Page 94 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 87
McDowell was 20 years old, but had spent parts of the last three seasons with the Indians, and was clearly the star of the Portland team at the start of the season. Tiant was not in the rotation.
Luis picked up a relief win in Portland’s rst game, and another a week later. His rst start was on May 3, in the Beavers’ 15th game. McDowell, meanwhile, started hot and got hotter, pitching a one-hitter and no-hitter in consecutive starts in early May, before nally getting recalled on May 30 when his record had reached 8-0 with a 1.18 ERA, with 102 strikeouts in 76 innings.
Tiant quietly built up his own résumé; at the time of McDowell’s promotion, Luis was 7-0 with a 2.25 ERA. With much lower expectations, Tiant was slower to get the attention of the Indians’ brass. After nally losing 2-0 on June 5, Tiant won four more games to nish June with a 12-1 record. e Indians nally recalled him on July 17. Tiant nished 15-1 (a PCL record .938 winning percentage) with a 2.04 ERA, completing 13 of his 15 starts.
Tiant joined the Indians in New York on Saturday morning, July 18, and was asked by his manager, Birdie Tebbetts, if he was ready to pitch. When advised that he was, Tebbetts told him he was pitching the next day against Whitey Ford. Tiant responded with a four-hit shutout, striking out 11. Luis nished 10-4 for the Tribe with a 2.83 ERA. His total line for 1964: a 25-5 record and 2.42 ERA in 264 innings.
Luis was a icted with a sore pitching arm in 1965, nishing 11-11, and showed up the next spring having lost 20 pounds on the advice of his father. He started the 1966 season with three consecutive shutouts, a streak that ended in Baltimore when Frank Robinson hit a ball completely out of Memorial Stadium, the only time that was ever done. Luis hit a rough spell in May and June and spent most of the last half of the season in the bullpen, notching eight saves in 30 relief appearances. Despite only 16 starts, his ve shutouts topped the American League. His ERAs in 1966 and 1967 were 2.79 and 2.74, respectively, more
than adequate, but not enough to win more than 12 games each year.
In 1968 Tiant became a star, nishing 21-9 and posting a league-leading 1.60 ERA. Luis also led the league with nine shutouts, including four in succession (one short of the then-record set by the White Sox’ Doc White in 1904). He pitched his best game on July 3 in Cleveland when he recorded 19 strikeouts in 10 innings against the Twins. In the top of the 10th, the Twins got runners on rst and third with no one out but Luis responded by striking out the side. e Indians pushed across a run in the bottom on the 10th to give him a 1-0 victory.
e following week, Luis started and lost the All-Star Game, giving the NL an unearned run in the rst inning that turned out to be the only run of the game. After a 3-0 loss to the Tigers on August 14, Denny McLain suggested: “Luis and I would each be ghting for 30 wins if he had our kind of hitting to go with his kind of pitching.”3 (Catcher Bill Freehan took it a step further, insisting that Luis would be “going for 40 wins.”)4 In the event, McLain nished 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA, and won the Cy Young and MVP Awards unanimously. Tiant ended his season with a one-hit, 11-strikeout masterpiece against the Yankees in New York.
e Indians nished 1969 with the worst record in the American League, and their worst winning per- centage in 54 years. Luis fell to 9-20, and posted an ERA of 3.71. It was not really as bad as it seemed — changes to the strike zone and mound sent the league ERA up to 3.62. Nonetheless, Luis was an average American League pitcher, which was quite a step down from 1968.
In December of 1969, Tiant was traded to the Minnesota Twins in a six-player deal that brought Dean Chance and Graig Nettles to the Indians. In 1970 he won his rst six decisions for a very strong Minnesota team, but left during his sixth victory with a sore shoulder that had been bothering him since the spring. Luis went to see a specialist, who found a crack in a bone in his right shoulder and prescribed only