Despedida, El Tiante

Your daily dose of postseason baseball—plus a little football.

Today, we celebrate El Tiante, celebrate Sean Manaea, try to celebrate the randomness of baseball, wonder about our guy Dave Roberts, do not wonder at all about Aaron Rodgers, and prepare for some wild scenes in Detroit and Kansas City.

Before we get to all of it… if you happen to be anywhere near Raleigh*, I will be talking WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL and anything else tonight, 7 p.m., at the marvelous Quail Ridge Books. Tickets are $30, which is the price of the book (and, lo and behold, you get a book that I will sign and personalize if you like).

*What is “near Raleigh?” Like, how far away from Raleigh can you be and still reasonably attend tonight’s event? This is a philosophical question that was first posed, I believe, by Socrates in 434 BCE. I will say two or so hours. We’re about three hours from Raleigh, and we will be at tonight’s event… though it is also true that I wrote the book and, thus, have to be there.

Also, by request, we’ll keep the JoeBlogs sale going for another day, though we are moving on from Pete Rose and changing the sale price of an annual sub to $43.67—in honor of Ichiro’s total 4,367 hits.

Let’s talk some baseball!

The Great Luis Tiant

Sadly, we don’t get to choose the first thought that pops into our heads when the news comes. This is the enduring theme of the original “Ghostbusters,” I think, maybe. When I first heard the news that Luis Tiant died on Tuesday at the age of 83, my first thought was not his beautiful pitching motion. Reggie Jackson called him the Fred Astaire of pitching. Roger Angell wrote a wonderful piece about Tiant’s many windups, one that he named, “Call the Osteopath,” and another that he called “the Slipper Kick.” I wish that had been the first thing that came to mind.

Or I wish I had thought about his many different pitches. “Hell, he’s got about 50 of them,” Thurman Munson grumbled. Tiant would have broken Statcast, which would have tried to put names to his baffling array of fastballs, curveballs, sliders, changeups, palmballs, knuckleballs, splitters, spitters, critters and jitters.

I wish I would have thought about that big smile, that huge cigar, that glorious mustache. I wish I would thought about seeing him all those times at El Tiante, his sausage shop outside of Fenway Park. He was always there, it seemed, always ready to take a photograph and sign an autograph and reminisce.

I wish I had first thought about the 1975 World Series and how he almost singlehandedly kept those surprising Red Sox going against one of the greatest teams in baseball history, the ’75 Reds.