Steve Carlton “Lefty Loosey”
Major League Baseball is old. Not Italian or Greek old. But American old. One hundred and fifty years and twenty thousand players old. Its history is a major part of what enraptures us — the continuity and the disruptions. The day to day sameness and the surprise. The sport wherein some records will last forever and where others get broken every year Baseball is also a game full of tall tales — like the story of “Big Ed” Delahanty, who hit .400 on three occasions, holds the fourth highest career batting average of all time, and who, in 1903, one year removed from a .376 campaign, was kicked off a train in upstate New York and drunkenly stumbled his way to edge of — and then into — Niagara Falls. One of five Delahantys who played professional baseball, Big Ed was found one week later and, to this day, very little is known about what led the most complete hitter of his time to his demise.
Baseball is also a game bursting with colorful nicknames — “The Big Hurt,” “Charlie Hustle,” “Mr. October,” and “The Say Hey Kid.” It’s a sport flush with great athletes who were terrible men (Ty Cobb) and even greater athletes who were also extraordinary men (Henry Aaron). But, more than its tall tales or its colorful nicknames — and more than any other American sport — baseball a game packed with total weirdos. There are at least four kinds of baseball weirdos. There are the “Screwballs,” players with (hopefully mild) mental illness, and who could not function effectively outside of the game, but who nevertheless thrive on the diamond. Rube Waddell and Len Dyktra are famous Screwballs. There are “Obsessives” who, as their name suggests, are so single minded in their pursuits and committed to their craft that they cannot, will not deviate from their practices. Wade Boggs and Rogers Hornsby fit this bill. There are “Free Spirits,” whose joy for the game can border on both childlike and hallucinogenic. Bill Lee and Doc Ellis were Free Spirits. And then, finally, there are the Heels, players who project menace or coldness — towards the media, sometimes towards opponents, and even occasionally towards teammates. Albert Belle and Barry Bonds were tremendous Heels.
Without question, many of baseball’s weirdos are actually “hybrid weirdos,” presenting traits of multiple classes. A rare few are triply weird. However, in the whole long, storied history of the game, there has only been one Uber-Oddball — a man who displays traits of all four subclasses. As it happens, this Uber-Oddball is also the second winningest left-handed pitcher of all time, a four time Cy Young Award winner, and the pitcher with the fourth most strikeouts of all time.
If you peruse the list of the greatest single seasons by pitchers in MLB history on the basis of W.A.R. you will notice that nearly all of the top twenty-five were accomplished by players from the “Dead Ball Era” of baseball, and specifically those who pitched before 1900, when forty win, five hundred inning seasons were not unheard of. “Hoss” Radbourne, for instance, won sixty games and struck out four hundred and forty-one batters across six hundred and seventy-eight innings in 1884, and his 19.2 W.A.R. (somehow only) ranks third all time. In contrast, Sandy Koufax does not show up until number sixty-eight on that list and Nolan Ryan first appears at number three hundred and forty-five. The first “Live Ball” pitcher on the list is Dwight Gooden, whose 1985 Cy Young and MVP season ranks twenty fifth. And right behind him, at twenty-six, is a slightly less tragic, far more successful, but exponentially weirder player. In fact, it’s our one and only Uber-Oddball — Steve Norman Carlton, or “Lefty” to anyone who remembers the Nineteen Seventies.
If there is such a thing as “normal,” Steve Carlton is the opposite of it — and his 1972 season was as aberrant as any in baseball history. Carlton’s 1972 was superior to Lefty Grove’s 1931, the year in which he won thirty-four games, lost only four and won the pitching “Triple Crown.” It was even greater than Lefty Gomez’s 1934 campaign, when he won twenty six games, lost only five and also won the “Triple Crown.” In fact, Steve Carlton — rather than Grove or Gomez, or Warren Spahn for that matter — is baseball’s one, true Lefty. And his holding of that status is not a matter of recency bias or the indisputable superiority of his skill or statistics. Rather, it’s on account of the fact that he was markedly stranger than the other great Leftys (or lefties) and was, as a result, more memorable.
