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(51,055 posts) Thu Feb 4, 2021, 02:30 PM Feb 2021

David Roth: The March Of The American Kooks

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The March Of The American Kooks | Defector
Steve Carlton won 27 games and the National League Cy Young Award in 1972, lost 20 games and gave up more earned runs than any pitcher in the league in 1973, and then stopped speaking to the media...
defector.com
8:15 AM · Feb 4, 2021

https://defector.com/the-march-of-the-american-kooks/

Steve Carlton won 27 games and the National League Cy Young Award in 1972, lost 20 games and gave up more earned runs than any pitcher in the league in 1973, and then stopped speaking to the media entirely over the next few seasons. Carlton continued not to talk—not as he won the Cy Young three more times in six years, not after he won his 200th career game or his 300th, and not as the lightning in his left arm first flickered and then finally failed, by which point Carlton was trying to make back the $10 million that an unscrupulous agent had taken from him. During that purgatorial final stretch, Carlton shuffled through five different teams in two years. He won a World Series with the Cardinals when he was first becoming what he would be, in 1967, and then another with the Twins in 1987, as a 42-year-old emergency starter with an ERA that started with a six. He pitched brilliantly for both the decades between those triumphs.

There was one particularly unlikable Philadelphia columnist that Carlton particularly didn’t want to talk to, but mostly he didn’t want to play his designated part in the industrial process of baseball media, and so just did not. The people covering Carlton called it The Big Silence, and hated him for it. Carlton finally started talking, a little desperately, near the end, but when he insisted, after a dead-cat bounce of quasi-competence with the White Sox in 1986, that he could still pitch into his 40s, the Chicago Tribune‘s Bernie Lincicome wrote that he “should have kept his mouth shut.” Lincicome added a line break for emphasis before concluding, “at least when he wasn’t talking, he didn’t lie.”

Carlton received 96 percent of the vote in his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1994; among starting pitchers, only Tom Seaver has ever received a higher percentage. Carlton was uncharacteristically or conveniently or maybe even authentically voluble after his election, and seemingly quite happy to talk. “I thought he did a super job answering questions,” Hall of Fame vice president Bill Guilfoyle told Murray Chass of the New York Times in April of 1994. “It was focused strictly on baseball. He made some pertinent observations about hitters, pitchers, catchers.”

The reason Chass was asking, and the reason Guilfoyle was moved to mention that Carlton stuck to sports in those interviews, was a story that Pat Jordan had written about Carlton for that month’s issue of Philadelphia Magazine. Carlton was known as a fastidious, driven, multiply eccentric baseball genius during his career, but also only known by the observable public-facing edges of his personal unusualness—the “mood behavior” room in which he sat before starts staring at a painting of the ocean; the arm exercises he did in a bucket of brown rice; the Eastern philosophy he read and the various esoteric disciplines he was purported to practice. The story in Philadelphia Magazine filled that outline in, in Carlton’s own words, and what had appeared from the outside to be a typical ballplayer mishmash of useful affirmations and secret tenets was revealed as something both more and less coherent, and which now seems much more prosaic. This was how Tim McCarver, Carlton’s longtime personal catcher, came to tell Chass that he “could say, with all the assurance in the world, that Lefty is not a bigot and he is not an anti-Semite.”

*snip*