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Bob Ryan

A complete-game 18-hitter? Reggie Cleveland threw one

Reggie Cleveland’s Sept. 25, 1977, start wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was historic.

Sept. 25, 1977: A gorgeous early autumn Sunday, and a perfect opportunity for a Globe writer to leave the altitudinous Tiger Stadium press box and sit in the stands with Lowell Sun scribe Charles Scoggins to watch Reggie Cleveland deftly scatter 18 hits in a complete-game 12-5 victory over the Detroit Tigers.

You read that correctly.

IP H R ER BB SO NP
9 18 5 5 0 1 145

That’s a pitching line worth framing.

We now live in a world where five pitchers might combine for a shutout and where managers think nothing of employing as many as 10 pitchers in a game, as Toronto’s John Gibbons did last Wednesday, finishing up with four pitchers facing one batter each until he found the right man to lose the game (R.A. Dickey, as it turned out).

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So, yes, it was an entirely different world. Even so, guys didn’t go nine while allowing 18 hits too often. In fact, John Labombarda of the Elias Sports Bureau reports that Cleveland is the only man in the last 63 years to do so.

Cleveland was then in his fourth and final full year as a member of the Boston Red Sox. He had arrived in December 1973 as part of a six-player trade with the Cardinals engineered by general manager Dick O’Connell, three seasons removed from being named National League Rookie Pitcher of the Year by The Sporting News.

He was a classic middle-of-the-rotation workhorse of the era who averaged 224 innings a year from 1971-74 and who was capable of fulfilling any role during a 13-year career in which he was 105-106 while starting 203 games and relieving in 225.

A native of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, he would have the distinction of becoming the first Canadian-born pitcher to start postseason games, those being Game 2 of the 1975 American League Championship Series against Oakland (no decision in a 6-3 Sox win) and Game 5 of the World Series against Cincinnati (a 6-2 loss).

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He looks back on a career full of shouldas and couldas.

“Hindsight is 20-20 and I could have been a whole lot better,” he acknowledges. “I was 17 when I signed and was thrown into an adult world. I had an alcohol problem; no doubt about it. If I had applied myself better, I could have lasted longer and maybe won 200 games.

“I had good years, but I could have been a lot better. I look back and say, ‘I was a [naughty word] idiot.’ ”

I’m glad he came right out with the drinking thing, because overall conditioning was always an issue with him. It was a constant media joke during his Red Sox tenure that Cleveland was the only man in baseball who actually gains weight during the season.

But the arm attached to his right shoulder was definitely made out of synthetic rubber. “I could bounce back,” he declares. He was always ready to take the ball.

He also had a toughness that was never more on display than on the evening of Sept. 14, 1977, when his first pitch to Red Sox nemesis (and notorious first-ball swinger) Mickey Rivers in the bottom of the first inning at Yankee Stadium hit the center fielder in the ribs.

“Let’s see the little [naughty word] hit that first pitch,” I recall Cleveland saying by way of explanation.

The postscript is that he pitched brilliantly for eight shutout innings before a Thurman Munson single and Reggie Jackson bomb to dead center made a 2-0 winner out of Ed Figueroa. But Cleveland’s point had been made.

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As a postscript to the postscript, he faced the Yankees five days later in Fenway and went the distance in a 6-3 victory. Rivers sat that one out.

Cleveland tells us now that he did it all with two pitches.

“I had a four-seam fastball and a slider,” he says. “That was it. I tried to throw a curve but I just couldn’t do it. The one pitch I wish I had was the circle change. That came later. I know that would have been a good pitch for me.”

What he always had was control. Take away the intentional walks, and he had such K/BB splits as 148/41, 153/48, 122/49, and 85/41. Keep that in mind when you contemplate the 18-hitter.

One thing he is particularly proud of is his 1976 season, when he started 14 games, relieved in 27, and gave up three home runs in 170 innings. “They were all at Fenway, and two of them barely made it over the wall,” he points out.

He took the mound for the second time in 1977 on April 17 in the first game of a doubleheader in Cleveland. He threw a four-hit complete game as the Sox won, 4-1. The only blemish was an Andre Thornton third-inning homer.

That up-and-down season bottomed out on July 23 when he gave up a cycle to the first four batters (Duane Kuiper single, Buddy Bell triple, Larvell Blanks double, Thornton homer) and Don Zimmer got him out of there. But he also had some very good games, including a five-hit shutout of Toronto Sept. 5.

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Thus he found himself very much in the rotation on Sept. 25. It was the last road game of the season, and the Sox having taken two of three from Detroit (the Friday night game being a Bill Lee 79-pitch complete-game special) were just 2½ games behind the first-place Yankees.

Carlton Fisk gave him a 3-0 lead with a three-run blast (No. 26). The Tigers got one back in the first, but by the fourth he had a 4-1 lead, and this is when the fun started. From the fourth inning on, the Tigers knocked out 15 hits. But they left 11 men on base. Reggie was making them earn it. He walked nobody and had just two three-ball counts all afternoon.

“Around the fifth, I started going up to Zim and saying, ‘Zim, I think I’m gassed,’ ” Cleveland recalls. “He’d say, ‘Just go out there and we’ll see what happens.’ ”

Reggie kept things moving. “I struck out one, I believe?” he inquires. That’s correct, he fanned Steve Kemp to end the first.

There were a few shots. Ben Oglivie hit one that landed on the right-field roof in the sixth, “They talk about Reggie Jackson’s homer in that ’71 All-Star Game,” chuckles Cleveland. “Benjie’s went higher and farther.”

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But by that time the lead was 9-2, and Zimmer was quite content with a starter that was keeping the ball in play. The Tigers had two hits each in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth.

“I was ready to take him out after the eighth,” Zimmer explained. “But he said, ‘I’m all right. I just got my second wind.’ ”

Butch Hobson gave Reggie a nice, fluffy cushion with a three-run shot (No. 30) in the top of the ninth, but things got a little scary in the home half, when four singles produced two runs.

There were men on first and second when Phil Mankowski smoked pitch No. 145 — directly at shortstop Rick Burleson. It was in the books.

He never won another game for the Red Sox. He lost his final start the following Friday night and he was sold to the Rangers early in the 1978 season.

Reggie Cleveland has nine grandchildren. They probably wouldn’t believe him if he told them he once threw a complete-game 18-hitter.

OK, kids. Here’s the proof.


Bob Ryan’s column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeBobRyan.