The Baseball 100: No. 63, Steve Carlton

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.

The greatest trade in Philadelphia Phillies history happened because two pitchers wanted more money. In Philadelphia, Rick Wise felt he deserved a huge raise. And why not? He was immensely popular in Philadelphia. He had come off an excellent and highlight-filled 1971 season. He went 17-14 with a 2.88 ERA. He made the All-Star team. He was fifth in the league in shutouts. Also, he threw one of the most famous no-hitters in baseball history against the Big Red Machine, famous not only for its dominance (his walk of Dave Concepción was the only baserunner of the day) but also because Wise hit two home runs in the game. Nobody had ever done that. Nobody has done it since.

Wise was 25 years old. He’d made $25,000 in 1971. He wanted $50,000.

The Phillies were outraged by Wise’s salary demands. Double his salary? They offered $40,000 and not a penny more and told him to take it or leave it. He didn’t take it.

At the same time, in St. Louis, Steve Carlton wanted his salary raised to $65,000. He was coming off a season that analysts of the day considered his best because he won 20 games. We now know it was not his best season. But wins were everything then, and as a 20-game winner, Carlton believed he deserved a big raise.

Cardinals owner Gussie Busch did not feel the same way. Busch was already sick of Carlton; the two had a bitter salary fight after Carlton’s fantastic 1969 season, when he went 17-11 with a 2.17 ERA, struck out 210 in 236 innings and set a major-league record by striking out 19 in a nine-inning game. The two went to war, and Carlton came away with a $50,000 deal and a Gussie Busch grudge that would never go away.

Busch could barely believe that Carlton wanted even more money after winning 20. He unwillingly went to $60,000, and when Carlton turned it down, the owner had had enough. He had heard about the Wise fight in Philadelphia, and so he ordered his general manager Bing Devine to offer a straight-up deal, Steve Carlton for Rick Wise. Devine, reportedly, kept delaying in the hope that Busch would just forget about it but Busch would not forget; he asked Devine about it every single day. He wanted Carlton gone. And he wanted Carlton to be sent to Philadelphia, baseball’s wasteland, a team and town so dysfunctional that Carlton’s teammate Curt Flood went all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid being traded there.

Finally, Devine ran out of time. He made the offer, and the Phillies jumped all over it.

The point is: The Cardinals are the ones who initiated the best trade in Phillies history and probably the worst one in St. Louis history. Nothing good comes from greed.

The trade was not immediately celebrated in Philadelphia. Quite the opposite. Wise really was beloved, and people felt a pang of regret when, after the deal, his wife, Susan, angrily quoted GM John Quinn saying, “We’d never trade Rick Wise, this is the fellow we’re going to build around.”

The consensus among the newspapers was that Wise would thrive in St. Louis, where he would finally get a chance to play with a good team. The Daily News wrote, in a matter-of-fact way, that he was a sure 20-game winner with a good-hitting team like St. Louis.*

And Carlton? Nobody quite knew what to make of him. He seemed unsteady, inconsistent. How would he perform in Philadelphia, where losing had become a state of being? “He will be hard-pressed to win 20 in his pretty new powder-blue uniform,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

*Boston later traded Wise to Cleveland for Dennis Eckersley, meaning that Wise was actually traded for two (!) Hall of Famers in his career.

Things changed very rapidly, however. You probably know that Tim McCarver eventually became Carlton’s personal catcher. But what you might not know is that he was also Wise’s catcher. So when the Wise-Carlton trade was made, reporters flocked to McCarver to see what he thought.

McCarver first made it clear that he thought they were exactly the same as pitchers. “They’re so comparable,” he said, “that you have to start looking to the finer points like how they field their position. When you have to start looking to things like their personalities, things like that, you know they’re awfully close.”

He then broke it down, pitch by pitch, and actually gave the edge to Wise for his fastball and his slider. Think about that: Steve Carlton had one of the greatest left-handed fastballs in baseball history, and he had the greatest slider in baseball history, righty or lefty, but when Carlton came to Philadelphia, McCarver gave the edge on both pitches to Wise.

