“I’m kind of envious,” said Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito. “I wish I could get in a time machine sometimes just to watch some of those games live, to see a Tiant or a Nolan Ryan or a Bob Gibson.”
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A half-century later, the outcome is less meaningful than the preposterous notion that such a game could even take place. Tiant recalls it philosophically.
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“It’s what character you have,” said Tiant. “When you’re pitching, you want to win. You fight. One inning, two innings, or 15 — it doesn’t make no difference.”
Though Hall of Famers Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski played for the Red Sox and Frank Robinson was in the Angels lineup, the enduring legacy of the game was defined by the starting pitchers.
A matchup of workhorses
Ryan, who in 1973 had set a major league record with 383 strikeouts, was a workhorse (72 complete games in 119 starts from 1972-74) amid a run of three straight seasons and five of six in which he punched out at least 300 batters. His fastball was a blur rendered terrifying by his inability to control it.
“He was uncomfortable,” said Tommy Harper, who batted twice for the Sox in that game. “He didn’t know where it was going when he pitched inside.”
Hitters’ discomfort against the Ryan Express made them all the more vulnerable to a curveball that looked like it would concuss them before breaking over the plate and to the bottom of the zone.
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“I remember Al Kaline being on second base one time after Nolan walked him and the guy behind him,” recalled Bobby Valentine, an Angels teammate of Ryan’s in 1974. “I asked him how Nolan was throwing. He said, ‘If they don’t make one of those two pitches illegal, he’ll throw a no-hitter.’ He was amazing.”
But the Sox entered the game feeling good about their chances. Ryan had started nine games against them and lost six.
“We beat him all the time,” said former Sox pitcher Bill Lee. “He played on terrible teams.”
Moreover, they had Tiant on the mound. After a rough stretch from 1969-71, the righthander was having a mid-career resurrection. He led the AL with a 1.91 ERA in 1972, the start of a three-year run in which he completed 60 of his 92 starts (65 percent).
Entering the June 14 start, Tiant had thrown eight straight complete games — and he (like Ryan) was in a four-man rotation, getting three or occasionally four days of rest between starts.
He matched Ryan’s determination to outwork his opponents, building endurance by running up and down the stairs in empty ballparks every day — and earning the deference of Sox manager Darrell Johnson.
“He knew me,” said Tiant. “He watched me. He wasn’t stupid. When I was in a situation, he’d talk to me. I’d say, ‘No, no, no. Go back over there, sit down, and watch the game.’ The other guys would laugh — Fisk, Yaz, the others.”
Working their magic
Ryan recorded all three outs by strikeout in the first inning and punched out six through three scoreless frames. Tiant, meanwhile, was surgical, retiring the first nine batters.
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Ryan faltered in the fourth. He walked the first three batters, and after a strikeout, he issued a bases-loaded walk to Terry Hughes to give the Sox a 1-0 lead.
“A run batted in against Nolan Ryan! Hughes jumped with joy,” Clif Keane wrote in the Globe.
Though he’d once struck out 19 batters in a 10-inning start for Cleveland in 1968, Tiant was the opposite of Ryan — an artist and magician who changed speeds and used precision and deception to confound hitters, eliciting weak contact in short at-bats to make complete games a regular occurrence.
“When the hitter sees you three or four times, it’s not easy to fool the hitter anymore up here,” said Tiant. “You had to use your brains — not just velocity.”
Tiant gave a dizzying array of looks to hitters. He rotated his back to the batter at the start of his delivery, then unspooled with a mix of overhand, three-quarters, and sidearm deliveries. His mix — fastballs, two curveballs (a looper and hard breaker), sliders, changeups, and occasional knucklers — from all of those release points created a seemingly limitless number of pitch shapes.
Tiant faced the minimum nine hitters from the sixth through eighth innings, but with Ryan still on the mound and the Sox trailing, 3-1, entering the ninth, the Sox righty seemed destined to absorb a hard-luck loss. But Ryan walked leadoff batter Rick Miller and allowed a tying two-run homer to Yastrzemski.
Tiant quickly dispatched all three Angels in the bottom of the inning.
Nine innings proved inadequate for resolution — not necessarily a happy development given the 8 p.m. start time.
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“We go, ‘Oh [expletive] — now we’ve got to stick around?’ ” said Lee. “Everybody had dates.”
Ryan and Tiant proved unaccommodating.
That was particularly true of Ryan and one unfortunate target in the Red Sox lineup — first baseman Cecil Cooper. A future five-time All-Star who was then in his first full big league season, Cooper struck out five times in nine innings (tying an AL record), fouled out on a bunt attempt in his sixth plate appearance, then struck out for a sixth time — matching a single-game record — in the 12th inning.
Angels manager Bobby Winkles approached Ryan — who’d never thrown more than 12 innings in a game — after that frame.
“I said, ‘That’s it,’ but he said, ‘No, I want my record. Last year I threw 242 at Detroit [in 12 innings],’ ” Winkles relayed to the Anaheim Bulletin.
Winkles relented, though the argument was nearly rendered moot. The Angels loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the 12th against Tiant. But the righthander got Valentine to fly to shallow left, then induced a ground out to send the game to the 13th.
Ryan worked a perfect 13th but Winkles would let him go no further. The pitcher retreated to the clubhouse.
“I remember him sitting in his locker with a towel around his neck, being pissed off,” said Valentine. “He wasn’t a happy camper. He didn’t have very nice things to say about the manager.”
Painful conclusion
Tiant would have no such dispute. The game was his.
“It comes to the point, they let you stay in the game no matter what, because they figured out there’s no other option better than you,” said Tiant.
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Tiant logged a scoreless 13th, stranding a runner at second with back-to-back strikeouts — two of his five strikeouts that night. When he returned to the dugout and saw reliever Barry Raziano replacing Ryan, Tiant sniffed a finish line.
“With the way [Ryan] was pitching, I was thinking, ‘I’ve got more of a chance to win the game,’ ” said Tiant.
But Raziano retired six straight hitters in the 14th and 15th. Tiant matched him in the 14th but in the 15th, he yielded a one-out single to speedy leadoff hitter Mickey Rivers before Denny Doyle lofted a fly ball to left that, according to the Associated Press game story, “eluded the desperate lunge” of Yastrzemski. It dropped for a double, and Rivers scored.
With little pomp, the game — after 4 hours and 2 minutes — was over, shortly after midnight in California. There were no players showered with Gatorade, no walkoff histrionics. It was just … done.
“A relief that it was over,” said Valentine.
For Tiant, who estimated his workload at 220 pitches, the conclusion was painful.
“It was hard,” he recalled. “We all want to win. We all want to look good. But that’s not always possible. You pitch a good game and you lose. That’s how it goes.”
At the time, the performance was rare but not unprecedented. Many starters pitched to and beyond the ninth.
“That’s what we did,” said Lee. “It was, ‘Pry this ball out of my cold, dead hands.’ ”
No one imagined Tiant’s outing would be the last of its kind — the last time a starting pitcher recorded an out in the 15th inning. For that matter, no starter has recorded an out in the 10th inning since 2012.
A half-century later, despite the disappointment of the loss, Tiant takes pride in what the game said about his unrelenting desire to compete — a statement further reinforced in his next start. On four days’ rest, Tiant logged 10 innings for a 2-1 win over the A’s on June 19.
“All those guys I played with or against, they respected my performance,” said Tiant. “They knew I went to the mound trying to beat you — and I’d go to the end.”
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.
