by Mark Frost
The reserve clause was originally intended to serve as a self-policing defense against rival teams and leagues raiding an owner’s roster. After it was formally drawn up in 1879, as a secret pact between the original National League teams, each owner was allowed to list five players who would remain off-limits to his competitors; you “reserved” the right to retain that player for one year beyond the life of his current signed contract, and then reserved the right to renew that right on a yearly basis, in perpetuity. Owners expanded the scope of the list to eleven men a few years later, then to fourteen, and by the turn of the century the reserve clause covered all twenty-five players on major-league rosters.
Labor relations were not the National League’s only problem. Operating with the unregulated freedom that only a monopoly can provide, owners often owned percentages of their fellow competitors’ teams—they called their league a “syndicate”—and brazenly manipulated rosters and schedules for one another’s benefit, raising justified questions from fans about their loyalty and integrity. Not only had the National League’s owners appeared to have lost their moral center, the game on the field had turned violent, rebellious players were almost unmanageable, and urban ballparks had devolved into dens of iniquity dominated by drunkenness and open gambling, unfit for families, the subject of many scolding editorials and Sunday sermons across the country. In this sea of troubles, Ban Johnson, a tough-minded, upright former Cincinnati sportswriter who had been running the smaller Western League for six years, saw an opportunity. He had from the start imposed a strict code of conduct on both his owners and players, banning liquor, fighting, and gambling from games, drawing fans back to his parks by offering a family-friendly atmosphere, and he had quickly made the Western League the most solvent and successful of the country’s many “minor” leagues. When four financially crippled National League franchises collapsed after the 1899 season, reducing its number to eight, Johnson declared war.
Johnson first changed the Western League’s name to the more patriotic-sounding “American League,” and then organized eight solid teams, all of them based either in cities where the National League had already failed, or where he now endeavored to challenge them head-to-head. He secured additional financing from an independently wealthy investor, giving him the security he knew he’d need to survive the red ink his teams would bleed while the American League established itself. When, as expected, the National League brushed aside his initial entreaties to recognize the American League as an equal, Johnson let their players know he was willing to ignore both the reserve clause and their established salary limits and began hiring away the National’s strongest talent. At the start of the American League’s second season in 1901, Johnson planted his flag in the territory of the National League’s strongest team; he decided to bring the franchise he’d been on the verge of establishing in Buffalo into Boston, assembled the strongest roster he could field, and announced he would soon build a new state-of-the-art ballpark to house them. Boston’s fans, the most passionate and informed in the country, long accustomed to excellence, had come close to open revolt about the declining state of their once great National League team, and they embraced Johnson’s fresh new product wholeheartedly.
Two seasons later these Boston “Americans”—named after the league itself, as were a few of Johnson’s other new teams, to distinguish them in those cities with established National League franchises—won their first American League pennant in their brand-new South End ballpark, the Huntington Avenue Grounds. The cornerstone of the franchise had become thirty-four-year-old pitcher Cy Young, whom Johnson signed away from the National League’s team in St. Louis—which would later become the Cardinals—two years after it had merged rosters with the same owners’ failing Cleveland Spiders. An Ohio native, Young had spent the first nine years of his career close to home in Cleveland, averaging twenty-six wins a season, but he hadn’t taken to St. Louis, and chaffed at the National League’s punitive salary cap. Johnson offered Young $3,000 a year to jump leagues and pitch for his flagship Boston franchise. Young was an imposing, dignified master of control on the mound, but most insiders had assumed his best years were behind him; he promptly averaged thirty-one wins a year for the Americans during their first three seasons and became a legend in Boston. Young had more than a little of Abe Lincoln in him—a frontier farm-boy philosopher, he would publish two books of his baseball musings, full of pithy aphorisms steeped in common sense—and had become a bona fide role model dedicated to clean living and the beneficial tonic of hard physical labor. The fledgling team rallied around the estimable Young, and their early success encouraged Boston’s rabid fans, led by a fanatical social club called the “Rooters,” to tilt their loyalties away from the old National League franchise toward the city’s new American League entry. Johnson’s gamble had paid off.
Although the warring leagues had ostensibly signed a “peace treaty” at the onset of the 1903 season, a cloud of anger and resentment over Ban Johnson’s hardball tactics still hung over the field. At the behest of their fellow owners, when the 1903 season ended, the then three-time-straight National League champion Pittsburgh Pirates issued a challenge to these upstart Americans—or Bostons, Pilgrims, or Puritans, as they were alternately known; team names continued to be fluid and casual for another decade—to play in a “best of nine games” postseason exhibition. Ban Johnson had raided the deep Pirates roster during the previous off-season, luring three of their biggest stars over to his American League. The Pirates had screamed foul, raising a hue and cry in the national press at this outrage; a perfect case of the pot calling the kettle black, since the Pirates had earned their name a few years earlier for brazenly stealing players from other National League teams. (Before which they had previously been known, without a hint of irony, as the Pittsburgh Innocents.) Now the Pirates had asked for and obtained this high-profile showdown, privately planning to expose and humiliate the American League, in front of a baseball-loving nation, as a grossly inferior product.