Best sliders in baseball history:

Steve Carlton
Bob Gibson
Randy Johnson
Clayton Kershaw
Dave Stieb

But McCarver wasn’t crazy. See, by 1972, Carlton stopped throwing what would become the greatest slider ever. He had picked up that slider in Japan after the 1968 season while trying to figure out a way to get out the legendary Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh. The first two times they faced each other, Oh homered. So Carlton tried the slider he had been playing around with. Oh buckled. “I knew I had something,” Carlton told Sports Illustrated.

Carlton used that slider to great effect in 1969, when he became one of the best pitchers in baseball. But he junked it in at some point in 1970. Why? Some thought it was because the Cardinals felt like it put too much strain on his arm. Some thought it was because he lost confidence in it.

My favorite version of the story is that he gave up the slider on June 29, 1970 after giving up two home runs on sliders to a 39-year-old Ernie Banks. “That son of a gun can still hit,” Carlton said after that game, and it warms the heart to think of Mr. Cub himself sending Steve Carlton into a canyon of self-doubt.

But, alas, it isn’t true. Both homers were hit off fastballs — the first one right down the middle, the second one up and away. The source for this is Carlton himself, who was still talking to the media in those days.

In any case, McCarver had it right that Carlton had given up on the slider.

But as soon as he got to Philadelphia, he began to throw it again. And barely a month later, reporters went back to McCarver to ask about Carlton. Suddenly, McCarver sang a very different tune.

“Pound for pound, I think Steve probably throws harder than anybody else in the league,” he said just five weeks after saying that Wise had a better fastball.

“He was zipping that slider,” McCarver continued. “When he has that working well, nobody is going to touch him.”

Nobody touched him in 1972. It was one of the greatest seasons a pitcher has ever had. He actually got off to a mediocre start — he was pretty dreadful in late April and throughout May. It was bad enough that when Paul Owens became the new GM, he made a point of saying that nobody on this doomed team was untouchable. “If they want to talk about Carlton, I’ll listen,” he said.

But then Carlton went on a pitching stretch for the ages. On June 7 against Houston, he struck out 11 in seven innings and allowed just one run. In his next outing against Atlanta, he pitched a complete game, struck out nine, and allowed one run. And in his next start, he threw 10 scoreless innings (though the Phillies lost in 11).

And he was off. For the next four months, while playing for the worst team in the league, Carton went 22-4 with a 1.54 ERA, 208 strikeouts, 61 walks and just 10 home runs allowed in 251 innings. He twice threw back-to-back shutouts. He completed 23 games. He had 19 starts during the stretch with a Bill James Game Score higher than 70.

In this century, no pitcher has had 19 starts with a Game Score higher than 70 in a full season. Carlton did it in four months.

In the end, he won 27 games … and Philadelphia won only 59. That’s a famous stat, so it’s interesting that Carlton probably would not have won many more games for a better team. Looking game by game, Carlton did not have many tough losses that year and he actually got a couple of cheap wins. Yes, he might have won 30 for a great team. But also might have won just 25. That’s the problem with pitcher wins.

The better statistic is WAR. His combined WAR — 12.1 (Baseball-Reference), 11.1 (FanGraphs) — is the highest for any pitcher since World War II.

How good of a pitcher do you have to be for someone to just say “Lefty,” and people know it’s you?

Time to jump into a rabbit hole! When you think of Carlton, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? His 1972 season? Maybe. His four Cy Youngs? Maybe. His eccentric interview after he was elected to the Hall of Fame? Maybe.

But there’s a good chance you will think about his silence.

Steve Carlton famously did not talk to reporters.

Well, at first he did talk to reporters, but then he stopped. When? How? It’s a lot more complicated than I first thought. There’s a general story, one that I believed, that Carlton stopped talking to reporters in 1973, the year he led the league in losses and felt like the media had kicked him around for long enough. It’s a story that makes sense.

But, alas, it isn’t true.

Carlton was a loner all his life. He grew up on a chicken farm in Miami and he felt most happy when he was out hunting and fishing. He didn’t like school. He didn’t particularly like people. He didn’t even like baseball all that much; basketball was his favorite sport. But he knew that he had a lethal left arm — literally. He discovered the power of his pitching arm after throwing rocks at living things.

