2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee Candidate: Luis Tiant

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Even in an era brimming with colorful characters and exceptional hurlers, Luis Tiant stood out. The barrel-chested, mustachioed Cuban righty combined an assortment of exaggerated deliveries with a variety of arm angles and speeds that baffled hitters — and tantalized writers — over the course of a 19-year major league career (1964–82) and an affiliation with the game in one capacity or another that extended through the remainder of his life. “The Cuban Dervish,” as Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite christened him in 1975, died on October 8 at the age of 83. No cause of death was announced.

The son of a legendary Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball star colloquially known as Luis Tiant Sr. — a skinny lefty, in contrast with the burly physique of his right-handed son — the younger Tiant was exiled from his home country in the wake of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro’s travel restrictions, and separated from his family for 14 years. Against that backdrop of isolation, “El Tiante” went on to become the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history, and to emerge as a larger-than-life character, so inseparable from his trademark cigars that he chomped them even in postgame showers. On the mound, he was a master craftsman whose repertoire of four basic pitches (fastball, curve, slider, and changeup) combined with three angles (over-the-top, three-quarters, and sidearm) and six different speeds for the curve and change yielded 20 distinct offerings according to catcher Carlton Fisk.

I covered Tiant’s life at length — and I mean length — here at FanGraphs shortly after he passed. Now that he’s a candidate on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, I invite you to (re)read that profile for the biographical details of the man’s fascinating life and career, which began with Cleveland (1964–69), and included stops with the Twins (1970), Red Sox (1971–78), Yankees (1979–80), Pirates (1981), and Angels (1982). I’m devoting this space to a more thorough review of his case and quest for Cooperstown in the context of this ballot, particularly as he’s competing for votes with one of his former teammates and contemporaries, Tommy John.

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Tiant finished his career with a collection of accolades that at first glance looks a little light for a Hall of Famer. He won two ERA titles, posting a 1.60 mark in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, and a 1.91 mark in ’72, when after a three-season odyssey of injuries, different uniforms, and diminished effectiveness he worked his way from the bullpen to the rotation and became a Boston folk hero. While he additionally led his league in shutouts three times, he doesn’t have much additional black ink when it comes to traditional stats. He made just three All-Star teams and never won a Cy Young award, topping out with a fourth-place finish in 1974, as well as fifth- and sixth-place finishes. That’s a little misleading, however. In 1968, he accompanied that 1.60 ERA with a 21-9 record in 258 1/3 innings, but that year Denny McLain became the first pitcher in 34 years to top 30 wins, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA in 336 innings. It was only the year before that the Cy Young had been split into separate awards for each league, and voters could submit only one name; not until 1970 would they be allowed to submit a top three. McLain won unanimously, but it’s quite possible that Tiant would have finished second if voters had been allowed larger ballots; in the MVP voting, he tied for fifth with the Orioles’ Dave McNally (22-10, 1.95 ERA in 273 innings), with McLain (who won both MVP and Cy Young) the only pitcher above them.

As it is, Tiant scores a modest 97 on Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, which measures how likely (but not how deserving) a player is to be elected by awarding points for various honors, league leads, postseason performance and so on — the things that tend to catch voters’ eyes. A score of 100 is “a good possibility,” while 130 suggests “a virtual cinch.”

Speaking of the postseason, Tiant was very good within a limited footprint, going 3-0 with a 2.86 ERA in 34 2/3 innings. The fractional two-thirds of an inning came in mopup duty with the Twins in 1970, the rest in ’75 with the Red Sox. He threw a complete-game three-hitter with just an unearned run allowed in the ALCS opener against the A’s; a Game 1 shutout against the Reds in the World Series; a four-run, 155-pitch complete game on three days of rest in Game 4 — a start that’s the stuff of legends; and then a valiant seven-inning, six-run effort in Game 6, when he faltered late but was saved by Carlton Fisk’s famous 12th-inning homer. Had the Red Sox won Game 7, this “hero of unmatched emotional majesty” (as Peter Gammons called him) might well have been the World Series MVP.

