Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83

Cuban-born and charismatic, with a personal tale caught up in politics, he was a dominant hurler with a quirky windup who helped lead the Red Sox to a pennant in 1975.

Luis Tiant, a Cuban-born right-hander who was one of baseball’s most entertaining and charismatic pitchers, and whose personal story was among the game’s most poignant, died on Tuesday. He was 83.

His death was announced by the Boston Red Sox, for whom he pitched in the 1970s. The team did not say where he died or cite the cause.

El Tiante, as he was known on the sports pages — or Loo-ee! as stadiums full of fans would often chant while he was on the mound — won 229 games over 19 big-league seasons, playing for teams in six cities, notably Cleveland and Boston, where he led the Red Sox to a World Series and became one of the most beloved players in the team’s storied history.

In a career that necessitated a long separation from his family and from Cuba, his homeland, and that was bifurcated by a serious shoulder injury, Tiant won 20 or more games four times and threw 187 complete games (more than Don Sutton, Don Drysdale, Lefty Gomez or Dizzy Dean) and 49 shutouts (more than Roger Clemens, Whitey Ford, Catfish Hunter, Sandy Koufax or Bob Feller).

But beyond his achievements, he was one of the game’s memorable showmen, distinctive in almost every way — from his Fu Manchu mustache, barrel-shaped torso and ever-present mammoth cigar (ever-present, that is, except on the field, including in the locker room shower) to his dizzying repertoire of breaking balls and delivery angles, as well as perhaps the most elastic, twisty-turny windup in history.

“His repertoire 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 crab grass,” Roger Angell wrote in The New Yorker, beginning a lengthy exegesis of what he called “the splendid full range of Tiantic mime.”

With men on, Angell went on, “his stretch consists of a succession of minute downward waggles and pauses of the glove, and a menacing sidewise, slit-eyed, Valentino-like gaze over his shoulder at the base runner.”

The Hall of Fame slugger Reggie Jackson had a more succinct assessment.

“Tiant,” he said, “is the Fred Astaire of baseball.”

Reporters and baseball executives always suspected that Tiant was older than he claimed to be, but according to numerous sources, the remarkable baseball odyssey of Luis Clemente Tiante y Vega began in the Marianao borough of Havana, where he was born on Nov. 23, 1940, the only child of Luis Eleuteria Tiant and his wife, Isabel Vega Tiant.

The elder Tiant, a standout southpaw who pitched for some 20 years in the Cuban professional leagues and the Negro leagues in the United States, was called Lefty or Sir Skinny; unlike his son, he was built like a toothpick. But young Luis was a chip off the old block in other ways.

The father was the first of the Tiants to feature a variety of wiggles and jiggles in his windup, to vary his pitch speeds and delivery. He was known for a wicked screwball and a mean pickoff move, but he could also throw hard — deceptive power in a man so slight.

When Luis Sr. first went to the United States, the younger Tiant claimed, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, “He threw so hard that he would knock the catchers down.” He added: “So sometimes they had to put a steak inside the glove on the hands. And when the game was over, the steak would be cooked.”

A Father’s Resistance

Lefty Tiant experienced vicious racism and onerous traveling and living conditions in the U.S. Fearful that Luis Jr. would be subject to the same, he was initially against his son’s becoming a ballplayer. But young Luis’s talent was undeniable, and though he tried out unsuccessfully for a professional team in Havana, Isabel Tiant persuaded her husband to allow their son to sign a contract with the Mexico City Tigers in 1959.

He played three seasons in Mexico. He returned to Cuba each winter to play for the Havana Sugar Kings, a professional team that was affiliated with the Cincinnati Reds until Fidel Castro’s communist regime nationalized American-owned enterprises in 1960.

