Coffee With a Fork

Steve Carlton stopped talking to reporters somewhere in the mid-1970s and never really started again. He said later that talking broke his concentration. Whatever the reason, the effect was that for a decade the best left-handed pitcher in baseball did all of his communicating from sixty feet, six inches, and he was extremely articulate.

The slider was the whole conversation. It did not sweep sideways like most sliders did. It broke down and away at an angle that made right-handed hitters look like they were swinging at a rumor. Willie Stargell said hitting Carlton was like drinking coffee with a fork. Tim McCarver said opposing hitters would tell him they were just relieved to be retired on something else.

In 1972 the Cardinals traded him over a salary dispute and he went to a Phillies team that would lose 97 games. He went 27-10 with a 1.97 ERA, 310 strikeouts, 30 complete games and 346 innings. The Phillies won 59 games all year. Carlton was the pitcher of record for nearly half of them, which remains one of the strangest single-season facts in baseball.

He built the arm with martial arts, meditation and a barrel of rice he would bury his left hand in and twist through. The writers thought it was eccentric and said so, and that was roughly the moment the door closed on them for good.

He finished with 329 wins, 4,136 strikeouts and four Cy Young Awards, and got his 300th against the Cardinals in 1983, which was a nice piece of accounting. The silence was never a gimmick. It was the same thing as the slider. He had decided what he was going to give hitters and what he was going to give everybody else, and he never once negotiated.