Book Review: Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward (1975)

The cover of Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, 1975. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps baseball card. Lots of empty seats at the Vet that day.

The back of Steve Carlton's 1975 Topps card. Pretty basic stats.

Back in June, I reviewed the 1982 baseball book Flamethrowers: Carlton & Gossage, by Bill Gutman. Continuing the trend of reading super old books about baseball meant for 12-year-olds, I recently read Steve Carlton: Star Southpaw, by Martha Eads Ward, published in 1975. I should probably add that Steve Carlton is my favorite baseball player, which helps explain my reading choices a bit. 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 300^th 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 9^th.

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 9^th 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 3^rd, 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 11^th 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.