Cuckoo libre
"I'm not a political person," says Tiant, sitting in a booth at Game On! near Fenway Park, looking sharp in a black leather jacket with a Bluetooth headset clipped to his ear and a giant 2004 World Series ring on his finger. His famous Fu Manchu is now cottony white. It's the second most expressive part of his face, after his empathic, amber-colored eyes.
Certainly, one can't picture the jovial, cigar-chomping Tiant speaking as provocatively as the Sox' Mike Lowell did back in 2006, when news reports revealed that Fidel Castro was gravely ill. "I hope he does die," said Lowell, whose parents fled the dictatorship for Puerto Rico in 1960. "Castro killed members of my family."
But if Tiant isn't especially "political," his life has been indelibly touched by politics.
By the time of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Tiant had begun to establish himself as a power-pitching phenom on the baseball-crazy island. Castro — himself a pitcher manqué— took note.
"I met him twice," says Tiant. "He used to come into the clubhouse. The last year we play in Cuba, in '61, he used to come and shake your hand."
That year, Tiant was splitting his time between playing in Cuba and the Mexican League. But in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, Castro consolidated power and locked down the island. Having abolished professional sports, he gave an ultimatum to any Cuban athlete playing abroad: return and play as an amateur or don't come home again.
And so what Tiant thought would be a three-month stint in Mexico turned into 46 years of exile. He swore he'd never go back as long as Castro was in power. But the years wore on and on. "It bother me a lot," he says. "I was the only child. My mom and dad no was young person. My father was maybe middle 50s. I thought I was never gonna see them again. It was hard, my first five years. Then, after a while, after I got my family, that made me happy in some ways: I got family to take care of now. I can't think too much or I'll go cuckoo."
Loooooeee!
The Cleveland Indians purchased Tiant's contract in 1961 for $35,000. After paying his dues in the minors, enduring segregation and racist taunts in the Jim Crow South — "they call you everything in the dictionary" — Tiant made his American professional debut in 1964.
Soon, he was dominating Major League Baseball. In 1966, he threw four straight shutouts. In 1968, he led the Majors with an obscene 1.60 ERA — the lowest in nearly 50 years — and nine shutouts. Add to that 21 wins and 264 strikeouts. Stat-wise, says famed sportswriter Peter Gammons in the film, it was "one of the five greatest seasons in the history of baseball."
But the next two seasons were marred by injuries. Cleveland gave up on him, trading Tiant to the Minnesota Twins, and soon after that he was demoted to the minors. His career looked to be all but over.
Enter the Red Sox, who took a flyer on him in 1971.
