Steve Carlton: 66 baseball cards

 

Some of the 66 Steve Carlton cards I recently got from eBay. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

I’ve written about my collecting of Steve Carlton baseball cards in several posts from last year. Every once in a while, I feel the need to buy more Steve Carlton cards, even though I’ve got just about every card he’s ever appeared on. Recently, I bought a 66 card lot on eBay for $10. Okay, it was $14.50 with the shipping and taxes. It was a nice mix of Carlton cards from the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the thing that caught my attention were the 3 cards from the 1983 Topps League Leader Sheet. This was a mail-in promo—there was a scratch-off game in packs of 1983 Topps, and the League Leader Sheet was one of the prizes. The sheet contained 8 cards of 1982 league leaders, featuring the same photos from their 1983 Topps cards. The only difference was a box in the upper left-hand corner saying what category they led the league in. The sheet was 8.5 x 11, so if you see individual cards, they’ve been cut from the sheet. The cards have a blank back. The League Leader Sheet isn’t especially rare, but it’s one of those 1980’s oddities that I never heard of during my childhood and only discovered in the last few years.

1983 Topps League Leader card. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Carlton’s 1983 League Leader card commemorates his leading the NL in wins in 1982. 1982 was the year Carlton won his then-record 4^th Cy Young award. Carlton was the only 20-game winner in the majors that year, and he also led the NL in games started, complete games, shutouts, innings, strikeouts, and hits allowed.

The 66 cards featured a smattering of cards from the 1970’s, and Carlton’s 1968 card, just his third Topps card. It’s not in great condition, so it’s not worth much, but it’s still a cool card. Carlton looks like such a gangly kid on his 1968 card. His glove almost looks gold on the card, it’s quite odd.

One of the coolest league leader cards is the 1973 Strikeout Leaders card. It features Carlton and Nolan Ryan, who would battle each other for the all-time strikeout lead during 1983 and 1984, and who were number 1 and 2 in career strikeouts for many years. 1972 had been a breakout year for both pitchers. Both Carlton and Ryan were traded during the 1971-72 off-season, in deals that were quickly regarded as two of the worst trades ever. In December of 1971, Ryan and 3 other players were traded by the Mets to the Angels for Jim Fregosi. The Mets had drafted Ryan in 1965, but he just hadn’t quite panned out. Sure, the kid could throw heat, but he was still so wild! In 1971 Ryan struck out 137 batters, but walked 116. The Mets had a fantastic pitching staff, anchored by Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman, and they had promising rookie Jon Matlack coming up as well. They figured they didn’t need this wild pitcher, and besides, Fregosi was a 6-time All-Star!

During spring training 1972, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch was frustrated with Carlton’s salary demands, and he was exploring trade offers for the left-handed pitcher. The Cardinals had signed Carlton in 1963, and he had been a vital part of their rotation since 1967. Carlton had a breakthrough season in 1969, when he started the All-Star Game, and struck out 19 Mets in a game in September. (Ironically, Carlton lost the game because Ron Swoboda hit 2 home runs off of him!) Carlton was coming off his first 20-win season in 1971. I’ve heard different figures about how far apart Carlton and the Cardinals were on salary, but it wasn’t more than $15,000. Carlton has even said that he was ready to accept the Cardinals’ figure when they called him to tell him he’d been traded to the lowly Phillies, for pitcher Rick Wise.

Both Carlton and Ryan were looking to establish themselves with new teams, and make their old teams regret the deals. They both accomplished their goals. Carlton won the pitching Triple Crown, leading the NL with 27 wins, a 1.97 ERA, and 310 strikeouts. He achieved this while pitching for a last-place team, and his 27 wins were 46% of the Phillies’ total! The next highest win total for pitchers on the 1972 Phillies was Bucky Brandon, with 7. Meanwhile, in the American League, Ryan exploded with 19 wins, a 2.28 ERA, a league-leading 9 shutouts, and an astronomical total of 329 strikeouts, 192 more strikeouts than he had in 1971.

1973 Strikeout Leaders, 1983 Strikeout Leaders. (This was the best picture I could get, the cards have bowed quite a bit.)

In 1982, Carlton again led the NL in strikeouts, and appeared next to AL champion Floyd Bannister on the 1983 Strikeout Leaders card. (Carlton and Bannister were later teammates on the 1986 Chicago White Sox.) As I looked at the back of these two cards, I was fascinated to see the top 10 strikeout pitchers a decade apart.

Backs of the 1973 and 1983 Strikeout Leaders cards. There's 10 Hall of Famers on the 1973 card.

What’s crazy is how many Hall of Famers are on the 1972 card. Of the 20 pitchers, 10 are Hall of Famers. Wow. The top 5 NL pitchers are: Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Don Sutton, and Fergie Jenkins. I’d face off against any team with those guys as my rotation! There’s even Hall of Fame pitchers from that era that aren’t on this card, like Phil Niekro. The AL leaders also featured 5 Hall of Famers: Ryan, Gaylord Perry, Bert Blyleven, Catfish Hunter, and last but not least, 8-time 20-game winner and 3-time Cy Young Award winner Jim Palmer. Fast forward to 1982, and there are only 3 Hall of Fame pitchers among the 20 listed: Carlton, Ryan, and Jack Morris. There are a lot of really good pitchers among the 1982 strikeout leaders, but it’s certainly not as illustrious a list as 1972. Among the 1972 leaders, all of the 10 Hall of Famers won more than 200 games, and there are 2 more 200-game winners who didn’t make the Hall: 1968 World Series hero Mickey Lolich, and the always entertaining Jerry Reuss. (Reuss was another promising young left-hander the Cardinals traded away in 1972.) So 12 of the 20 pitchers from 1972 won more than 200 games—in contrast the 1982 leaders had 4 200-game winners: Carlton, Ryan, Morris, and Bob Welch. (Fun fact: Welch won 27 games for the A’s in 1990, tying Carlton for the most wins in a season since Denny McLain won 31 games in 1968.)

It’s fascinating to me how you had a cluster of pitchers who debuted in the 1960’s who had these amazing, Hall of Fame careers, and then you don’t see a similar group of Hall of Fame-caliber pitchers until the emergence of Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Randy Johnson in the mid-late 1980’s. (Yes, I know Clemens isn’t in the Hall of Fame.) I’m also amazed at how those guys who came up in the 1960’s took the ball every 4^th day, threw 250+ innings every single year, and were hardly ever injured. And that was an era when conditioning wasn’t taken as seriously as it is today. I wish someone had written a book chronicling all of those pitchers while they were all still alive, and tried to figure out what their secrets were.