Luis Tiant, inimitable ace of the 1975 AL champion Red Sox, dies at 83

But his glory days were his eight seasons in Boston, where he won 122 games and was the centerpiece of several pennant races with a bewitching style that Globe writer Peter Gammons called his “marionette abracadabra.”

“He looked little like baseball royalty,” wrote Globe columnist Harold Kaese. “Stocky, thick-chested, short-armed. This was one of the princes of pitching?”

Mr. Tiant’s chiropractic motion — “wheeling and rotating on the mound like a figure in a Bavarian clock tower,” observed New Yorker writer Roger Angell — baffled batters who had no idea when and where the ball would be coming at them.

“He doesn’t even look at you when he throws the ball,” said former Yankees catcher Thurman Munson.

Mr. Tiant’s unpredictability amplified his two greatest qualities — his resilience and his reliability in must-win contests.

“If a man put a gun to my head and said, ‘I’m going to pull the trigger if you lose this game,’ I’d want Luis Tiant to pitch that game,” said Darrell Johnson, the manager of the 1975 Red Sox.

Luis Clemente Tiant Vega was born in the Havana municipality of Marianao in 1940 and named after his father, a legendary lefthander for the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues during the 1930s and ’40s. While he showed early promise on the mound, Mr. Tiant was cut by the Havana Sugar Kings, a minor league affiliate of the last-place Washington Senators, whose representative suggested that he become a fruit salesman.

Mr. Tiant, who went on to post a 229-172 record in 573 major league appearances with 187 complete games and was a three-time All-Star, enjoyed his prime years with the Red Sox after two teams had disposed of him. The Cleveland Indians, who signed him out of the Mexican league in 1961, traded him to the Minnesota Twins in 1969 after he’d struggled through a 9-20 campaign, his only losing record in six seasons in Cleveland.

After the Twins cut loose an injured Mr. Tiant after one season, the Red Sox picked him up to bridge a gap in their rotation and stuck with him after he went 1-7 in 1971.

“I never gave up,” he said. “I kept telling myself as long as I could get the ball to home plate, I was going to stay in baseball.”

Mr. Tiant’s renaissance began in 1972 when he won 15 games, 11 of them after early August, and kept his teammates in the playoff chase until the final weekend of the season.

Mr. Tiant, who sported a desperado mustache and smoked cigars in the clubhouse shower and whirlpool, was a beloved teammate with a knack for amusing his colleagues, to whom he assigned nicknames such as “Polaco” (Carl Yastrzemski), “Frankenstein” (Carlton Fisk), and “Pinocchio” (Rico Petrocelli).

“Luis knew exactly when to turn a bus ride into something out of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” said former Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans.

But on the mound, Mr. Tiant was a relentless and riveting competitor whose virtuoso renditions fellow Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee likened to a symphony: “Hard at the start, a little sweet, slow stuff in the middle, and then the big explosion at the end.”

Mr. Tiant was at his most dominant and dramatic during the 1975 pennant run when after being idled for two weeks with a bad back late in the season he delivered half a dozen masterpieces.

“You can talk about anybody else on that team you want to, but Tiant is The Man,” said former Baltimore Orioles ace Jim Palmer.

After taking a no-hitter into the eighth inning of a 3-1 decision over the Detroit Tigers Sept. 11, Mr. Tiant shut out Baltimore (to chants of “LOO-ie, LOO-ie”) on Sept. 16 and Cleveland on Sept. 26.

He then held the Oakland A’s to one unearned run in a 7-1 victory in the opener of the American League Championship Series.

“He’s the Fred Astaire of baseball, dancing his way to victory,” declared A’s slugger Reggie Jackson. “He had that crowd in a hoopla.”

Then, after mystifying the Cincinnati Reds in the first game of the World Series, Mr. Tiant beat them again on the road in Game 4.

“We haven’t got anybody in the National League like that,” observed Reds captain Pete Rose. “Nobody who throws those high-spinning curveballs that take two minutes to come down.”

Though Mr. Tiant won 21 games for a third-place club in 1976 and another 25 during the two subsequent seasons — including a shutout of the Toronto Blue Jays that guaranteed the Red Sox a divisional playoff with the New York Yankees in 1978 — management offered him only a one-year contract for 1979, when he would be 38.

“They never took me seriously in their negotiations,” said Mr. Tiant. “They treated me like some old fool.”

So Mr. Tiant decamped as a free agent to the Yankees and won 13 games the next year.

“When they let Luis Tiant go to New York, they tore out our heart and soul,” said Yastrzemski.

Mr. Tiant played two years in the Bronx before finishing his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and California Angels.

“It’s always nice to have someone on the club uglier than yourself,” joked Angels teammate Fred Lynn, who’d played with Mr. Tiant in Boston.

Mr. Tiant retired in 1982, having beaten the Red Sox for his final victory. After serving as a Yankees scout and a minor league instructor for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox, Mr. Tiant coached for four years at the Savannah (Ga.) College of Art and Design.

In 2001, he signed on with the Red Sox as pitching coach for their Lowell affiliate and as a special assignment adviser.

“When I’m in Boston, I always feel like I’m home,” said Mr. Tiant. “I almost cry, I feel so good.”

His tears had flowed in earnest in 1975 when he saw both parents for the first time since 1961, two years after the Cuban revolution. After a letter from Senator Edward Brooke had been hand-delivered by colleague George McGovern to Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, Mr. Tiant’s mother and father were allowed to visit their son indefinitely.

“I never thought I’m gonna see them again and I’m thinking they’re thinking the same way,” Mr. Tiant said. “But it happened.”

His parents arrived in August, when the Red Sox were comfortably ahead in the division. His father, wearing a Red Sox cap, threw out the first pitch before a game with the Angels, then watched his son take the mound.

Yet even after the reunion with his parents, the tug of his homeland remained strong, and after decades of diplomatic wrangling, Mr. Tiant returned to the island in 2007 for the first time.

“I have to go to Cuba before I die,” said Mr. Tiant, whose emotional return was chronicled in a documentary, “The Lost Son of Havana.” “That is going to complete my life.”

His true home, though, long had been Boston.

“Luis embodied everything we love about this game: resilience, passion, and an undeniable sense of belonging to something greater than himself,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said Tuesday. “But what made Luis unforgettable was his vibrant personality. He was a gifted storyteller, always sharing tales filled with humor, honesty, and an enduring loyalty to his teammates.”

He also offered a taste of his country to the Fenway faithful, with the El Tiante food stand on Jersey Street outside the ballpark.

“This is my second country,” said Mr. Tiant. “People here have been great to me, good to my family. No matter where I go, and I have been to a lot of places, there is no better place for me.”

Mr. Tiant leaves his wife, Maria, and children Luis, Isabel, and Daniel, along with John Papile, whom he regarded as a son.