batters and struck out 19 before leaving the game after 13 innings, with the score tied at 3. Tiant kept coming back to the mound, finally giving up a run in the 15th inning. He threw an estimated 220 pitches - more than twice the limit of most pitchers in today’s game. (At the time, most teams did not track pitch counts and used a starting rotation of four pitchers, not five.)

“My father used to tell me, ‘What you start, you finish,’” he said years later.

In 1975, he helped lead the Red Sox to the postseason and baffled the Oakland A’s in the opening game of the American League Championship Series, pitching nine innings in a 7-1 victory that prompted Oakland’s Reggie Jackson to pronounce Tiant “the Fred Astaire of baseball, dancing his way to victory.”

In the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds - the “Big Red Machine” led by Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan - Tiant pitched a Game 1 shutout. After the Reds won the next two contests, Tiant protected a one-run lead over the final five innings of Game 4, giving Boston a 5-4 win. He threw at least 155 pitches in the game.

Tiant then started Game 6, which was ultimately decided by Boston catcher Carlton Fisk’s dramatic 12th-inning home run down the left-field line. The next day, Cincinnati came from behind to win the decisive game 4-3, capping what is still considered one of the most thrilling World Series in history. All three games won by the Red Sox were started by Tiant, who never appeared in the postseason again.

“Luis Tiant with a lead was the best pitcher of that time,” Gammons said in “The Lost Son of Havana.” “Luis treated a lead as if it were his family, and he defended it, and it was amazing to watch.”

Off the mound, Tiant could be endearingly profane. After a victory, he celebrated by lighting up a huge cigar and puffing away in the shower and during interviews.

“In boots, black cap, foot-long cigar and nothing else,” Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell wrote in 1988, “he’d hold court with half-hour monologues Richard Pryor would envy.”

Luis Clemente Tiant Vega was born Nov. 23, 1940, in Havana. His father, also named Luis Tiant, was a left-handed pitcher in Cuba and also played for the New York Cubans, a prominent team in the old Negro Leagues, for more than 15 years. According to his son, he once struck out Babe Ruth in an exhibition game.

In Cuba, Tiant’s parents were laborers, working in gas stations and in other odd jobs. As a boy, young Luis had few interests beyond baseball. He was 18 when he moved to Mexico to further his career.

In the early 1960s, after Cuban leader Fidel Castro blocked citizens from leaving the country - especially young men of military age - Tiant’s father wrote to his son, telling him not to return to his homeland. (The younger Tiant eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen.)

Tiant signed with the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) in 1962 and made his first major league appearance two years later, pitching a shutout against Hall of Famer Whitey Ford at Yankee Stadium in New York.

In the twilight of his career, Tiant played for the Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates and Angels before retiring at age 41. He was a three-time All-Star and had a career record of 229-172, with an ERA of 3.30, comparable to Hall of Fame pitchers Catfish Hunter and Jim Bunning. His 187 complete games included 49 shutouts.

Every pitcher in baseball history with 49 shutouts or more has been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame - except Tiant, who also never won a Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in his league. His exclusion from the shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., is often cited by sportswriters and former players as one of baseball’s greatest injustices.

For much of his career, Tiant spent the offseason in Mexico, the birthplace of his wife, Maria del Refugio Navarro. He and his family later settled near Boston. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1961, survivors include three children and several grandchildren.

After his baseball career, Tiant was a spokesman for the Massachusetts state lottery and a pitchman for commercial products. He coached in the minor leagues and for the Nicaraguan national team and spent four years as the head baseball coach at, of all places, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. He later became a coach and adviser in the Red Sox system.

In conjunction with the documentary about his life, Tiant returned to Cuba in 2007 for the first time in 46 years. He generally avoided political discussions, but he could not help shedding tears at the poverty and hopelessness he saw among the Cuban people.

Asked to describe what made him happiest about visiting Cuba after so long, Tiant said, “Seeing my family and my country.”

And the worst thing?

“Seeing my family and my country.”