The owners decided to call this blood-feud exhibition the “World Series.”
WHILE THE FANS in Fenway continued to chatter with excitement over Fred Lynn’s home run, Luis Tiant returned to the mound and Cincinnati’s first batter of their second inning, first baseman Atana-sio “Tony” Rigal Perez, came to the plate.
Perez and Tiant were fellow countrymen and near contemporaries—at thirty-three, Perez was less than two years younger—and both had traveled a similar path out of the beisbol-rich environs of Cuba. Also like Tiant, Perez had been a precocious talent, earning his way onto a traveling Cuban All-Star team at the age of fourteen. He was a skinny kid then with a big friendly grin, tall for his age—almost six-two—grown powerfully strong from the summers he’d spent working beside his father and grandfather in a sugar mill. But their paths never crossed in their homeland; Tiant grew up in suburban Havana on the northwest coast, while Perez lived in the region of Camaguey in central Cuba’s rural countryside. Luis Tiant Sr.’s professional baseball career had inspired not only his son but a whole generation of young Cuban pitchers. For hitters like Tony Perez—he played shortstop in his early days—who came of age in Cuba during the 1950s, their inspiration was a man named Saturnino Orestes Armas Minoso Arrieta. Baseball fans around the Americas would come to know him, in a pleasing, almost cartoon-like contraction, as Minnie Minoso.
Tiant started Perez with a sidearm slider that missed low and inside for ball one.
Since banishing black players from its leagues in 1884, organized baseball had long made a fine distinction that allowed a few light-skinned (or “Caucasian”) Latins to play in the majors, occasionally even letting a few darker-skinned Latins into the minors as long as they could be verified as “Cuban” and not African-American. After playing for almost ten years in Mexico and the Negro Leagues, Minoso wasn’t allowed to play an inning in the American major leagues until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947; Minoso was nearly twenty-eight by the time he appea
red in a few games for the Cleveland Indians in 1949. Never appreciating what they had, in 1951 the Indians traded him to the Chicago White Sox—where he became the first black player to wear a White Sox uniform, and instantly established himself as one of game’s most flamboyant and colorful figures. Displaying speed, power, defense, and an exuberant personality, Minoso made seven All-Star Games during the fifties, and gave hope to every kid in Cuba with a bat that their dreams might be within reach.
Tiant’s second pitch to Perez was a slow, arcing overhand curve that dropped in for a strike to even the count, a touch of showmanship that stirred up the crowd. Perez had struck out waving at that same weightless changeup from Luis in Game One. El Tiante was rolling out his full repertoire for the Reds’ dangerous RBI machine.
“Tani” Perez, as everyone called him then, knew that the only future Cuba could give him was the same backbreaking factory life his father and grandfather had endured, and that following in the footsteps of the great Minoso offered the only avenue of escape. Similarly inspired by Minoso’s success, American big-league teams had for the past few years dispatched a brigade of scouts to scour the Cuban countryside looking for hidden gems. One of those scouts, Tony Pacheco, director of scouting for the Havana Sugar Kings—at that time the Cincinnati Reds’ Triple-A farm team in the International League—spotted Perez when he was sixteen, saw a glimmer of potential in his raw skills, and got him the instructional help he thought he needed to develop. When Perez turned seventeen, Pacheco was sufficiently encouraged by Tani’s progress to sign him as a Reds farmhand; the deal he proposed would only cost the Reds a one-way plane ticket to Tampa, and a grand total of $2.50, the price of Perez’s visa. There wasn’t much to recommend the offer, but other pressures had come into play that weighed heavily on Perez’s decision.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 1959, revolutionary forces led by a thirty-two-year-old lawyer named Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt regime of Cuba’s longtime military dictator Fulgencio Batista, promising new elections and a swift return to democracy. Those elections never materialized, and Cuba’s long relationship with Batista’s patron United States swiftly deteriorated once Castro established his government. Amid a wave of murderous reprisals against former Batista supporters, Castro balked at attempts by the American government to paternalistically influence the direction of his country the way it had grown accustomed to doing so routinely throughout the twentieth century. When President Eisenhower imposed a punitive quota on Cuban sugar imports, Castro retaliated by seizing and nationalizing American-owned industries throughout his country. He also made a series of alarming moves toward the threatening embrace of the Soviet Union, all the while publicly denying any interest in establishing a socialist government. Rumors spread that every available young man would be conscripted into compulsory military service and that all emigration off the island would soon be curtailed. Luis Tiant, now pitching in his second professional season in Mexico, had never shown an interest in politics, but he was alarmed by the changes afoot in Havana that his father told him about whenever they spoke by phone. Life, as the Tiant and Perez families had known it in Cuba, had reached a treacherous crossroads. Although Castro himself spoke often of his love for the great sport of beisbol—he had pitched for his college team and made a show of appearing on the mound in games after he took office, bragging that he had once been offered a contract by a scout from the New York Giants—if he broke off relations with America, the bridge for Cuban players to the major leagues that had been built by the success of Minnie Minoso might instantly collapse.
