by Mark Frost
Fisk called for the same pitch again; he liked the way that last one had seemed to trouble Concepcion. Tiant threw the exact same pitch, running right in on the fist. Protecting the plate, Concepcion tried to swing inside-out at the ball and drive it to the right, but he caught just a sliver of it and popped it into the air, foul, wide of first, where Cecil Cooper collected it for the third out of the inning.
Tiant, as he’d done all Series against the Reds, had pitched out of another jam. As Rick Burleson trotted in toward the dugout past Luis, he apologized for his error. Tiant smiled at him, radiating confidence, as if he didn’t have a care in the word.
“Don’t worry about it, man,” said Tiant, patting the Rooster’s shoulder. “We still got ’em.”
Luis Tiant had just completed his fortieth consecutive scoreless inning at Fenway Park. But his extraordinary streak was about to come to an end.
ELEVEN
Luis’s parents, Luis Eleuterio Tiant and Isabel Rovina Vega Tiant, reside at Calle 30, Apartment 9, Mariano, Havana, Cuba. He has not had a chance to spend any time with them for many years. Naturally, he has a great desire to do so.
Luis’s career as a major leaguer is in its latter years. It is impossible to predict how much longer he will be able to pitch. Therefore, he is hopeful that his parents will be able to visit him in Boston during this current baseball season to see their son perform. I am sure we both agree that this is a reasonable desire.
I have contacted the State Department and have been assured that the granting of visas to enter the United States will be no problem. Therefore, with your help, I am confident that a reunion of Luis and his parents is possible this summer. Such a reunion would be a significant indication that better understanding between our peoples is achievable.
I look forward to receiving your response.
Sincerely,
Edward W. Brooke
WHEN FIDEL CASTRO FINISHED READING SENATOR Brooke’s letter about Luis Tiant and his parents at the dinner party, he didn’t speak for a while. George McGovern thought he seemed intrigued and engaged, while quietly calculating all the implications of the issue against his larger agenda.
“Let me check on this,” he said. “I will give you an answer when we meet tomorrow.”
Their meeting the next day began at four-thirty in the afternoon and, with the vast number of subjects they had to cover, would last until hours after midnight. But when they first sat down, the encounter began with Cuba’s prime minister responding to Senator Brooke’s letter.
“I’ve checked on your request about Mr. Tiant’s parents,” said Castro. “They have been advised that they can go to Boston and stay as long as they wish.”
Senator McGovern conveyed the welcome news back to Edward Brooke, who then passed it on to Judge Schreiber and Luis Tiant. The wheels of statecraft and diplomacy moved a little slower; it took almost four months to smooth out all the details of the visit, while Brooke’s office arranged for Luis to send his parents money and the plane tickets. After finally flying from Havana to Mexico City on August 15, the Tiants had to wait for nearly a week before their complex visas were finalized at the U.S. Embassy; on a road trip with the Red Sox in Chicago and Kansas City, Luis spoke to them by phone daily. Although the family had tried to keep details about their arrival private, word leaked to the press, and Luis was deluged with requests for interviews. Luis, Maria, and their three children drove to Logan International Airport on Thursday evening, the 21st of August, along with a number of close family friends. When they walked into the arrivals terminal, they found a pack of nearly one hundred reporters and photographers waiting for them. Doing his best to accommodate their interest, Luis patiently answered questions while struggling to maintain his composure. When they announced the arrival of their connecting flight from Mexico City, the press stepped back from around the family, uncharacteristically giving them space; many of them were sportswriters who had known Tiant for years and knew what this meant to him. A hush fell over the room.
When his father stepped off the plane into the terminal, Luis put a hand over his eyes and wept. Fifteen years; Luis had tried to prepare himself for the moment but to no avail. His father saw him and smiled and waved; Luis rushed to him, into his embrace.
“Don’t cry, son,” his father whispered softly in Spanish. “The cameras will see you.”
