 |
The cover of Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, 1975. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)
|
 |
Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps card. Lots of empty seats at the Vet that day.
|
 |
The back of Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps card. Pretty basic stats.
|
(This article was first published on
Mark My Words in December, 2019.) I recently read
Steve
Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, published in 1975. In reading
Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, I
was hoping that I might dredge up a few additional nuggets about my favorite
baseball player, and I succeeded.
Author Martha Eads Ward does a good job in producing a
readable biography of an athlete who is now famous for his silence with the
media. At the time the book was published, Carlton hadn’t yet stopped speaking
to the press, although Ward didn’t interview Carlton for this book. Carlton’s
relationship with the press has been somewhat misunderstood. It’s a misconception
that Carlton didn’t talk to the press throughout his entire career. Carlton
gave numerous interviews for the first decade of his career. It wasn’t until
the late 1970’s that he started refusing most interview requests. (Although
Carlton did some interviews during this time. For example, Hal Bodley
interviewed Carlton after the 1980 season for his book The Team That
Wouldn’t Die.) Carlton’s silence with the media lasted until July of 1986—when
Carlton was signed by the San Francisco Giants he gave a press conference.
Anyway, digression over.
Ward died in 2015, at the age of 93. She published 10 books and
was the Children’s Librarian at the Quincy Public Library in Quincy, Illinois,
for many years. I learned from Ward’s obituary that she attended Knox College,
which is also my alma mater. Ward transferred to the University of Southern
California, where she obtained her degree. She did a nice job of researching
the book.
Now, with the internet, it’s incredibly easy to find box scores of baseball
games, but back in the 1970’s finding accounts of individual games would have
required quite a bit of work.
Ward begins the book with an account of Carlton’s incredible 19
strikeout game against the New York Mets on September 15, 1969. Carlton’s 19
strikeouts in a 9-inning game set a record for post-1900 baseball, although it
was tied in 1970 by Tom Seaver, and eventually broken by Roger Clemens in 1986
when he struck out 20 batters in a game. Carlton threw 152 pitches during that
game, and incredibly enough, Carlton lost the game to the Mets, 4-3, thanks to
a pair of homers he gave up to Ron Swoboda. Nowadays, there’s no way a manager
would let a pitcher throw 152 pitches during a game, regardless of how many
strikeouts he had.
Later in his career, Carlton was well-known for his unorthodox
training regimen, which incorporated martial arts exercises. One of the
exercises called for Carlton to stick his left arm in a barrel of rice and work
his hand down to the bottom of the barrel. But even early in his career, Carlton
was enthusiastic about weightlifting, which was not something most baseball
players did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. As Ward tell us, “Some coaches, including
Carlton’s former Cardinal pitching coach, Billy Muffett, are not enthusiastic
about this exercise program, and some players have a fear that it leads them to
become muscle-bound.” (p.26-7) While that comment might sound ridiculous today,
that was actually a fear in the 1960’s, that lifting weights would make you too
“muscle-bound” to be a good baseball player. Of course, today it seems like
nearly all baseball players are extremely muscular.
One of the more random facts we learn from the book is that
Carlton’s “favorite dish is a Ukrainian concoction: dough filled with sharp
cheese, potatoes, butter, onion, and sour cream.” (p.30) This tidbit might not
seem to be important to anyone other than Steve Carlton, but it reminded me of
another quote about Carlton. After Steve Carlton won his 300th game
in 1983, he didn’t speak to the media, but his wife Beverly did. A reporter
asked her if there was anything we should know about Steve Carlton. She
replied, “Well, he likes Ukrainian food.” Her response, reported in Sports
Illustrated magazine, seems very odd. But now the mystery of what Ukrainian
food Steve Carlton liked is solved!
While reading Flamethrowers by Bill Gutman, I learned that
Carlton was called up by the St. Louis Cardinals at the end of the 1964 season
but didn’t get into any games. This was a fact that I had never encountered
before. Ward sheds a little more light on Carlton’s late-season call-up.
Carlton said he joined the Cardinals in Cincinnati and saw Bob Gibson hit three
doubles. Through the magic of the internet, we can deduce that was the first
game of a doubleheader on September 19, 1964. The Cardinals lost the
game, 7-5 when Frank Robinson hit a walk-off three-run homer with two outs in
the bottom of the 9th.