But, yes, it was also what he did on the mound. In 1972, Carlton won twenty-seven games, struck out three hundred and ten batters, kept his ERA below two and his WHIP below one. According to most advanced statistics, Carlton’s finest season was finer than Gibson’s 1968, Pedro’s 1999 and 2000, and any season by Koufax, Seaver, Ryan or Maddux. What the advanced stats don’t consider — in fact what they don’t even care about — is that Carlton accomplished all of that while pitching for a team that won less than thirty-eight percent of their games. In other words, Lefty accounted for nearly half of the Phils wins in 1972.
Obviously, it wasn’t just 1972. Between 1967 and 1984, the first full eighteen seasons of his career, Carlton won three hundred and ten games and struck out nearly four thousand batters. Between 1971 and 1980 alone, he won almost two hundred games. He did all that while starting every fourth day and, for the most part, throwing just two pitches — an elite fastball and a slider that was almost as blazing, but doubly devastating. At six foot four, he towered over every opposing hitter, except for The Daves (Parker and Kingman). While his height and velocity were plenty intimidating, though, Carlton’s most unnerving feature was his unshakeable dispassion. He did not care who was at bat. He did not care what the score was. The batter was invisible to him. The game was silent. He was simply throwing one of the same two pitches to very precise locations, past an anonymous obstacle, one hundred and forty odd times per game.
It’s not as though Carlton was unconcerned with his performance or his craft. To the contrary, he was obsessed with both. His training, while unorthodox, was meticulous. He meditated for hours on end. He practiced martial arts every day for years. In order to create hand and forearm strength, he’d make a fist and rotate it through a five gallon container of rice, until he reached the bottom. He focused on flexibility and lean muscle and control. But, mostly, he tried to focus on nothing at all.
Lefty’s chief goal as an athlete was to block out distractions. Rather than studying hitters’ charts, though, he would spend hours in a blue “mood behavior” that The Phillies built for him in the clubhouse. Before games, he would sit in that blue room and meditate on a painting of ocean waves, repeating his mantra: "I am courageous, calm, confident, and relaxed. I can control my destiny." Carlton’s enemy was not Johnny Bench, Pete Rose or Joe Morgan. It wasn’t the Reds or the Pirates. It was his own mind. To be clear, his interest in transcendental meditation was by no means unique among athletes. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton were both avid practitioners. But more so than either of those famously cerebral NBA centers, Carlton’s goal was not simply mindfulness — it was, to quote Carl Spackler from “Caddyshack,” total consciousness.
And this is where Lefty eclipses Wade “The Chicken Man” Boggs and Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Carlton’s obsessions were neither superstitious nor psychedelic. His obsession with maximum repetition and minimum distraction was not even really about sports. It was about about eternity — about a deathless exitsence. More than he wanted to win and more than he wanted to strike batters out, Steve Carlton wanted to live forever. Pitching was simply the medium for his homegrown Buddhism. His pursuit of immortality was a pursuit of perfection and an elimination of all obstacles. No batters. No noise. No time.
Carlton conquered his first set of obstacles — opposing batters — early on in his career and with relative ease. Next up was the noise, which Carlton dampened through “The Big Silence,” a ten plus year boycott of all media. From 1973 up until his three hundredth win in 1983, Carlton neither spoke to nor read any press. As much as any other pitcher in baseball history, Lefty was able to ignore hitters and the media. Time, however, was his ultimate foe. Carlton figured that if he could ignore the passage of time, he could cheat decline and, eventually, death. And so, he refused to wear a watch. He eliminated clocks from his life. He stopped celebrating birthdays. To Carlton, his body — and his age — were simply expressions of his mind.
Lefty’s unorthodox tactics worked unfathomably well — until they didn’t. After an uneven, but still overpowering 1983 season, Carlton ran out of gas towards the end of 1984 and watched as Nolan Ryan cruised by him as baseball’s all-time strikeout king. In 1985, however, on the other side of forty, Carlton was confronted by his mortal enemy. He could see through hitters and disavow watches, clocks and birthdays, but Carlton could not beat Father Time. He finished that season with just one win against eight losses. And, over the course of the next two seasons, which he spent on five different club’s rosters, Steve Carlton went eleven and twenty-three with an ERA above five.
