Installment 9: Steve Carlton won 27 games for a team that only won 59.
1. “First thing Steve Carlton did when he was traded the other day was phone (Players Association executive director) Marvin Miller to ask what he could do about it. There is something about being traded to Philadelphia that makes a man demand his constitutional rights." —March 1, 1972
It was a fun fact in the making before the 1972 season even began. That offseason, Carlton was traded for Rick Wise. Both were young star pitchers who were holding out for more money: “We make no bones about it,” Cardinals GM Bing Devine said. “The impetus for the trade was the fact that we could not satisfy Carlton's salary demands. We looked around and saw that Philadelphia was having trouble, too.”
The owners knew both players were worth the money—they each paid their new pitcher what they’d refused their old one, $65,000 per pitcher—but they wouldn’t just give it to them. They had to put up obstacles. “I'm not used to having young smart-alecks tell me what do,” the Cardinals owner Gussie Busch reportedly told his GM, regarding Carlton. So they made trades like this one that were, everybody understood, punitive.
Carlton understood his banishment to Philadelphia that way. He didn’t want to leave St. Louis. He even offered to withdraw his salary demands if the trade could be canceled, but was told it was too late. Wise, on the other hand, was…well, smart. “It’s a helluva break for me,” he said, noting that the Cardinals would contend for the title, while the Phillies—who were always awful—had never given him any run support. Before the trade Carlton had won 20 games with the Cards and Wise had won 17 with the Phils, but the conventional wisdom was that a 17-game-winner on the Phillies was better than a 20-game-winner on the Cardinals. This was, in essence, a math equation involving two variables. “Considering the comparative teams they'll have going for them, I'd say Rick Wise will match Carlton's 20 wins with the Cardinals before Steve Carlton will equal Rick's 17 with the Phils,” Dick Young wrote, solving for X.
That prediction was wrong. Carlton went eight strong innings on Opening Day, then threw a three-hit shutout in his second start, then a one-hit shutout with 14 strikeouts in his third. The Phillies had scored eight total runs but Carlton was 3-0 and unconcerned. "My job isn't to score runs. My job is holding the other team down,” he said.
The 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers went 9-73, the worst season in NBA history. The 1972 Philadelphia Eagles won only two games, both by a single point. The 1972 Phillies, on days that Carlton didn’t start, went 30-85, for a winning percentage—.260—that would be the third-worst by an NL team since 1900. But the Phillies went 29-12 when Carlton did start. “Every fourth day we were the best team in baseball," Phillies reliever Mac Scarce said. "Every other day we were the worst."
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Here we need to note that a couple decades later Steve Carlton would be known for espousing several strange conspiracy theories, many of which were built on racist and homophobic tropes and Carlton’s seemingly all-encompassing paranoia. He doesn’t appear to have reached that point by 1972. He was back then merely philosophical and odd and idiosyncratic, a guy who would meditate for hours in a soundproof room before games, a guy who would correspond for years with a fan he knew only as “Mr. Briggs, a night watchman,” who told him “where the power and energy comes from” and wrote near-daily letters on philosophy and metaphysics and how to apply the theories of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to baseball. Briggs taught him that “man is the only animal who puts limitations on himself.”
Carlton would later say (in his Hall of Fame induction speech) that the trade to Philadelphia turned out great for him, because it let him put his ideas fully into practice. Those ideas seemed to center on the power of focus and concentration to eliminate the distractions and limitations of what he called “variables.” From a 1973 Sports Illustrated profile:
“‘People are always throwing variables you,’ he says, as if variables were hard objects to be ducked. Those he ducks include the past, the future, anger, men on base and, preeminently, pressure.”
That all seems fine. Of course, since it’s Carlton, and you know about Carlton, you might also find this “master of his own fate” stuff foreshadows some of his later beliefs, quoted in Pat Jordan’s seminal Carlton’s-Gone-Weird magazine profile from 1994:
“Champions think a certain way. They create their future. The body is just a vehicle for the mind and spirit. Champions will themselves to win. They know they're gonna win. Others hope they'll win. The mind gives you what it asks for. That's its God."
Then he relates a story about a friend in Durango, who, years ago, didn't want to play on his high school basketball team because he knew it was going to have a losing season. Before the season began, the friend was hit by a car, destroying his knee. "See," says Carlton, as if he's just proved a point. "If you have an accident, you create it in your mind. That's a fact. The mind is the conscious architect of your success. What you hold consciously in your mind becomes your reality."
But that was later. In 1972, his stated beliefs were more grounded: He just wanted to eliminate the variables.
On June 25th, 1972, Steve Carlton hit Tim Foli with a pitch to lead off the fourth inning. The Expos manager, Gene Mauch, feeling that Carlton had done so intentionally, charged the mound and blind-sided the pitcher with a punch that got Carlton on the shoulder. Both men toppled to the ground. Somebody kicked Carlton. The brawl ended. Carlton got up and calmed himself and stayed in the game. He retired the next three batters. An inning later, he restrained himself from charging the mound when the opposing pitcher threw one behind him. (The other guy was ejected.) An inning later, he sat through a 46-minute rain delay. Finally, he completed the game, which the Phillies won. Final score: 1-0.
And that is how Steve Carlton’s 1972 season is broadly understood. Surrounded by hapless teammates, Carlton stayed focused, did what could do himself, and overcame his teammates’ failures.
“Baseball is a sport centered on the psychology of how players handle failure,” his SABR bio argues. “Steve Carlton was surrounded by a disastrous Phillies team but he managed extremely well by establishing himself as the best pitcher in the game.”
So, to the narrative, we now have the supposed moral: Do not worry about the people around you who are letting you down. Maybe don’t even acknowledge that they exist. You can only solve yourself.
2. “You could feel that everything was different when he was pitching. The players would perform differently and I’d even manage differently. He had charisma. You had to be there to sense it.” —April 9, 1973
But how bad were Steve Carlton’s teammates? Undeniably, they were bad when he wasn’t pitching, but when he wasn’t pitching that didn’t affect his record. What about the days when he was pitching, when he had to actually work with or suffer for them? On those days, the Phillies were pretty good!
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