The next year, Tiant married a Mexican woman, Maria del Refugio Navarro. They were planning on honeymooning in Cuba and spending the winter there, but in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion that spring, Castro had tightened his grip on the island, banning outside travel. So it happened that Lefty Tiant told his son not to come home, that playing professionally in Cuba was impossible, and that if he returned to Havana it was very likely that he wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

Aside from a brief visit from his mother in Mexico, Tiant would not see his parents again for 14 years, and he would not set foot in his homeland for almost a half century. His emotional return to Cuba in 2007 was filmed for a documentary, “The Lost Son of Havana” (2009), directed by Jonathan Hock.

The scout who had signed Tiant for Mexico City was Bobby Avila, an all-star infielder who had won a batting title for the Cleveland Indians (now the Guardians), and it was the Indians who purchased Tiant’s contract from Mexico City in 1962.

Tiant spent parts of three seasons in the Cleveland minor league system — where he ran into some of the same hardships his father had encountered — and made his major league debut on July 19, 1964, shutting out the American League champion Yankees on four hits and striking out 11. Over the final months of the season, he won 10 games and lost only four.

After such an auspicious start, Tiant’s six seasons with Cleveland were a mixture of modest, mediocre and marvelous. He had some arm problems, and from 1965 to 1967 his record was only 35-31, but in 1968, the so-called year of the pitcher, he became a star.

That was the year Denny McLain won 31 games for the Tigers and Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals set the modern-era earned run average record, allowing just 1.12 runs per nine innings. Tiant went 21-9, with a microscopic E.R.A. of his own, 1.60 — the lowest in the American League in more than 100 years.

He also threw nine shutouts, including four in a row to start a stretch of 41 consecutive scoreless innings, tied for the eighth-longest streak in major league history.

In a bizarre turnaround, Tiant lost 20 games in 1969, and Cleveland traded him to the Minnesota Twins. He won his first six decisions in 1970, but an injury to his shoulder — eventually diagnosed as a broken scapula — undermined his season, and the Twins, believing he was finished at age 30, released him before the beginning of the 1971 season.

An Unexpected Chance

For the next year and a half, Tiant barely held on to his career. He had a monthlong tryout with the Atlanta Braves’ Triple-A affiliate in Richmond, Va., but the Braves were unimpressed. He pitched well for the top Red Sox farm club, in Louisville, Ky., and the Sox promoted him to the big leagues in midseason. But he was mostly awful, winning just one out of eight decisions and pitching to a 4.85 earned run average.

Then came a stroke of serendipity. Before the start of the 1972 season, the Red Sox traded a star reliever, Sparky Lyle, to the Yankees (a dark day in Boston sports history), and the Sox decided to keep Tiant on the roster to bolster their bullpen. No longer the consistent flamethrower he was before his injury, he now deployed a full quiver of windup and delivery tricks and velocity variations, baffling hitters with hard sliders and fastballs mixed with tantalizing, off-speed stuff — looping curves, palm balls and knuckle balls.

“It looks like Tiant has added another pitch,” the Yankee catcher Thurman Munson told the sports columnist Dick Young in 1975. “Now he has about 50.”

Tiant thrived in relief and in spot starts, and by late August he was again in the starting rotation and beginning a remarkable comeback. In a string of 10 starts during a tight pennant race — the Sox finished second to Detroit — he was 9-1 with six shutouts, allowing less than one earned run every nine innings, clearly the team’s most valuable player.

In spite of being mostly a reliever for more than half the season, he won 15 games and lost only six, and his earned run average of 1.91 was the best in the American League. He was voted Comeback Player of the Year, and the Boston fans had found a new hero.

“He meant so much,” Carl Yastrzemski, the Red Sox Hall of Fame slugger, said in the 2007 documentary. “The fans absolutely loved him. The players loved him. We loved to play behind him.”

Over the next six years, Tiant won 106 games for the Red Sox, recording at least 20 wins in each of three seasons. In 1975, he helped the Red Sox to the American League pennant, winning 18 games during the regular season and Game 1 of the American League Championship Series against the Oakland A’s, a complete game in Boston in which he gave up only an unearned run.

