Game Six (7 page)

“That’s the only way I know how to play the game” became Pete’s matter-of-fact defense, and he was always so open and available and engaging with the press that they had perpetually given him a pass. Although, in the wake of Watergate, the emerging ethics of “new journalism” now encouraged reporters to tread deeper into what had formerly been considered the private lives of public figures, sportswriters—particularly team “beat” writers whose livelihood then depended on close, often protective daily relationships with their subjects—were among the last in print to change their ways. Rumors of Rose’s questionable off-field behavior and relationships with bookies abounded but remained strictly off-limits in the papers. But now that public opinion, prompted by journalistic digging, had finally returned a damning verdict on Nixon, Pete Rose had begun to represent a walking question for some observers: At what point does an unbridled competitive instinct cross over into pathology?

After flying out in his last at bat against Tiant in Game One at Fenway, Rose had crossed back to the dugout behind the mound and said to Tiant: “Bring your lucky charm with you to Cincinnati: You’ll need it.” Early on during Game Four, when he faced Tiant for
the second time, Rose turned to Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk after a few pitches, held his thumb and forefinger in a zero sign, and said: “Nothing. The guy has nothing. He wouldn’t win five games in the National League.”

When a Boston reporter showed a published account of that moment to Tiant in the clubhouse over the weekend during the long rain delay, hoping for the kind of incendiary response that beat writers can hammer into headlines, Tiant calmly read the piece, crumpled it up, and threw it in the trash.

“I don’t have anything to say,” he said quietly. “I just hope I get a chance to face them again.”

The scorecard so far: Rose versus Tiant 1–7, with two walks, one run scored. Tiant versus the Reds 2–0.

Rose took Tiant’s first pitch of the game, a fastball with some zip on it that moved slightly away from him and caught the outside right corner for a called strike.

How you like
that
fastball, Pete?

What Rose had been trying to get at about Tiant, in his own needling way, had an element of truth; in both Series games he’d pitched against the Reds, Tiant did not come at them with an overpowering fastball. The Reds were a dead fastball–hitting team, and for over a decade the National League had been thought of as offering a “purer” form of the game’s reddest meat: power pitchers trying to throw it past power hitters. The American League, it was said, lived more on corners, curveballs, and finesse, an image that “innovations” like the designated hitter had done little to dispel. But during Tiant’s first tour of duty in the bigs, a six-year stint for the mediocre Cleveland Indians in the mid-sixties, he’d been one of the most dominating fireballers in the game; in his best season, 1968, he’d gone 21–9, struck out 264 batters, and posted an otherworldly earned run average of 1.60, the lowest number posted by
any
pitcher in the American League since Hall of Famer Walter Johnson in 1919. Batters, for that entire season, hit only .168 against Tiant. He led the league with nine shutouts, at one point threw forty-one consecutive scoreless
innings, and one night struck out nineteen in a ten-inning complete-game win; that’s power pitching.

After struggling through the 1969 season, Tiant became the centerpiece of a multiplayer trade to the contending Minnesota Twins. He showed no signs of letting up after starting the season for the Twins 6–0, but then suffered the first serious injury of his career: a fractured right scapula damaged by the exceptional demands he’d been making on his arm for ten years. No team doctor had ever seen this injury in a pitcher before; it abruptly ended his ability to rely on strength and power alone, and should have ended his season. But eager to help his new team, he tried to come back from the injury too soon and pitched indifferently, losing three of four starts down the stretch of a pennant race. The Twins won the West Division, but the Orioles swept them in the American League Championship Series.

A few months later when Tiant didn’t immediately bounce back, notoriously tightfisted Twins owner Calvin Griffith gave up on him at the end of spring training in 1971, handing him a shocking outright release. No time on the disabled list to heal, or minor-league assignment to work his way back into shape—he had been fired, his contract rendered null and void. The transaction sent a coded but unmistakable message across the wire to the rest of baseball: Luis Tiant is washed up. Griffith was then quoted as saying he could “get four or five young kids for the money I was gonna pay him”: all of $65,000. The team left Luis at their Orlando hotel while they returned to Minneapolis for the start of the regular season. His shocked and outraged teammates filed past him in the lobby on their way to the bus, some of them near tears as they said good-bye to their most popular player. But taking Griffith at his word that Tiant was damaged goods, no other major-league team stepped up to take a chance on him.