He bragged that nobody could knock doves off telephone wires the way he could, and that he once threw an axe with such precision that it cut off the head of a quail, and that he once killed a rabbit with a perfectly thrown stone. “That doesn’t seem possible,” he said, “but I hit it smack in the head.”

So when he failed to start on the basketball team as a high school senior, he quit the sport and focused on becoming a professional pitcher. He threw hard enough that he quickly got a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals and signed with the club for $5,000.

From the start, reporters found him interesting. He was unlike anybody, that was for sure. When he was 14, he began to read books about metaphysics and that became his lifetime passion.“It was the only subject that interested me,” he told one reporter. “It’s a personal thing. I’m looking for what the answers are going to be at the end of life if you live a certain type of life.”

Carlton had this complicated philosophy about pitching and training and life that involved a blend of Eastern religions, weird exercises (like thrusting his arm in huge buckets of rice), mental focus, physical exhaustion, absolute commitment. As Bill James once wrote, “I would try to explain it to you but I don’t understand it.” Many reporters probably thought he was a bit of a crackpot, but when it’s a great athlete, “crackpot” becomes “colorful,” and to sportswriters, colorful athletes who say unpredictable things are more precious than diamonds.

The story that he stopped talking to reporters in 1973 is compelling because it fits his timeline. He did grow annoyed that after his amazing 1972 season, interview requests skyrocketed. And 1973 was a lousy year all the way around. He came to spring training with a severe chest cold — something close to pneumonia — and he generally pitched lousy all year. Reporters hit him pretty hard. So you could imagine him stopping interviews right then.

But he didn’t. Carlton talked to the press all year in ’73.

Well, what about 1974? There’s another version of the story that goes like this: Carlton stopped talking to the press after Philadelphia Daily News baseball writer Bill Conlin shredded him in print.

Well, that story is half true: Conlin did indeed shred him. It happened during spring training; Carlton was terrible. He was so bad that his manager, Danny Ozark, threatened to pull him as the Opening Day starter. “There is a 60 percent chance he won’t start opening day,” Ozark harrumphed after a bad Carlton outing. Reporters raced over to Carlton to ask if he was worried. “No reason to be,” he said. “I never get anybody out in the spring.”*

*He did start that Opening Day, by the way; he faced Tom Seaver, who had just replaced him as baseball’s highest-paid pitcher.

One day after Ozark’s outburst, Conlin began a two-day series called, yes, this is really what it was called: “The Disaster of Steve Carlton.” In it, he wrote at length about Carlton’s massive decline after his incredible ’72 season and predicted, with some confidence, that Carlton would never again be that pitcher.

“Norman Mailer never matched ‘The Naked and the Dead,’” Conlin wrote. “What’s Jonas Salk done lately. Johnny Vander Meer pitched back-to-back no-hitters and vanished. Maybe we should accept the probability that Carlton peaked during that one season of grandeur and remember it is difficult to recapture the way we were.”

So, yes, you could imagine a hit job like that could have motivated Carlton to quit talking. But, in fact, it didn’t. Carlton was quoted just days later after getting hit with a Billy Williams line drive in his start against the Cubs a few days later, “All I had time to see was ‘Chub Feeney,’ and ‘Sewn in Haiti,’” Carlton said.

And he was quoted all year. Yes, he might have turned down a few interview requests — especially after pitching poorly — but he sure seemed to be quoted as much as ever.

In 1975, Carlton signed a three-year deal with the Phillies, and for the first couple of months of the season, you couldn’t shut the guy up. He talked about how much he loved Philadelphia. He talked about how he was looking to have his best year ever. He talked about his perceived feud with catcher Bob Boone. And so on and so on.

But in June, we caught the first glimpse of the Carlton silent treatment. It happened on June 16, 1975. That day, Carlton pitched six innings against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, gave up three runs, and hurt his left elbow. Reporters gathered around to ask about the injury. Here’s how the Daily News reported it:

Carlton will usually grunt after a tough outing. When he finally emerged from the trainer’s room, Carlton cowled to his locker.