After a disastrous start to the 1988 season, Lefty was released by the Twins. That December, he ignored his forty-fourth birthday and continued to work out religiously, in hopes of signing with a new team. But there were no takers. He was convinced that collusion was to blame, but, in truth, it was just time. The lefty who, as a boy, never really cared much for sports and who, as a teenager, played baseball simply because it came naturally to him and who, as a young man, was drafted for his size and his potential and who, graduated from prospect to ace during an offseason exhibition game in which he fooled Sadaharu Oh with a wicked slider and who, through irrational monastic dedication, became the greatest left handed pitcher of his generation, had to finally confront facts. He was not immortal.
In his mood behavior room, on the mound and, even in the dugout, Carlton felt safe. Outside of baseball, living life, keeping up his marriage, managing his finances and, very occasionally, speaking with the media, Carlton felt titanic unease. Early in his retirement, through some combination of disinterest and naïveté, he lost the fortune he’d earned as a player. And so, tired (and fearful) of the city and needing to start over, Steve and Beverly Carlton moved to Durango, Colorado. Seven hours from Denver and four from Albuquerque, Carlton wanted to get away — from the past and from the media, but mostly from the government. He built an impressive bunker, flanked by fruit trees, where he raised turkeys, pheasants and horses. Along with external energy sources and (of course) clocks, he got rid of his televisions. Lefty spent those first years in Durango preparing for end of times events that he was convinced were at hand. Very occasionally, he’d sign autographs, because he needed the money. But otherwise he avoided the outside world, which, in his mind, was full of distractions and doom.
The paranoia that gripped Lefty was somewhat mitigated by his quiet, bucolic life — at least at first. But then, because he depended on the outside world for income and, for reasons that remain unclear to me, he ended “The Big Silence.” In 1993, Carlton appeared on ESPN’s “Up Close,” sharing eight to ten sentences of Tao in between twenty minutes of Roy Firestone’s monologue. And then, the following year, out of loneliness or hubris or compromised faculties, Carlton allowed sports writer Pat Jordan to visit him at his bunker ranch. Off camera and off mic, Carlton started talking. And talking. And talking. And that’s when things went from odd to kooky.
Originally published as “Thin Mountain Air” in Philadelphia Magazine, Jordan’s profile depicted a an isolated, eccentric man, consumed with conspiracy theories — some libertarian, some anti-Semetic — but all of which foretold disaster. Upon its publications, a flurry of whispers emerged ranging from “Steve Carlton, really?” to “I kind of figured.” After the eyebrow raises and chuckles, though, Lefty was forced to come forward and defend himself. He claimed the piece was fabricated, while Tim McCarver, Carlton’s longtime battery mate, claimed that the former Cy Young Award winner suffered from extreme gullibility rather than insanity or bigotry.
Since the “Thin Mountain Air” debacle, Carlton has, for the most part, avoided the media. His Hall of Fame induction speech during the summer of 1994 included one joke (“It's like Rush Limbaugh being voted in by the Clintons.”) and a series of very tame, completely generous notes of gratitude. After the ceremony, he got back on his horse and rode back to Durango.
Nowadays, he makes occasional appearances for The Phillies, mostly out of financial obligation but also because he does appreciate the fans. Primarily though, he lives a solitary life. He divorced in 1998. His parents passed. His kids are grown up. He traded in his prepper streak for a sustainable living badge. And, as if to prove his oneness with nature, he’s even given up hunting. In many ways, his life is not so different from what it was in 1994. His body has naturally aged, but, on the surface at least, Lefty seemed to have finally achieved the monastic life he’d spent decades pursuing.
Steve Carlton believed in reincarnation — he dreamed of being everything and nothing at all. In 1987, though he was not on the World Series roster, Lefty was invited to the White House along with the rest of The Twins to meet President Reagan. When a photo from the event was released to the press, every single member of the team and staff were identified by name — with the exception of Carlton, who instead was listed as "unidentified Secret Service agent." More than his 1972 season, that AP photo might have been peak Lefty — different from everyone else, and also completely unknown. Everything and nothing.