El Tiante pitched the first Sox game I ever went to in 1974. I was ten. It was an "NBC Monday Night Baseball" game vs the Yanks. Back when nationally televised games were a special thing. I believe he pitched a complete game for the "W". I remember RF Dwight Evans throwing a guy out at third that was trying to get from first to third on a single. What an arm that guy had.
My favorite Red Sox pitcher - great motion, best memories.
In 1974, I took a semester off from college and lived in Boston for 8 months. I saw 41± Red Sox games from $1.25 Fenway Park right field bleacher seats that were a short walk across a couple large parking lots from my 820 Beacon St apartment just west of Kenmore Square, where Beacon & Commonwealth Ave crossed each other and the Mass Pike passed through.
What a team... sort of.
IIRC, they were comfortably in first place in late mid-August when I left Boston and returned to Rochester to continue my education.
Okay, I just went to Baseball Stats and confirmed my overall impression, seeing that Tiant pitched a 3-0 shutout on August 23 to put Boston sixteen games above .500 and 7 games up in the AL East. I didn't look more closely but imagine that both were their largest margins of the season.
Until Tiant pitched 4-0 shutout win a month later, he was involved in no other decisions, and the Sox went 8-20, tumbling to 3rd place where they stayed, eventually finishing the season 84-78.
[This was the kind of performance that contributed to a notable defeatist joke at the time: "Did you hear that the Red Sox are moving to the Philippines? They're going to be renamed the Manilla Folders."]
The following season, the Red Sox finally made it to the World Series, and I saw Tiant's Game 1 victory from the right field bleachers.
The next day, I was in the same bleacher location, and the Sox were ahead when my college roommate (the source of my tickets) somehow alerted/retrieved me, and put me into a seat at field level directly behind home plate halfway through the game. Here, I am NOT going to search out the details. I only know that my body was jolted when Manager Dick Williams made a pitching substitution (Dick Drago? Diego Segui?) that I deeply did not want. Boston lost game 2 and the Series went to Cincinnati 1-1, and Boston eventually lost in 7 games.
A year more matured, the starting lineup now featured Rice, Lynn, Evans (an outfield whose combined age didn't add up to my current age, fwiw), Fisk, Yaz, Rico P, Rick Burleson at SS, Cecil Cooper at Dan Hurley, and forgettable Doug Griffin at 2B