Did it start bothering him in the sixth when Andre Thornton and Manny Trillo were pounding back-to-back homers?

No answer. The question was repeated. Carlton spun away from his locker and sent a towel toward a receptacle. He strode to the shower.

It seemed like a one-time deal, a bad day, and Carlton talked again to the press in his next outing. But two weeks later, after a dreadful performance in Cincinnati, Ozark tore into Carlton. I mean, he really tore into Carlton; it’s shocking by today’s standards to see a manager just bludgeon his superstar. But Ozark did not hold back:

“He was so inconsistent from one hitter to the next. That’s the thing that concerns me more than anything. No consistency. And his breaking ball was terrible. He just had no idea what he was doing. … I think it’s more a lack of concentration than anything else. … If he can’t get his mind on what he’s trying to do, I don’t know how we can help him. If he keeps this up, he won’t be worth anything on the market. The other clubs see it too.”

And, once again, Carlton stopped talking to the press. In late July, Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stan Hochman made the first public mention of it: “Mr. Carlton was unavailable after the performance,” he wrote. “He was off doing his Greta Garbo bit. Some nights, Mr. Carlton does his ‘Invisible Man’ bit. He does not enjoy meeting the media, on the grounds that his theories of pitching will be misunderstood since they are on a higher plane.”

But even this wasn’t the start. Carlton talked to the press sporadically for the rest of the season, and in 1976, he was once again quite talkative. After he won his 20th game in ’76, he was so happy that this series of words appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “‘This is the happiest day of my life,’ Carlton bubbled.” Yes, the papers reported him bubbling.

He talked in 1977, too. By now, he was definitely withdrawn, often defiant, but as one reporter wrote that year: “Eventually he will return to his dressing cubicle where he will politely, although at times somewhat painfully, unravel his performance in detail before the notepads, cameras and tape recorders.”

The rabbit hole does seem to end in 1978. That year, the Phillies won the National League East, but at the same time the team had a cold war with the local press. Numerous players — particularly Bake McBride and Garry Maddox — stopped talking to the press for a time. Carlton was one of those players.

But unlike the others, Carlton never thawed. I think there’s a simple reason for it: Carlton found that he liked not talking to the press. What was the downside for him? He was free to concentrate on his pitching. He didn’t have to endure an endless repeating of the same question. OK, true, he wouldn’t be able to get his message out — but he didn’t really have a message he wanted to get out anyway. Sure, they would knock him in the papers but, in Carlton’s mind, they were doing that anyway.

By 1979, it became known across the sports world that Carlton was the guy who didn’t talk to the press. He was mocked repeatedly for it.

And? From 1980 to 1983, he won two Cy Young Awards, could have won a third, won his 300th game and passed Walter Johnson to become the all-time strikeout king. (Nolan Ryan would take that title back later.) He later said not talking to the press cleared his mind and allowed him to become the pitcher he was meant to be.

In later years, it became pretty clear that Carlton was smart to not talk to the media because there were all kinds of bats flying around in his attic. In 1994, after he was elected to the Hall of Fame, he did a series of interviews, including a long interview in his home in Durango, Colo., with Pat Jordan. The result was an astonishing portrait of racism, homophobia, fear, nonsense and anti-semitism. A few lines probably will suffice:

He believes that the last eight U.S. presidents have been guilty of treason … that the AIDS virus was created at a secret Maryland biological warfare laboratory “to get rid of gays and blacks, and now they have a strain of the virus that can live 10 days in the air or on a plate of food, because you know who most of the waiters are,” and finally, that most of the mass murderers in this country who open fire indiscriminately in fast-food restaurants “are hypnotized to kill those people and then themselves immediately afterwards,” as in the movie The Manchurian Candidate. He blinks once, twice, and says, “Who hypnotizes them? They do!”

Carlton quickly released a statement saying the entire article was untrue and suggested that Jordan “became so disoriented (in the thin air of his hometown of Durango) that he lost his grasp on truth and decency.”

Pat Jordan, as only he can, grumped back: “Steve is the most fearful man I’ve ever met.”

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

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