Whether or not Tiant’s basic numbers scan as Hall-worthy depends somewhat upon the era to which you’re comparing them. Pitcher wins are an imperfect stat to begin with for reasons statheads have spent the past 40-plus years explaining, but historically they’ve remained foremost in the minds of Hall voters, and so I think the following is at least somewhat instructive. Of the 53 pitchers who have collected somewhere between 210 and 249 career wins, just 15 are in the Hall, nine of whom began their major league careers before 1920. None debuted during the 1921–49 stretch; of the other six, four arrived in the 1950–65 range, namely Whitey Ford (236 wins, debuted 1950), Jim Bunning (224 wins, debuted 1955), Juan Marichal (243 wins, debuted 1960), and Catfish Hunter (224 wins, debuted 1965). The other two reached the majors over two decades later, namely John Smoltz (213 wins, debuted 1988) and Pedro Martinez (219 wins, debuted 1992).

Meanwhile, of the 38 pitchers in that 210–249 win range who aren’t enshrined, 11 debuted prior to 1920, six more in the 1921–49 period unrepresented within the first group, three in the 1950–65 range (Mickey Lolich, Jim Perry, and Tiant), 11 in the 1966–87 span, and then eight from ’88 onward, including three still active or not yet eligible (Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer). If we set aside the pre-1950 group and the ones not yet eligible, that’s six out of 24 pitchers in this range who are in the Hall versus 18 outside. While none of the outsiders won a Cy Young, neither did Bunning or Marichal. Run prevention-wise, Hunter is the only Hall of Famer from this group with a lower ERA+ (104) than Tiant (114). Even so, Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Kevin Brown, and Curt Schilling are all outside with an ERA+ in the 117-127 range.

Viewed from this vantage, it shouldn’t be surprising that Tiant didn’t get elected. But when he first became eligible, on the 1988 BBWAA ballot, he had reason for optimism given that Hunter — statistically the most like Tiant as expressed by his Similarity Score (another James creation) — had been elected just the previous year with a comparable win-loss record and ERA (224-166, 3.26 ERA) to Tiant’s marks of 229-172 and 3.30. The second-most similar pitcher to Tiant by that method, Bunning (224-184, 3.27 ERA), had received 70% on that same ballot. While slugger Willie Stargell was the only candidate elected via the 1988 ballot, Tiant received 30.9%, far short election but a debut hardly without promise; meanwhile, Bunning inched up to 74.2%.

Alas, both pitchers got lost in the shuffle on the 1989 ballot. Not only did Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski both debut and gain easy entry with vote shares in the mid-90s, but Gaylord Perry and Fergie Jenkins also debuted, both with more robust résumés than either Tiant or Bunning in terms of statistics and honors. Both were former Cy Young winners with more than 3,000 strikeouts, with Perry owning a second Cy Young and membership in the 300-win club as well. Bunning fell back to 63.3%, while Tiant slipped to 10.5%.

First-year candidate Jim Palmer, a three-time Cy Young winner, jumped the line to gain entry in 1990, as Bunning slid to 57.9% and Tiant to 9.5%. When Jenkins and Perry were elected in 1991, Bunning aged off the ballot (he would be elected by the Veterans Committee in ’96), while Tiant sank even further, to 7.2%. He had missed his window; after Jenkins’ election, it would take until 2011 for another starter with fewer than 300 wins (Bert Blyleven) to gain entry via the writers. As “That Seventies Group” reshaped expectations for Hall starters’ credentials, Tiant never even climbed back to 20%, topping out at 18% in 2002, his final year on the ballot.

