BOSTON (AP) — Luis Tiant, the charismatic Cuban with a horseshoe mustache and mesmerizing excitement 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 he died at his home in Maine.
“Today is a very sad day,” Fred Lynn, a teammate in both Boston and California, wrote on X. “A great game pitcher, a funny, genuine guy who loved his family and baseball. I miss him already.”
Tiant, known as “El Tiante,” was a three-time All-Star whose best individual season came in 1968, when he went 21-9 with 19 complete games and nine shutouts – including four in a row. But it was his 1.60 ERA — the best in the AL in a half-century — that, combined with Bob Gibson’s 1.12 NL mark, helped convince baseball to lower the pitcher’s mound to give batters a better chance.
The younger Tiant, the son of a Negro Leagues star, totaled 229-172 with a 3.30 ERA and 2,416 strikeouts. He had 187 complete games and 47 shutouts in a 19-year career, mostly with Cleveland and Boston.
His death comes a week after that of baseball’s all-time hitting 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 and eliminated 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 he never made it to the national shrine in Cooperstown, New York, where he received a maximum of 30.9% of the vote in 1988, his first year on the ballot received.
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