Luis Tiant, charismatic Cuban pitcher with mesmerizing windup, dies at 83

Luis Tiant, the charismatic Cuban with a horseshoe mustache and mesmerizing windup 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 that he died at his home in Maine.

“Today is a very sad day,” Fred Lynn, a teammate in both Boston and California, posted on X. “A Big game pitcher, a funny genuine guy who loved his family and baseball. I miss him already.”

Red Sox pitcher pitcher Luis Tiant delivers a pitch against the Orioles at Fenway Park in 1974.

(Anonymous / Associated Press)

Known as “El Tiante,” Tiant was a three-time All-Star whose greatest individual season came with Cleveland in 1968, when he went 21-9 with 19 complete games and nine shutouts — four of them in a row. But it was his 1.60 ERA — the best in the AL in half a century — that, combined with Bob Gibson’s 1.12 mark in the NL, helped convince baseball to lower the pitching mound to give batters more of a chance.

The son of a Negro Leagues star, the younger Tiant was 229-172 in all with a 3.30 ERA and 2,416 strikeouts. He had 187 complete games and 47 shutouts in a 19-year career spent mostly with Cleveland and Boston.

His death comes one week after that of all-time baseball hits 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, shutting out 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 never made the national shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., receiving a high of 30.9% of the votes in 1988, his first year on the ballot.