“He is a joy to watch, this swarthy, ample gentleman of 34 going on 44,” the sports columnist Red Smith wrote in The New York Times after the game. “Black-bearded and sinister, he looks like Pancho Villa after a tough week of looting and burning. He works without waste of time or motion, glowering briefly into the sun to take the catcher’s sign, pivoting on one leg to face center field, then wheeling back to deliver over the top. He is a master of every legal pitch and he never throws two consecutive pitches at the same speed.”

In the 1975 World Series, one of the greatest in baseball history, which the Cincinnati Reds won in seven games, Tiant pitched a shutout in Game 1 and a complete game 5-4 victory in Game 4, in which he threw an astonishing 163 pitches and held on to a one-run lead for five innings.

He started again in the memorable Game 6, pitching seven innings in what turned out to be a 12-inning 7-6 Red Sox win that ended with a dramatic Carlton Fisk home run.

“If a man put a gun to my head and said, ‘I’m going to pull the trigger if you lose this game,’” the Red Sox manager that season, Darrell Johnson, said, “I’d want Luis Tiant to pitch that game.”

Dear President Castro

For Tiant, the baseball postseason was not even the most dramatic event of the year. That summer, with relations between the United States and Cuba thawing, Senator George S. McGovern, Democrat of South Dakota, visited Cuba carrying a letter to Castro from Senator Edward Brooke III, Republican of Massachusetts, requesting that the parents of one of his constituents, Luis Tiant, be permitted to visit Boston to watch their son play.

At the end of a long meeting, McGovern presented Castro, known as a passionate baseball fan, with the letter, and the next day he sent word to McGovern that not only would the request be granted, but Lefty and Isabel Tiant would also be allowed to stay in Boston as long as they pleased.

On Aug. 21, 1975, the Tiants landed at Boston Logan International Airport, and the reunion with their son, teary on both sides, was covered by local television.

At Fenway Park five days later, just before the game between the Red Sox and the California Angels began, Lefty Tiant, then 69, left the Red Sox dugout and walked to the mound, where his son was preparing to pitch to the first Angels hitter. He took off his sport jacket and handed it to his son, who held it as his father toed the rubber, wound up, and threw the ceremonial first pitch to the Boston catcher Tim Blackwell. The entire ballpark was on its feet cheering.

“Frankly I thought it was a pretty special moment in social history, to have two generations of Cuban stars in Fenway Park,” the Boston sportswriter and television commentator Peter Gammons said in the documentary. “And when his father threw out the first ball, the chant of ‘Loo-eee, Loo-eee’ was deafening. It was really a remarkable, remarkable moment.”

Tiant’s parents remained in the United States. Fifteen months later, they died within three days of each other. Their son is survived by his wife, Maria; three children, Luis Jr., Isabel and Daniel; and a number of grandchildren.

Tiant became a free agent after the 1978 season, and he signed with the Yankees. He won 21 games over two years in the Bronx, including eight for a Yankee team that won the American League Eastern Division championship in 1980. He finished his career with abbreviated stints with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Angels. His overall record was 229-172, with a 3.30 earned run average and 2,416 strikeouts.

In subsequent years, Tiant was a scout for the Yankees in Mexico as well as a minor league and college coach and for a time a Spanish-language broadcaster for the Red Sox. Though he was nominated for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, N.Y., multiple times, he never garnered enough votes to gain entry.

Other Cuban pitchers, including José Contreras and Orlando and Livan Hernández, followed Tiant to stardom in the U.S., but Tiant remains the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history.

In 1999, the Baltimore Orioles played a two-game series against the Cuban national team — one game in Havana, one in Baltimore — that sparked a political controversy. Tiant spoke out against major league baseball’s participation.

“We should never forget what has happened to the people in Cuba for 40 years,” he said, adding: “All baseball cares about is getting players out of Cuba. It doesn’t care about the suffering, just money. The Orioles shouldn’t have gone to Cuba. This is a free country, but that’s the way I feel.”

Bernard Mokam contributed reporting.