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Steven Norman Carlton (born December 22, 1944) is an American former professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as a left-handed pitcher for six different teams from 1965 to 1988, most notably as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies with whom he won four Cy Young Awards as well as the 1980 World Series. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994 in his first year of eligibility.
Nicknamed " Lefty", Carlton has the second-most lifetime of any left-handed pitcher (4th overall), and the second-most lifetime wins of any left-handed pitcher (11th overall). He was the first pitcher to win four Cy Young Awards in a career. He held the lifetime strikeout record several times between and , before his contemporary Nolan Ryan passed him. One of his most remarkable records was accounting for nearly half (46%) of his team's wins, when he won 27 games for the last-place (59–97) Phillies. He is the last National League pitcher to win 25 or more games in one season, as well as the last pitcher from any team to throw more than 300 innings in a season. He also holds the record for the most career balks of any pitcher, with 90 (double the second on the all-time list, Bob Welch).
As a teenager, Carlton began reading and following the teachings of Eastern philosophy and Paramahansa Yogananda, who promoted greatness through meditation.
He attended North Miami High School, playing baseball and basketball at first. Carlton had no plans beyond high school and showed little interest in his studies. As a senior, Carlton quit basketball to concentrate on pitching. He was teammates in high school with Kurt Bevacqua, and his teammate Richie Mehlich defeated Charlie Hough 1–0 in the playoffs under coach Jack Clark; Mehlich was later the victim of murder.
After high school, Carlton played baseball at Miami Dade College North, where he pitched in relief on a strong team under coach Demie Mainieri.
In 1963, while a student at Miami-Dade, he signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a $5,000 bonus.$5,000 in 1963 is equivalent to $38,556.97 in 2014 dollars.
In 1965, Carlton pitched one game and 5 innings of one-run ball with the Cardinals team in the Florida East Coast Instructional League and was promoted to the major league team.
In 1966, Carlton started 19 games with the now Class AAA Tulsa Oilers of the Pacific Coast League, going 9–5 with a 3.59 ERA.
In the 1967 World Series, Carlton started Game 5 and pitched six strong innings, giving up only an unearned run, but taking a 3–1 loss. The Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox to capture the World Series.
In the 1968 World Series, Carlton pitched in two games in relief, giving up three runs over four innings as the Cardinals lost to the Detroit Tigers in seven games.
A contract dispute with the Cardinals (he had made $26,000 in 1969 and was holding out for $50,000, as opposed to the Cardinals' contract offer for $31,000) made Carlton a no-show at spring training in . He proceeded to go 10–19 with a 3.73 ERA, leading the NL in losses. In , Carlton rebounded, going 20–9 with a 3.56 ERA, his first of six 20–win seasons.
Following another salary dispute, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch ordered Carlton traded. The Cardinals were offering $55,000 and Carlton wanted $10,000 more. He was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies on February 26, 1972, just before the season for pitcher Rick Wise. The trade is now considered one of the most lopsided deals in baseball history. However, at the time, the trade appeared to make sense from the Cardinals' perspective. Carlton had won 77 games to Wise's 75, and both were considered among the game's best pitchers. Tim McCarver, who had caught for Carlton in St. Louis and for Wise in Philadelphia (and who would later become Carlton's personal catcher again with the Phillies), described the trade at the time as "a real good one for a real good one". He felt Carlton had more raw talent, but Wise had better command on the mound. While Wise pitched in the majors for another 11 years (he pitched two seasons with the Cardinals before being traded to Boston), he only won 188 career games compared to Carlton's 329. Partly because of this, the trade is considered one of the worst trades in Cardinals history, and one of the most lopsided trades in all of baseball history.
Carlton was 77–62 with a 3.10 ERA in 190 games and 172 starts with the Cardinals over parts of seven seasons, with 66 complete games and 16 shutouts. He was selected to the NL All-Star team in 1968, 1969 and 1971.
Some highlights of Carlton's 1972 season included starting the season with five wins and one loss, then losing five games in a row, during which period the Phillies scored only 10 runs."Imagination, It's Funny" by William Leggett, Sports Illustrated, August 21, 1972 At this point he began a 15–game winning streak. After it ended at a 20–6 record, he finished the final third of the year with seven more wins and four losses, ending with 27 wins and 10 losses. Carlton also completed 30 of 41 starts.