At the age of thirty, just when he’d reached the point where a decade of excellence had resulted in a contract that might offer Tiant the first professional and financial security of his life, the cau
tionary warnings his father had made about the cutthroat practices of pro baseball appeared to have come to pass. Yes, the Old Man had let young Luis go to Mexico to pitch back in 1959, and three baseball seasons later his son had defied the odds when he signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians. Never shy of the spotlight, Tiant made a startling major-league debut, throwing a four-hit shutout against Whitey Ford and the mighty Yankees in their fabled home park, but despite the success he then went on to have with the Tribe, becoming by acclaim one of the best pitchers in baseball, Tiant had never been paid accordingly. Latin players in particular had a hard time negotiating with their teams during this era in the game. Struggling to establish themselves in a different country and culture and language, without effective representation, they were reluctant to be perceived as troublemakers and as a result often had to settle for less than their fair market value. He had been one of the few bright spots on a mediocre Cleveland team for six years, but rather than reward Tiant after he had earned a bigger contract, the Indians moved him to Minnesota. Understanding that this game was a business first, Luis had always been cautious with his money, and Tiant Sr.’s advice hadn’t gone completely unheeded; Luis had never moved his wife, Maria, and their three young children to the United States from her native Mexico City.

But in the spring of 1971 he was out of a job, and perhaps out of chances.

One man refused to give up on him: fellow pitcher Stan Williams, who’d been his teammate in Cleveland and seen Luis in his prime, and who’d also gone to the Twins with him as part of that same trade in 1969.

“I thought what was happening to Luis was a tragedy,” said Williams. “I knew Luis when he was sound, and I was so sure in my heart that he wasn’t finished. He’s the best friend I ever had in baseball; I respected him as an athlete and I loved him as a person. I also knew how much this game means to him, which has nothing to do with cheers and headlines.”

Williams worked the phone, reaching out to every executive he
knew, and convinced a scout in the Atlanta Braves organization to give Luis a thirty-day contract with their International League Triple-A franchise in Richmond, Virginia. Although Richmond only used him sporadically, Tiant had two particularly effective outings against the Louisville Colonels, the league’s Boston Red Sox affiliate, that made Louisville’s manager Darrell Johnson take notice. A former major-league catcher with a keen eye for pitching talent, Johnson alerted the Red Sox to take a look at Tiant. At the end of Tiant’s contract, the Atlanta front office, which was committed to a youth movement and had signed Luis primarily as a favor, released him again, at which point Johnson quietly persuaded Boston’s general manager Dick O’Connell to sign Tiant to a full year’s contract with the Red Sox organization.

Darrell Johnson put Tiant to immediate work in his rotation at Louisville and saw his confidence, control, and command grow with every outing; in thirty-one innings, he struck out twenty-nine and posted a 2.61 ERA. Johnson called Dick O’Connell less than three weeks later to tell him that “whoever your best pitcher is up there right now, Tiant is going to be better.”

O’Connell sent his director of player personnel Haywood Sullivan out to Rochester that night to confirm the opinion, and he watched Tiant throw a seemingly effortless shutout in the first half of a doubleheader. The next morning, Sullivan met Luis for breakfast.

“Are you ready to come back to the big leagues?” asked Sullivan.

“Just give me the ball,” said Tiant, “and I will show you.”