Tiant’s candidacy has fared similarly amid ever-changing ballot formats since then. In three appearances on the Veterans Committee ballots (2005, ’07, ’09), he maxed out at 25%. He’s now on his fourth appearance on an Era Committee ballot. He was considered alongside the likes of future Hall of Famers Kaat, Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva, plus this ballot’s Ken Boyer as part of the 2012 Golden Era Committee ballot, for candidates who made their greatest impact on the game during the 1947–72 period, as well as a similar cast that also included this ballot’s Dick Allen three years later. In both cases, he fell short of the level of support needed to have his actual vote total announced; customarily, the Hall lumps together all of the candidates below a certain (varying) threshold as “receiving fewer than x” votes to avoid embarrassing them (or their descendants) with the news of a shutout. When the Hall reconfigured the Era Committee system in 2016, Tiant wound up classified within the Modern Baseball Era (1970–87); after finishing below the threshold for vote totals on the 2018 ballot, he was bypassed for the ’20 one, a ballot that finally gave Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker their first shots.

As you can see from the table above, Tiant’s Hall of Fame Monitor score (HOFM) is the lowest of the group, but he fares better via advanced metrics. He ranked in his league’s top 10 in WAR eight times, leading in 1968 (8.5) and finishing fourth in both ’72 and ’74. While he cracked the top 10 in ERA just four times, he did so in ERA+ seven times (including the two league leads), a reminder that toiling in hitter-friendly Fenway Park may have cost him some recognition. While he’s on the lower side of That Seventies Group in terms of S-JAWS, the adjusted version of my Hall fitness metric that tones down the impact of high-volume innings totals from earlier eras, his ranking is still impressive. The newer version jumps him from 59th overall to tied for 42nd with Palmer and Smoltz, two pitchers generally considered no-doubt Hall of Famers; meanwhile, he’s 45th in both career WAR and in adjusted peak. Voters won’t see another candidate above those rankings until Kershaw and friends (a quartet that also includes Justin Verlander) become eligible.

In introducing S-JAWS, I noted that Tiant is below the standard — the mean of all enshrined starters — but basically at the median (53.6). While he doesn’t particularly stand out next to a cohort of 300-game winners, he’s got much stronger advanced stats than Hunter (who nonetheless had a Cy Young and five championships going for him) and Kaat (a Cy Young winner but a compiler whose lengthy broadcast career helped his 2022 Era Committee election). His S-JAWS equals or surpasses some other enshrinees whose careers overlapped, such as Don Drysdale (53.7), Marichal (53.2), Bunning (51.4), Ford (45.5), Sandy Koufax (44.2), and Jack Morris (37.4), but those pitchers all have higher Monitor scores, with Bunning (98) the only other one below 100. The enshrined starters he outranks in S-JAWS mostly had shorter careers in earlier eras, where innings totals were higher and runs even more scarce.

I’ve wavered on Tiant, mainly in light of older versions of JAWS and in direct comparison to his Era Committee competition, because even beyond the numbers his case hasn’t always jumped out. On my virtual 2018 Modern Baseball ballot, I tabbed Marvin Miller, Alan Trammell, and Ted Simmons, but left my fourth slot empty because I didn’t see any of the other seven candidates (Tiant, John, Morris, Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, and Dave Parker) as strong enough. Morris was elected, but Tiant is by far the strongest of that group by JAWS if not more traditional reckonings. If I had a do-over, factoring in his cultural importance as one of the most high-profile Cuban player success stories, from battling racism in the minors after being cut off from his family to his mid-career comeback and emergence as a folk hero, I’d consider him more strongly — but including him on that ballot would have hinged upon how much extra weight to give John for his own comeback after the pioneering elbow surgery that bears his name.

I’m still wrestling with Tiant versus John on this ballot. Tiant — who pitched in the same rotation with John in Cleveland, New York, and Anaheim — is squarely ahead on a performance basis, and in a vacuum I think he’s Hall-worthy; I’m pretty solidly in favor of any post-integration pitcher with an S-JAWS of 50 or higher. What I’m less sure of is whether Tiant will emerge as one of my top three on my virtual ballot, or whether Hall voters’ unfortunate history of waiting until after a candidate’s death to recognize them — see Santo, Miñoso, and Allen for just the latest in the litany — suggests that I should put aside my soft resistance to the 81-year-old John and prioritize voting for him while he’s still around to appreciate the honor. With three more candidates to evaluate, I have a bit longer to think about it.