During the 18 games of the winning streak (three were no-decisions), Carlton pitched 155 innings, allowed 103 hits and 28 runs (only 17 in the 15 winning games), allowed 39 walks, and had 140 strikeouts. From July 23, 1972, to August 13, 1972, he pitched five complete-game victories, allowed only one unearned run while only giving up 22 hits in 45 innings, and threw four shutouts."Steve Carlton's Long Winning Streak in '72 Still Amazing" by Ted Silary from Baseball Digest Nov 1992 Baseball commentators during 1972 regularly remarked that Carlton's slider was basically unhittable.
"Auggie Busch traded me to the last-place Phillies over a salary dispute," reflected Carlton on his 1972 season. "I was mentally committed to winning 25 games with the Cardinals and now I had to re-think my goals. I decided to stay with the 25-win goal and won 27 of the Phillies' 59 victories. I consider that season my finest individual achievement."
"One thing I regret is that Philadelphia fans didn't see the same Steve Carlton we saw in our clubhouse," longtime Phillies teammate Larry Bowa said of Carlton's media silence. "He put up a mask when the writers came in. He was very consistent with the writers. He didn't talk to any of them."
Carlton reflected on his longtime media silence, saying: "It (not talking to the media from 1974 through the end of his career) was perfect for me at the time. It took me two years to make up my mind. I was tired of getting slammed. To me it was a slap in the face. But it (his silence) made me concentrate better. And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes. It's all quotes, anyway, and it all sounds the same to me. After that they wrote better and more interesting stuff. I took it personal. I got slammed quite a bit. To pick up the paper and read about yourself getting slammed, that doesn't start your day off right."
In 1980, Carlton led the National League in victories (24), strikeouts (286) and innings pitched (304) to help the Phillies win the 1980 World Series, their first title; he won the series' final game and was 2–0 with a 2.40 ERA with 17 strikeouts in 15 innings in his two starts against the Kansas City Royals.1980 World Series#Game 6 Carlton is the last major league pitcher to have 300 innings pitched in a season.
Carlton won a Gold Glove Award for his fielding in . On September 13, 1982, for the fourth time in his career, Carlton hit a home run and tossed a complete-game shutout in the same game. He is the only pitcher to have done so in three different decades.
He helped the Phillies to another pennant in 1983, finishing 15–16 with a 3.11 ERA in 37 starts. but they lost to the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. Carlton was 2–0 with a 0.66 ERA against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, allowing 1 run in 13 innings with 13 strikeouts. In the 1983 World Series, Carlton was matched up against Jim Palmer in Game 3, where he gave up 2 earned runs in innings of a 3–2 loss. The Phillies lost the series in five games.1983 World Series#Philadelphia Phillies
On September 23, 1983, in a game against his former team, the St. Louis Cardinals, Carlton won the 300th game of his career, becoming the 16th pitcher to accomplish the feat.
There were five more lead changes and a tie in before Carlton ran out of gas. His last-ever lead in the all-time strikeout race was after his start on September 4, 1984, when he struck out four Cubs to lead Ryan by three (3,857 to 3,854). Although the season ended with a mere two-strikeout lead for Ryan (3,874 to 3,872), Carlton had an injury-riddled season in 1985 and an even worse season in 1986 before being released by the Phillies just 18 strikeouts short of 4,000.
On his longtime Phillies teammate Mike Schmidt, Carlton said, "Schmitty provided what pitchers need most, home runs and great defense. He's the best third baseman that I ever played with, and maybe of all-time. Obvious Hall of Famer, even then. He retired while on top of his game. I thought for sure he was going to hit 600 home runs."
In 15 seasons with the Phillies, Carlton was 241–161 with a 3.09 ERA. He started 499 games with 185 complete games, 39 shutouts and 3,031 strikeouts against 1,252 walks in 3,697 innings. He was a seven-time All-Star with the Phillies and won the NL Cy Young Award four times: in 1972, 1977, 1980 and 1982.
Overall, Carlton's 1986 numbers (with three teams) were a 9–14 win–loss record, with a 5.10 ERA.