After being called up by the Red Sox in June of 1971, Tiant spent most of his time in the bullpen, pitching effectively but compiling only a 1–7 record. Regaining his form in 1972, Tiant worked his way into the starting rotation by mid-season, went 15–6, won his second ERA title (1.91), and ended up being named the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year. He then followed that up with back-to-back twenty-win seasons. If he never did fully reclaim the monstrous fastball of his youth, by 1975 no one could dispute that he had reestablished himself as one of the game’s marquee tal
ents. That was the distinction Pete Rose had failed to recognize: Luis Tiant wasn’t merely a
thrower
anymore; like his father before him, he had matured into a
pitcher.
A pitcher recognizes that he can and must use any means necessary to win his battle with hitters, and Tiant had developed one of the most varied and wicked arsenals of weapons that students of the game had ever seen. Recognizing that at its core the art of hitting is about timing—a batter has, at best, one fifth of a second to decide whether or not to swing at an average major-league pitch once the ball is released—Luis did everything in his power on the mound to confound and disrupt a hitter’s perceptions. His windup, an elaborate, herky-jerky montage of gyrations, tics, and seemingly gratuitous embellishments—which included looking up at the sky, the lights, or fans in the upper deck, while completely turning his back to the plate—came toward the batter at four different tempos and from three different directions: overhand, three quarter, sidearm. He could throw five different pitches employing all those variations, with equal proficiency, and never look exactly the same way twice.

The casual observer might dismiss all his exertions as theatrical excess, but Tiant’s methods had a purely practical purpose: They allowed him to disguise the ball for so long that it became nearly impossible to pick up the release point when it left his hand, the crucial moment in a batter’s effort to then infer a pitch’s direction and speed. Add to that Luis’s pinpoint control—home plate is seventeen inches across; he worked primarily on the two inches of black rubber on its outside edges—his masterful knowledge of the strike zone, his ability to change speeds
without
altering his windup, and the comprehensive book he kept on the tendencies of every batter he faced, it was no wonder so many hitters walked back to the dugout shaking their heads. No, Tiant didn’t throw as hard as he used to—although he could still top 90 mph on the speed gun when he reared back, like on that first pitch to Rose—but batters seldom seemed able to do anything about it. His teammate Carl Yastrzemski, who knew a little bit about hitting, had faced Tiant often when he pitched for the Indians earlier in their careers.

“Luis is the only guy I can think of who kept me guessing every minute,” said Yaz.

During the 1975 season, when the Red Sox appeared often on NBC’s
Game of the Week,
Tiant’s contorted delivery had become the windup most imitated by young baseball players not just in Boston but across the country, and had led to his growing national popularity. He also recognized as few others did that an essential part of his job—the job of the game itself—was to entertain people, and a pitcher occupies center stage more obviously than any other athlete in team sports. Tiant made himself entirely available to fans before and after games, signing autographs, posing for photos, engaging in real conversations, impressing everyone he met with his gentle and genuine demeanor. When he’d played and lived in Cleveland, neighborhood kids knew they could always ride their bikes over, knock on his door, and spend some time with him; sometimes he’d even come outside and toss a ball around. Luis was at heart a showman, who embraced and relished his leading man’s role, but he was also deeply devoted to the game for the skill, guts, and artistry it allowed him to express. That was an even bigger reason for the respect and affection he inspired in people; when the biggest stakes were on the table, he gave the game every last measure of himself.

Pete Rose labored every day of his life to grind out the maximum result from what by any measure was far from the game’s biggest talent, and he had earned his reputation as the hardest-working man in baseball. Both he and Luis Tiant had by this time, for all these reasons, become the public faces of their respective franchises. Not surprisingly, off the field both men also liked to gamble, hooked on the adrenaline rush of being in the center of the action. But in Tiant, for maybe the first time in his life, Pete Rose had met his match as a competitor.

Rose lashed at Tiant’s second pitch, a high, hanging breaking ball, and lined it crisply to left field. Carl Yastrzemski dashed forward at the crack of the bat, slipped slightly on his first step, recovered, slid onto his left knee in the moist turf, and snatched the sinking liner out of the air. Another hard hit “at-em” ball, with the
same result: one out. Rose, batting .315 in the Series and leading his team in hits, was now 1–8 against Tiant.

Ken Griffey stepped into the box. Sparky had gone with his hunch that afternoon and kept Griffey in the second spot of his lineup. Mindful that Griffey had gotten a hit against Tiant in both his games so far, and hit the ball hard two other times for outs, Sparky hoped that his speed could help the Reds manufacture some early runs and take the crowd out of the game. Tiant fed off the energy in Fenway, Sparky could feel it, and tonight they’d turned the dial into the red; they needed to get to him fast. He also trusted that gut instinct of his: Griffey was going to do some business tonight.