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.

Steve Carlton 1983 and 1984 Topps Gallery of Champions

 

Steve Carlton 1983 and 1984 Topps Gallery of Champions. These are some of my favorite Carlton oddities. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

You'll need a magnifying glass to read the stats on the back, though. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

These cool little bronze cards of Steve Carlton are from the Topps Gallery of Champions. The Gallery of Champions bronze cards were included with cases of Topps Traded cards from 1983-1991. I don’t remember ever seeing them during my childhood, but they’re cool little collectibles. Another oddity that I didn’t know I was missing until I started trying to complete my Steve Carlton collection. I was able to track down the 1983 Carlton bronze pretty easily, but the 1984 eluded me for a while. I thought I had the 1984, but the collector actually sent me the 1983, which I already had. This happened a couple of times, so I ended up with several 1983 cards, but that’s fine with me. The Gallery of Champions bronzes are some of my favorite Carlton oddities, and they’re not too expensive if you want to collect them. Be warned, you’ll need a magnifying glass to read the stats on the back.

Steve Carlton Likes Ukrainian Food

 

2021 Topps X Sports Illustrated card, reproducing Carlton's 1983 SI cover.

The back of the card makes no reference to Carlton's affection for Ukrainian cuisine.

This 2021 Topps X Sports Illustrated Steve Carlton card has an unlikely connection to Ukraine. I’ll explain. The card reproduces the cover of the October 3, 1983 issue of Sports Illustrated, celebrating Carlton’s 300th win.

Steve Carlton won his 300th game against his former team, the St. Louis Cardinals, on September 23, 1983. Carlton pitched 8 innings in the game, threw 137 pitches, gave up just 2 runs, and struck out 12 batters.

Carlton wasn’t speaking to the media in 1983, so Sports Illustrated was being ironic with the caption on the cover, because Lefty wasn’t going to tell them how he won number 300. But his wife Beverly did speak to the media the night he won his 300^th game. She said, “Steve would like to play another 10 years, and as hard as he works, he just might. I wouldn’t mind that at all. Baseball’s been great to us.” Asked if there was anything else she wanted to add about Steve, she said, “Well, he likes Ukrainian food.” Who knew? It’s very curious that Beverly Carlton thought this was an important enough fact about her husband to mention to the press. It’s also curious because “Ukrainian food” isn’t very well known in the United States—it doesn’t conjure up an image the way “Italian food” or “French food” would. But that’s kind of fitting with Steve Carlton’s whole vibe that he likes Ukrainian food. Steve’s not a guy who goes with the crowd, he does his own thing. How many other baseball players have had “wine collecting” listed as a hobby on the back of their baseball card?

The 1975 book Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, also references Carlton’s love of Ukrainian cuisine, but it fills in some details. “His favorite dish is a Ukrainian concoction: dough filled with sharp cheese, potatoes, butter, onions, and sour cream.” Sounds delicious, but not exactly low-calorie. What Ward is describing sounds like varenyky, considered one of the national dishes of Ukraine.

I don’t know enough about Steve Carlton’s family background to know if he’s of Ukrainian heritage, but now I wonder if it was a diet of Ukrainian food that allowed Carlton to pitch for 24 years, win 329 games, capture 4 Cy Young Awards, and rack up 4,136 strikeouts? Someone should ask Lefty.