Tiant went back to the sidearm slider, laying more heat on it this time, and it broke inside off the corner of the plate toward Perez’s hands. Perez took his first swing at a hittable ball and whacked it hard and foul down the first base line. One and two, advantage Tiant.
So Tani Perez accepted the Reds’ paltry offer. He spoke only two words of English when he arrived at their spring camp in Florida—“yes” and “no”—and didn’t know a living soul on the continent. The Reds dispatched him to their rookie club in Geneva, New York, where the frigid weather of the early northeastern spring shocked his system. He was still rail thin, and the Reds tried him initially at second base, then moved him to third, where he would remain until his body filled out. But everywhere they sent him, Tony—during the acclimation process his nickname had quickly been Americanized—Perez ripped the cover off the ball. In his third year, with the Reds’ farm team in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he hit .292, with 18 home runs and 74 RBIs. He also experienced his first taste of Southern segregation when he was grouped with the team’s African-American players and denied access to white restaurants and hotels. Luis Tiant went through the same shocking introduction to American apartheid in 1963, playing for Burlington in the Carolina League. Perez’s performance earned him a promotion late that season to the Reds’ Triple-A franchise in the Pacific Coast League, the San Diego Padres. He tore up PCL pitching in 1964, hitting .309 with 34 home runs and 109 RBIs. Tiant made it to Cleveland’s Portland franchise in the PCL that same spring, their number two starter behind the Indians’ best prospect, fireballer “Sudden” Sam McDowell.
Tony Perez shared another crucial quality with Luis Tiant: As a person off the field, and at the plate in even the most pressurized situations, he possessed an almost unearthly calm, and with extraordinary consistency he delivered hits when runners were in scoring position; by now it was clear that it was only a matter of time until Perez would get the call to the major leagues. To go with his great natural talent, he owned the perfect temperament for baseball’s long, trying seasons, a relaxed, generous, easygoing, good-humored confidence that never called attention to itself and, like Tiant’s, defused the tension in every locker room he entered. Johnny Bench said that with his engaging attitude, booming baritone, and wide, contagious smile, Perez “cast a net” over the entire team and wouldn’t let them wander. His teammates had already tagged him with the nickname he’d carry throughout his career: “Doggie,” the “Big Dog,” or “Big Doggie,” the man you could always count on to come through when the game was on the line.
After Perez stepped out of the box to gather himself, Tiant nodded at the sign from Fisk and reared back into the same overhand motion he’d used for that tantalizing slow curve, but instead fired a high, hard fastball an inch beyond the outside corner, exactly where he’d wanted to put it; that was an “out” pitch and a less disciplined hitter would’ve ripped at it and missed. Perez kept the bat on his shoulder. The count went even, two balls, two strikes.
The parallel paths of Tony Perez and Luis Tiant would come close to crossing again in July of that 1964 season. After Sam McDowell was called up by the Indians, Tiant had stepped in to become the unquestioned ace of the Pacific Coast League Portland Beavers, compiling a commanding 15–1 record only halfway through the season. The Beavers traveled to San Diego for a weekend mid-July showdown with the Padres, with Tiant scheduled to start the first game on Friday night, and the local paper splashed this impending showdown, between their local Cuban slugger and the visiting Cuban hurler, all over the front page of their sports section.
Home plate umpire Satch Davidson put a new ball in play, and Tiant slipped off his glove for a moment to give it a brief rub before he looked in to Fisk for the sign.
But that first showdown in 1964 between the two rising Latin stars never materialized; when Tiant arrived with the team at their San Diego hotel that afternoon, he was immediately summoned to the room of his manager, Johnny Lipon, who broke the news he had just received from Cleveland Indians general manager Gabe Paul; they wanted Tiant to join the Indians on the road in New York City immediately. The moment Tiant had been waiting for since coming to America had arrived, but his initial instinct was to refuse the call-up; the way the Indians had left him off their roster at the beginning of the year after an exceptional spring camp had wounded his considerable pride. He felt that no matter what he did he would never get the same re
spect as their fair-haired favorite, Sam McDowell. Lipon had to gently convince his best pitcher that that was exactly why he had to seize this moment and prove to the Indians how wrong they’d been about him. Luis never unpacked his bags; when the Portland Beavers took the field against the Padres that night in San Diego, Tiant was already on the red-eye to New York, where the next morning he signed his first big-league contract, for $5,000—$1,000 below the league minimum. The following day, twenty-three-year-old Luis Tiant won his first big-league start in memorable fashion, besting the first-place Yankees and their ace Whitey Ford with a four-hit shutout. Tiant never looked back; he ended his season for the Tribe at 10–4 with a 2.83 ERA. Tony Perez received his own call-up to the Reds just one week later, and spent the next two years working his way into Cincinnati’s regular lineup, finally winning the third base job outright at the start of the 1967 season. Over the following years, in their respective leagues, the two men had gone on to stardom; in Tiant’s case twice, with an interruption, while Perez established himself as the steadiest, most unshakeable component of the Big Red Machine. But they had still never faced each other in regular or postseason competition until Game One of the 1975 World Series.