“I don’t care,” said Luis.
The Old Man closed his eyes and held him tight and smiled. Then Isabel appeared at his side, and Luis bear-hugged his mother, while Luis Senior held out his arms to Maria and his three grandchildren, twelve-year-old Luis, seven-year-old Isabel, and one-year-old Danny, and they all crowded into his arms.
Few pictures were taken. Almost everyone else in the room, reporters and photographers included, was in tears.
As the family walked slowly away, a Spanish reporter asked Luis’s mother who was the better pitcher, her husband or her son. Luis and his father, arm in arm, overheard the question and answered for her.
“She doesn’t know anything about baseball,” explained Luis Senior.
“My father was better than me,” said Luis.
“No, my son is better,” said Luis Senior, in his halting English. “I watch him pitch on television in Havana.”
“My father brought the screwball to Mexico. He was a great pitcher.”
“I’ve been in training,” said Luis Senior, smiling again at the reporter. “You tell the Red Sox, if they need me, I’m ready.”
When they got back to the family home in Milton, the welcoming party went on for hours, and for the first time since 1961 the entire Tiant family slept under the same roof. Luis and his father stayed up later than the rest, over drinks and Cuban cigars; life, baseball, all the missing years. The next morning, a photograph of the Tiant family reunion at the airport made the front page of every newspaper in Boston.
Luis had thrown the last game of the road trip in Kansas City; his next scheduled start at Fenway came the following Tuesday against the visiting California Angels, when his parents would see their son pitch a major-league game for the first time. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey met them beforehand and asked if Luis Senior would like to throw out the first pitch that night. When Luis translated the offer for his father, he seemed initially reluctant—he didn’t want to embarrass his son, or himself—but when the moment came and his name was announced to the crowd, Luis Senior popped up out of the dugout with a Red Sox cap on and energetically jogged to the mound, where his son was waiting for him. The ovation grew louder as the Old Man slid off his coat, traded it with his son for the baseball, straddled the rubber, made a full windup, and fired a screwball to reserve catcher Tim Blackwell behind the plate; he threw it back to Luis as the crowd cheered.
That was supposed to be the end of the ceremony, but Luis Senior asked for the ball back.
“What’s wrong, Papa?” asked Luis.
“It wasn’t a strike,” he said. “Give me the ball.”
Luis handed it to him. He signaled for Blackwell to get back into his crouch, and this time the slender and elegant “Señor Skinny” whistled a fastball right down the heart of the plate. The crowd, predictably, went nuts. This perfect evening didn’t end perfectly, only because his parents didn’t see Luis pitch the Red Sox to a win; they lost to the Angels 8–2 on the night of August 26. Still troubled by a sore lower back at the time, Tiant didn’t have his usual velocity, and may have been pressing with his parents watching him play for the first time. But from that point on in the season, they hadn’t seen him lose at home; five complete-game victories in a row, including the opening games of the team’s playoff series against Oakland and Cincinnati.
The night after Luis’s 6–0 gem in Game One of the 1975 World Series, the Tiants hosted an impromptu gathering for family and friends at their home in Milton. At around two that morning, as the joyful celebration was winding down, Luis came through a door and saw his father looking up at him from a nearby easy chair, the sweetest, proud, sad
smile on his face. He held out his arms, and Luis sat down beside him and they held on to each other, without saying a word, both of them crying silently. The dream, passed down from father to son, had come all the way home.
JACK BILLINGHAM strode out to the mound in the bottom of the fourth to face his second batter of the game, right fielder Dwight Evans. He missed with his first pitch, low and away, then came back inside with a live fastball that rode in on Evans’s hands, which he fouled off to even the count at 1–1.
Bringing in Norman and Billingham as early as he had, both of them starters by trade, Sparky hadn’t actually called on the rank and file of his relief corps yet; they were still six deep out there, and if he had to, Anderson wouldn’t hesitate to use every last one of them.