He made the Twins roster in , pitching in four games (0–1 with a 16.76 ERA), before being released by the Twins on April 23, 1988, after surrendering eight runs in five innings in what would be his final meaningful appearance. No teams signed Carlton for the remainder of the 1988 season.
Nolan Ryan pitched until and extended his strikeout lead over Carlton to almost 1,600 before retiring. Carlton eventually fell to third and then fourth place on the all–time strikeout list after Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson passed him.
| W | L | PCT | ERA | Games played | Games started | Complete game | SHO | SV | Innings pitched | H | Earned run | R | Home run | BB | Strikeout | Wild pitch | HBP |
| 329 | 244 | .574 | 3.22 | 741 | 709 | 254 | 55 | 2 | 5217.2 | 4672 | 1864 | 2130 | 414 | 1833 | 4136 | 183 | 53 |
Phillies announcer and Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn said of Carlton as a pitcher, "Lefty was a craftsman, an artist. He was a perfectionist. He painted a ballgame. Stroke, stroke, stroke, and when he got through (pitching a game) it was a masterpiece."
Carlton picked 144 runners off base, by far the most in Major League Baseball since pickoff records began being collected in 1957. Andy Pettitte is second with 98.
Although he never threw a no-hitter, Carlton pitched six one–hitters, 11th most in baseball history.
Carlton had 90 career balks, by far the most in baseball history.
Carlton was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in with 95.82% of the vote, one of the highest percentages ever.
The Philadelphia Phillies retired Carlton's number 32 in 1989.
The Philadelphia Phillies honored him with a statue outside Citizens Bank Park in 2004. In 1998, The Sporting News ranked Carlton number 30 on its list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
In 1999, Carlton was a nominee for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
Despite his career-long rivalry with Ryan, Carlton maintains his greatest rival was Tom Seaver.
His losing 19-strikeout effort against the Mets was a microcosm of his career against them. While he posted 30 wins against them during his career, they bested him 36 times.
Carlton appeared in an episode of Married... with Children, playing himself in an episode where former athletes humiliate Al Bundy while filming a shoe commercial. In the episode, Kelly Bundy asks him for an autograph and he is shown writing with his right hand.
In an interview with ESPN's Roy Firestone, Firestone asked Carlton, “Why do you think you were put on this earth?” Carlton answered, “To teach the world how to throw a slider.”
The same article notes that former teammate Tim McCarver defended Carlton against charges of being a bigot and an Antisemite, though he acknowledged "If he's guilty of anything, it's believing some of the material he reads. Does he become confused with his reading about radical things? Yes. I've told him that. Does that translate into him being antisemitic? No."
As of 2017, Carlton lives in Durango, Colorado.
Carlton has an orchard and 150 fruit trees, saying, "Before Al Gore was green, I was green." Of his healthy partnership with St. Luke's, he added, "I'm interested in this 'fit for life' idea, we're trying to get people off the couch, move a little bit, not a sedentary life. ... St. Luke's and myself, we're on the same page as far as how we think about that. I'm not on the medicine side, but I've been trained well. I know a lot of different arts. That's what I'm interested in."
In 2017, Carlton said that he hadn't had a television in around 15 years and didn't follow daily baseball. "I don't know these players anymore, (I know) some of the coaches, but I've moved on. Something else to do, there's more to it. I owned it for 24 years. I played it, so I don't need to do it again. I'm on to different things."
Speaking about today's pitch counts, Carlton added, "I wasn't raised in this environment, so I think differently. These guys don't know anything but pitch counts. I would balk at it because I don't agree with it, but they can't go up against it because that's all they know. Philosophically I don't agree with it because I think these guys are not really in shape because they don't throw enough. You need to throw so much so the tendons, ligaments, the muscle and bone get bigger, denser, stronger to be able to handle the stress of throwing. I don't think they throw enough. 100 pitches is not a lot. You warm up with 100 pitches. Then you throw your 200. We threw 185 pitches in a game."
Tim McCarver, Carlton's longtime teammate and personal catcher, said jokingly once: "When Steve (Carlton) and I die, we are going to be buried in the same cemetery, sixty feet, six inches apart." McCarver died first in 2023.
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