Steve Carlton 1986 Leaf

 

1986 Leaf Steve Carlton (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Here's the back of Steve's 1986 Leaf card, complete with French! (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Donruss made Leaf cards for sale in Canada, to compete with Topps’ O-Pee-Chee cards. The Canadian cards are the perfect way to improve your baseball-related French vocabulary.

The 1986 Leaf and Donruss card features a nice action shot of Carlton in mid-delivery, wearing the awesome powder blue road uniforms the Phillies sported throughout much of Carlton’s time with the team.

Looking at the stats on the back of the card, you can see Lefty’s impressive stats going into the 1986 season. A 3.04 ERA over 4,878 innings pitched, 3,920 strikeouts, 55 shutouts, and 314 wins. A Hall of Fame career, to be certain.

But if you look at Carlton’s 1985 season, you can tell something happened: just 92 innings pitched and a won-loss record of 1-8. What happened was that Carlton went on the disabled list for the only time in his 24-year MLB career. Carlton had a strained rotator cuff, and he missed 2.5 months of the 1985 season.

Carlton actually pitched well in 1985, as his stellar 3.33 ERA indicates, but he was a victim of poor run support, as the Phillies could only scratch across an average of 2.39 runs in Lefty’s 16 starts. That’s less than half of the 5.23 runs the Phillies scored for Carlton in 1984! The Phillies also lost 4 of Carlton’s 1985 starts by 1 run.

When Carlton went on the disabled list on June 21, his ERA was a sparkling 2.43. Carlton came back from the DL on September 2, and he started 3 games in September. But he didn’t make a start after September 14. There were still more than 20 games left in the season, and the Phillies were way out of the pennant race, so I don’t know why Carlton didn’t start again. Maybe his rotator cuff was still bothering him.