Billingham’s third pitch, a slow curve, missed outside, 2–1.
The first member of that cadre, Clay Carroll, continued to throw in the Cincinnati bullpen; with Billingham due up second in the top of the fifth, Sparky prepared to use a pinch hitter in that spot and throw another arm at the Red Sox.
Bench set up outside and Evans swung and missed at a prototype Billingham sinker that dropped out of the zone, just below his bat, to even the count at 2–2. He barely fought off the next one, another sinker, swinging late, fouling it straight back; Billingham appeared to have the advantage.
Dwight Evans had played 115 games in right field for the Red Sox in 1975, hitting .274, with thirteen homers and fifty-six runs batted in. His performance at the plate had markedly improved throughout the year, as had manager Darrell Johnson’s confidence in him. Only twenty-three, he was the oldest of Boston’s three young star outfielders—Evans, Lynn, and Rice—and the way Evans had blossomed in this Series, the Red Sox appeared to have the makings of one of the greatest outfields of all time.
When Billingham came back with his third straight sinker, Evans was waiting on it, and caught it solidly on the meat of the wood, going with the pitch and driving it hard to right field. Ken Griffey took off at the crack of the bat, but the ball angled away from him, bounced once on the warning track about twenty feet inside the foul line, and bounced almost straight sideways over the short wall into the seats just past the Pesky Pole for a ground rule double.
The crowd sprang to life again as Rick Burleson walked to the plate. Billingham missed low and away for a ball.
At the corners of the infield Pete Rose and Tony Perez crept forward onto the edge of the infield grass, anticipating a sacrifice bunt. Burleson’s task was to move Evans over to third any way he could, where with one out a fly ball to the outfield would bring him in; a bunt, deep fly ball, or ground ball out to the right side would all do the job. But with pitcher Luis Tiant due up next, the quickest path to manufacture a run here was through the considerable gap that had opened up between Perez and Joe Morgan, where a single could score Evans from second.
Billingham missed again, a fastball, low and just outside, 2–0.
Darrell Johnson never flashed the bunt sign out to Don Zimmer; he trusted that Burleson, with his sound bat control, could put the ball into play on the right side, as he’d been able to do consistently throughout the season.
But not unless Billingham gave him a pitch to hit; his next, a sinker, came in low for ball three, 3–0. Sparky had flashed a sign of his own to Bench: Don’t give him anything near the plate. More signs from Johnson to Zimmer to Burleson; taking all the way. Another sign from Sparky: Put him on. The pitch missed low, nowhere near the zone, for all intents and purposes an intentional walk.
Burleson trotted down to first. Red Sox runners at first and second, nobody out.
Luis Tiant shed his jacket and walked to the plate. Third base coach Don Zimmer walked all the way down the line to Tiant, and they talked for half a minute, Zimmer making sure that Tiant understood exactly what they needed: a bunt, down the third base line, to prevent the force play at third and advance both runners.
But Sparky put his own play on: He was willing to gamble to prevent another run, and so Tony Perez charged in hard from first with the pitch, while Rose hung back near the bag at third; Billingham would field any ball hit to the left and either he or Perez would try to nail Evans at third for the force-out.
Tiant squared to bunt with the pitch, and as Billingham’s high fastball broke in on him, he poked his bat out at it and popped it weakly into the air down the first base line. Luis hesitated, thinking the ball would easily be caught for an out—and possible double play—but with Perez charging in, the ball gently arced just over his head and dropped fair. When he saw it land, Tiant, surprised, tossed his bat and ran. Perez turned and chased the ball down as it rolled near the foul line, picked it up, and flipped it underhand to Joe Morgan covering first for the out.
Luis Tiant’s luck was still holding; his little oops blooper had worked to perfection in the face of the Reds’ aggressive defense, advancing Burleson and Evans to second and third with one out.
First baseman Cecil Cooper came to the plate. Playing the percentages, Sparky pulled the Reds’ entire infield onto the grass, hoping for a ground ball from a Billingham sinker that would allow them to either hold Evans at third for an out at first or make a play at the plate if Evans ran on contact. The risk: As good as they all were, drawing his infielders closer to home reduced their effective range by nearly 40 percent; a sharply hit ball that found a gap would score two runs and break the game open. Sparky accepted the risk; although his powerful offense had come from behind to win forty-four times during the ’75 season and four times in the playoffs—half of those in their final at bat—on this night he didn’t feel that his Reds could afford to fall any deeper in the hole.
Billingham’s first pitch missed outside for ball one.
Cooper was now 1–15 in the Series; if he was ever going to find a moment to break out of his slump, this was the time.
Billingham’s sinker missed low for ball two. Clay Carroll continued to throw in the Reds bullpen. The crowd revved up, on their feet again.
When Billingham came back with a sinker, Cooper swung and missed, looking awkward and uneasy. Joe Morgan trotted in and shouted some encouragement to Billingham: That was the pitch, that was the one we need.
Bench called for the sinker again, Cooper swung late, and topped it into the dirt in front of home plate, where it squirted weakly down to the drawn-in Tony Perez. Perez looked Evans back to third, then ran over to touch first and retire Cooper, unassisted, for the second out. Cooper’s slump continued.
The scoring threat diminished, Sparky returned his infield to their normal depth for Red Sox second baseman Denny Doyle; only Rose stayed close to the bag at third in case Doyle tried to drop in a sneak bunt.
The first pitch missed just low, Bench and Billingham staying with the sinker. Billingham came back with it again and caught the inside corner for a strike to even the count. His third sinker in a row to Doyle then produced the desired result: Doyle chopped it down into the dirt directly out toward where Joe Morgan had him played. Morgan charged in to confidently field it, and took his time tossing to first to get Doyle by two steps for the final out of the fourth.
Billingham’s sinker ball had done the job again at Fenway. Due up second in the top of the fifth, Jack already knew as he walked off the mound that he was done for the night. He also couldn’t help but think that if only he’d been out there from the start, Fred Lynn wouldn’t have hit one out of the park to give the Red Sox the early lead.
If only.
For his career, Jack Billingham had now pitched twenty-two and two-thirds innings in two World Series and given up exactly one earned run. He would never be given another World Series start, and appeared in only one more Series game before he finished his long and successful pitching career; but to this day Jack Billingham, cousin to Christy Mathewson, still holds the record for the lowest career ERA in the World Series in all of baseball history.
TWELVE
We never have any pressure. We just go out and play as hard as we can, and if we
win, we win.
SPARKY ANDERSON
AMAZING AS LUIS TIANT’S COMEBACK FOR THE RED SOX had been, capped by his commanding performances down the stretch of the pennant drive and throughout the playoffs, viewed in the context of what was happening in Boston during the summer of 1975 it becomes even more remarkable. A place with a long memory, built on a tradition of clearly defined class lines, Boston had evolved from a confederation of succinct and separate neighborhoods into a city that has been described, accurately, as the biggest small town in America; closely knit but cloistered and partitioned. Never as robust and vibrant a melting pot as New York, throughout its history racial and ethnic boundaries in Boston had tended to be drawn in more indelible ink. When the northward migration of African-Americans fleeing Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought thousands to eastern Massachusetts seeking factory and manufacturing jobs, those segregated neighborhood lines became even more sharply carved in the earth. By the 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement advanced the cause of fuller social equality, atavistic racial attitudes, often provoked by incidents of prejudicial police brutality, erupted into violence throughout the inner cities of the United States. The black neighborhood of Roxbury, where tensions had simmered near boiling for years, experienced three nights of rioting and violence in June of 1967, the summer of the Red Sox’s “Impossible Dream.” Seven years later, the flash point in Boston for these ancient, lingering antipathies became implementation of the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling that segregated public schools should now be integrated by forced busing of students.