El Profe: Luis Tiant’s ‘Bendición’

Bendición

Que dios te bendiga.

Long before I really understood what it meant, I recall asking my abuelitas for la bendición — their blessing. It’s what we asked of our grandparents and elders as Latino kids, and even as adults.

Receiving a blessing from a grandparent, an older relative or a respected elder was treasured.

That same feeling occurred this past summer when those words were uttered by Luis Tiant, a player that I had long admired for his perseverance as part of a unique generation of Latino ballplayers who literally left home behind and helped integrate baseball.

I was humbled, honored and felt que era familia — that I was family.

The Stuff of Legends

The mound was his stage, the spot from which he commanded the attention of both the batter and the fan. He exuded confidence while using a memorable pitching delivery in which he whirled toward centerfield and “showed the batter my number.”

That whirlwind delivery was created on the fly during his Cleveland days and reintroduced as part of his comeback with Boston

“Nobody told me to do that kind of delivery,” Tiant said when I interviewed him onstage this summer at the All-Star FanFest Clubhouse in Miami. “It just came into my mind. And I said, ‘Let me try this. Let me look in the center field, then release.’

“And I did it. And I saw the [batter’s] eye get about that big. He moved away from the home plate and the ball was right there. Strike three. And then the hitter asked (catcher Carlton) Fisk, ‘What is that?’ Fisk told him, ‘No, that’s a new pitch.’ ‘Oh, are you kidding me?!’

“And from that point on, I started doing it.”

That he commanded the baseball stage this way seemed genetic. After all, Luis Tiant is a grand name among Latino baseball fans, and particularly among Cubans. The more knowledgeable Latino baseball fans will tell you there were in fact two Luis Tiants, both legendary in their own right.

A crafty lefthander, Luis Eleuterio Tiant pitched for the Cuban Stars in the Eastern Colored League and then for the New York Cubans in the Negro National League. Negro League lore has it that a batter befuddled by Tiant’s delivery once swung when Tiant was throwing to first trying to pick off a runner.

“Strike,” the home plate umpire declared.

“What?” the batter protested. “He didn’t throw a pitch.”

“If you’re dumb enough to swing, then you earned a strike.”

That gives you a sense of what the younger Tiant inherited from his father.

Loo-ee, Loo-ee

One of my all-time favorite baseball moments involved the two Luis Tiants taking the Fenway Park mound on August 26, 1975.

Funhouse mirror images of each other, that’s what they were.

One righty, one lefty.

One lanky, one stocky.

One in street clothes, the other in a Red Sox uniform.

One who never wanted that moment to end, the other anxious to get the game started.

By the time the two Luis Tiants shared the Fenway mound, the son had become the right-handed reincarnation of the left-handed father.

Pitching had become all about guts, guile and gumption.

The younger Luis Tiant had been a flame-thrower with the Cleveland Indians who blew batters away. His 1968 season was legendary: 21-9 while striking out 264 and leading the American League with a 1.60 ERA and nine shutouts. Advance metrics validate his dominance: He also led the league with a 186 ERA+, 2.04 FIP and 5.3 H/9.

Then everything broke apart on the mound while pitching for the Minnesota Twins on May 28, 1970. His right shoulder blade literally snapped as he hurled a pitch toward the plate. It seemed his season was done, his career possibly over.

But for Luis Tiant, it was just the latest in a long list of hurdles.

Making the move

His father had actively discouraged him from pursuing a professional career in the United States. Dealing with Jim Crow segregation and racial hostility during his Negro League days had spoiled the elder Tiant’s appetite for playing Stateside.

Better to study to be a doctor or engineer, father recommended to son.

But the son found in his mom an advocate who swayed her husband to allow the younger Luis to start his pro career in the Mexican League. Doing so in 1960, they all knew, meant separation. For how long? None of them knew. Cuba was in the early years of Fidel Castro’s rule, and Cuba’s relationship with other countries was rapidly changing. Fifteen years would pass before the two Luis Tiants could share a moment together.

New Country, New Man

After two seasons in the Mexican League, the younger Tiant signed with the Cleveland Indians. Part of a trailblazing generation of black players, he encountered a different set of challenges than his father had faced a generation earlier.

Luis Tiant, who was born in the Havana suburb of Marianao 77 years ago, became a pioneer in the truest sense — a black player who integrated the minor league teams on which he played, and transformed the culture of the minor league towns and ballparks where he lived and performed, including spring training in segregated communities in Arizona and Florida.

But the treatment was unsettling.

“I used to go to my room and cry every day,” Tiant shared, recalling his early days in the minors. “We would go on the road. [But] we couldn’t use this stop on the road to eat. [Black players] couldn’t get out. The white players had to bring the food to the bus. That’s the only way we could eat. Then when we returned to the place where we played, they stayed in the nice hotel. We would have to go to the black section. And it was not really a good thing. It was like hell. You were not being treated like a human being.”

The racial barriers made him more determined.

“And always I say, ‘People don’t like me because the color of my skin or whatever.’ That’s fine. But I’m going to show them that color has nothing to do with what you can do. And that’s what I did.”

Tiant’s baseball travails were more complicated than your typical major leaguer’s. As a Cuban, there would be no offseason homecoming. No mom’s home-cooking to enjoy as he recuperated from the long season.

So, when he broke his shoulder blade at age 29, it wasn’t the first time he’d had to remake his life. Indeed, what I had long admired about Tiant is how he evolved into an ace while overcoming devastating physical injury, the racial tumult and outright racism of the 1960s, and the personal fallout from the political turmoil of U.S.-Cuban relations.

The fastball that once neared triple-figures in early years was gone, but not his baseball smarts. Tiant succeeded as the ultimate reclamation project, in Boston of all places — two decades before guys like Nomar Garciaparra, Manny Ramírez, Pedro Martínez and David Ortiz became Latino superstars at Fenway Park.

He got to Boston and turned into El Tiante, becoming one of Beantown’s favorite athletes and rising again to dominate AL hitters. The hopes of Fenway’s faithful surged with El Tiante on the mound. The Cuban became the Red Sox ace, a three-time 20-game winner who amassed 121 victories from 1972 to 1978

Without Tiant’s pitching in the 1975 World Series versus the Cincinnati Reds, Boston doesn’t have the magical moment of Fisk in the 12th inning of Game 6, jumping up and down at the plate, imploring the ball he crushed down the left field line to stay fair and force a Game 7.

Our interview covered these and other topics spanning his five decades in baseball. The audience was spellbound listening to his emotional story of returning as the “Lost Son of Havana” to Cuba, of seeing once more the land of his forebears, and of being able to embrace his relatives, who still recalled him their Luisito.

Sharing a stage with Luis Tiant and enabling him to tell the story of his journey is one of the things for which I am thankful this year — because it allowed others to understand how much grander his on-field accomplishments were, given the off-field circumstances he overcame. In so doing, I was able to give something back to a Latino baseball hero.

And Luis gave me something I don’t think he quite realized meant the world to me: la bendición.

Featured Image: La Vida Baseball