Known as “El Tiante,” Tiant was a two-time All-Star whose best individual season was 1968, when he went 21-9 in 19 complete games and nine shutouts, four of them consecutive. But it was his 1.60 ERA – the best in the AL in half a century – that, along with Bob Gibson’s 1.12 mark in the NL, helped convince baseball to lower the pitching mound to the batter to give more chances.

The younger Tiant, the son of a Negro League star, was 229-172 overall with a 3.30 ERA and 2,416 strikeouts. In his 19-year career, which he spent mostly with Cleveland and Boston, he had 187 complete games and 47 shutouts.

His death comes a week after that of baseball’s all-time scoring leader Pete Rose, whose Cincinnati Reds faced Tiant’s Red Sox in the 1975 World Series – still considered one of the greatest in baseball history.

Tiant won Game 1 by shutting out the Reds, threw 155 pitches in a complete game victory in Game 4, and was back on the mound for eight innings of Game 6, which Boston won in the bottom of the 12th on a Carlton Fisk home run.

After his retirement, Tiant was inducted into the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame but never made it to the National Shrine in Cooperstown, New York, receiving a high of 30.9% of the vote in 1988, his first year of election.