Carlton was with the Cardinals for the final two weeks of
the 1964 season, as the team won a thrilling pennant race. On September 20,
1964, the Philadelphia Phillies were in first place by 6 ½ games with 12 games
left to play. The Phillies then proceeded to lose 10 games in a row, and they
finished the season tied with the Cincinnati Reds for second place, one game
behind the Cardinals.
Both Gutman and Ward’s accounts of Carlton’s time with the
Cardinals in 1964 refer to Carlton warming up in the late innings of a game
against the New York Mets, but not actually entering the game. Ward makes it
sound as though the game that Carlton warmed up for was on October 2, 1964,
when the Cardinals lost to the Mets, 1-0. However, the Cardinals were still in
the heat of the pennant race—Bob Gibson started that game and went
8 innings, and relief ace Barney Schultz pitched the 9th inning. I
doubt manager Johnny Keane would have considered bringing Carlton into such a
high-stakes situation for his first major league appearance. The Cardinals’
15-5 loss to the Mets on October 3rd, in which 8 Cardinal pitchers
were used, is much more likely. (This is the game referenced in Gutman’s book,
which is described as a blowout loss.)
Carlton made his major league debut on Opening Day, 1965,
entering the game in the bottom of the 11th inning, and walking the
only batter he faced. (The game, played against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley
Field, ended in a 10-10 tie when the game was called because of darkness.)
Carlton didn’t get much work with the Cardinals during the 1965 season, as he
only pitched 25 innings and didn’t get any decisions. After the season, the
Cardinals had to decide what players they would protect from the first-year
draft. Their choice came down to Steve Carlton or Dave Dowling. The Cardinals
protected Carlton, which was the right move, as he still had 329 major league
wins ahead of him. Dave Dowling pitched in two major league games. One of them
was the October 3, 1964 blowout against the Mets that Carlton warmed up for.
Dowling’s other major league game was on September 22, 1966, when he started
for the Cubs, pitched a complete game against the Reds, and won. His major
league record is 1-0. Dowling appeared on three Topps baseball cards, in 1965,
1966, and 1967. All three cards used the same photo of him.
Steve Carlton soon became one of the Cardinals’ bright young
stars—he
had a record of 14-9 for the World Series-winning team in 1967. Carlton made
his first All-Star team in 1968, and the following year he was the starting
pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game. Starting the game was big
moment in Carlton’s career, and Ward presents us with a quote that seems
unlikely, considering Carlton’s future disavowal of talking to the press:
“There’s all the prestige, especially for a young player like me. And all the
ink. All the great publicity. Interviews. Television and radio tapes.” (p.84)
A salary dispute with the Cardinals led to Carlton being
traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in February of 1972. The trade ended up
being a terrible one for the Cardinals, as Carlton went on to win 4 Cy Young
Awards for the Phillies, and his pitching helped lead them to the playoffs six
times during his 15 seasons with the Phillies. Carlton had an incredible season
in 1972, as he won 27 games for a last-place team that only managed 59 wins,
meaning that Carlton was responsible for 45.8% of the Phillies’ wins! Carlton
won the pitching Triple Crown, leading the National League in wins, ERA, and
strikeouts. He was also the unanimous choice for the Cy Young Award that year.
1973 was a terrible year for Carlton. Facing sky-high
expectations, which he had done nothing to tamp down, Carlton went from a
20-game winner to a 20-game loser, finishing 1973 with an ERA almost two runs
higher than 1972, and a record of 13-20. Carlton had walking pneumonia during
the season, and although he didn’t spend any time on the disabled list because
of that, it couldn’t have helped.
Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw ends after the 1974
season, a year in which the Phillies finally escaped the basement, finishing in
third place in the NL East. Carlton also rebounded to post a 16-13 record and
lead the NL in strikeouts with 240. (He also led the league in walks, with 136.)
Steve Carlton turned 30 in December of 1974, and his career record stood at
133-105, for a winning percentage of .559. He was certainly one of the most
exciting pitchers in baseball, but I doubt that anyone would have predicted
that he would pitch until he was 43 years old and go on to win another 196
games.
