BOSTON (AP) — Luis Tiant, the charismatic Cuban with a horseshoe mustache and mesmerizing windup who pitched the Red Sox to the brink of a World Series championship and himself to the doorstep of the Hall of Fame, has died. He was 83.
Major League Baseball announced his death in a post on X on Tuesday, and the Red Sox confirmed that he died at his home in Maine.
Known as “El Tiante,” Tiant was a two-time All-Star whose greatest individual season came in 1968, when he went 21-9 with 19 complete games and nine shutouts — four of them in a row. But it was his 1.60 ERA — the best in the AL in half a century — that, combined with Bob Gibson’s 1.12 mark in the NL, helped convince baseball to lower the pitching mound to give batters more of a chance.
The son of a Negro Leagues star, the younger Tiant was 229-172 in all with a 3.30 ERA and 2,416 strikeouts. He had 187 complete games and 47 shutouts in a 19-year career spent mostly with Cleveland and Boston.
His death comes one week after that of all-time baseball hits leader Pete Rose, whose Cincinnati Reds faced Tiant’s Red Sox in the 1975 World Series — still considered one of the greatest in baseball history.
Tiant won Game 1, shutting out the Reds, threw 155 pitches in a complete game victory in Game 4 and was back on the mound for eight innings of Game 6, which Boston won on Carlton Fisk’s home run in the bottom of the 12th.
After his retirement, Tiant was inducted into the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame but never made the national shrine in Cooperstown, New York, receiving a high of 30.9% of the votes in 1988, his first year on the ballot.
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My brother, a Yankee fan turned me on Lois T and his famous cigar and easy going style of playing baseball. My brother was easy going and I believe players like Tiant were great examples for the youth. It’s a game!!! I’m a baseball fan too but I am also aNY Yankee fan because of my father’s and grandmother’s influence, I remember seeing her black and white TV on during the day and while most other ladies were watching soap operas, she had the Yankees on or any other team playing if they weren’t. But my Mom was a bosox fan so l have always respected both teams and later while bartending in an x pitchers bar learned so much more about the all the great bosox players, Ted Williams, Tiant and … Later while living in England I was miserable because no baseball over there. We tend to take for granted America’s greatest sport and the likes of the great players we were so fortunate to show us how it’s played and call it out own!!
baseball game on! )