Steve Carlton: 30 Cards

The 30 Steve Carlton cards I recently bought on eBay.

Like many kids who grew up in the 1980’s, I collected baseball cards. My collection was haphazard, as I bought new packs regularly, but one of my favorite activities was scouring the commons boxes at Shinder’s. The commons cards dated back to the 1960’s and 1970’s, so it was through Shinder’s that I learned about many obscure baseball players from those decades. My reasons for buying a specific card could be varied: it might be a player I’d heard of, or it might just be because he was wearing a cool uniform. 

My favorite baseball player is Steve Carlton, so I’m always on the lookout for his cards. I have all the major brand Steve Carlton cards that were issued during his career—I hesitate to say I have ALL his baseball cards, because it seems like there’s always some kind of rarity out there. Suffice it to say, I have a lot of Steve Carlton cards. But I’m always on the lookout to see if I could upgrade the cards in my collection, or to see if there’s something I’ve missed. So that’s why I recently bought 30 Steve Carlton cards from eBay.

There was nothing rare or valuable in this lot, and I already have all 30 of these cards—you can see a picture of the cards at the top of this post—but my main reason for buying them was because of the very nice condition 1972 Topps cards. The cards were a real mixture, with a bunch from the 1970’s and 1980’s, and a couple of Topps cards from 2015. The highlights for me were the 1972 cards—Carlton’s base card, featuring him with the Cardinals, and the scarcer 1972 traded card, where he appears in a Phillies uniform for the first time. Carlton was having a salary dispute with the Cardinals—sources differ on how much money the dispute was over, but the highest figure I’ve heard is $10,000—and so they traded him to the Phillies for pitcher Rick Wise. Not a wise move, if you’ll pardon the pun. Carlton went on to win the pitching Triple Crown for the last-place Phillies, winning a career-high 27 games. 

Some other highlights of the 30 cards were a very nice 1974 and 1975 Topps, and two of the more obscure 1980’s Carlton cards: a 1984 Topps Nestle “Dream Team,” and a 1985 Topps Drake’s Super Pitchers. The Nestle and the Drake’s cards aren’t necessarily rare, but they’re the sort of obscurities that I never knew about in the 1980’s and 1990’s, so they’re kind of exciting to me for that reason. The 30 cards I got were worth the $18 I paid for them.