On This Date: Steve Carlton Wins No. 300 in St. Louis, and Doesn't Say a Word (Sept. 23, 1983)

On this date in 1983, on a Friday night at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, 38-year-old Steve Carlton beat the Cardinals 6-2 for the 300th win of his career. He pitched 8 innings, gave up 2 runs and struck out 12. He was the 16th pitcher in major league history to win 300 games, and only the 4th left-hander, after Eddie Plank, Lefty Grove and Warren Spahn.

He did it against the team that had traded him, in the ballpark where he became a star. Afterward, he didn't talk about it. He hadn't talked to reporters in years, and he wasn't going to start for this.

The Team That Let Him Go

Carlton grew up as a pitcher in St. Louis. He broke in with the Cardinals in 1965, won a World Series ring with them in 1967, and in 1969 struck out 19 Mets in a single game, a record he set in a game he lost.

In early 1972, he and owner Gussie Busch were a few thousand dollars apart on a contract. Busch refused to close the gap and traded him to the last-place Phillies for Rick Wise on Feb. 25, 1972. The Phillies paid Carlton what he wanted. He went 27-10 for a team that won 59 games and won the first of his 4 Cy Young Awards. Eleven years later he came back to Busch Stadium needing one more win.

The Night

The Phillies came in hot. They had won 7 straight and were in a tight NL East race with Pittsburgh and Montreal. This was the "Wheeze Kids" team, built around old men: Joe Morgan was 40, Tony Perez was 41, Pete Rose was 42, and Carlton was the ace at 38. He was 14-15 going into the night.

His pitching coach, Claude Osteen, said Carlton was pacing the clubhouse with a bat before the game. "I could tell he was more on edge than he usually is," Osteen said. "He really wanted to get this out of the way."

Carlton drove in the game's first run himself. Gary Matthews doubled in the 2nd, and Carlton singled him home. Greg Gross made it 2-0 in the 3rd. In the 4th, David Green hit a 2-run homer for St. Louis and tied it.

Then the Phillies went to work on Joaquin Andujar. In the 5th, Matthews singled home a run and catcher Bo Diaz singled home 2 more. Whitey Herzog was thrown out in the same inning for arguing balls and strikes. Mike Schmidt doubled home Morgan in the 6th, and it was 6-2.

Carlton didn't give up another run. In the 8th, Ozzie Smith led off with a triple, and Carlton struck out the next 2 hitters and left him standing on 3rd. That was his 12th strikeout, and the last batter he faced. Osteen took him out rather than let him run his pitch count up in the 9th. "I didn't want to see him take the chance of getting into a high-pitch last inning," he said.

The win was the Phillies' 8th in a row and put them 3 games ahead of Pittsburgh with 8 to play. Al Holland pitched a scoreless 9th. When the last out came, Holland walked straight to Carlton and handed him the ball. "He said, 'Thanks,'" Holland said later, "and I said, 'No, Lefty, thank you.'"

The Silent Treatment

There was no press conference. Carlton's teammates celebrated with him in a closed clubhouse, and the writers got their quotes from everybody else.

Nobody on the Phillies was surprised. Mike Schmidt, who played behind him for more than a decade, put it about as well as anyone could: "If Lefty gave a damn for embellishment, he'd talk to the press. Not caring about it, that got him there quicker."

The Other Race

The 300th win wasn't even the only record chase Carlton was in that year. In 1983, he and Nolan Ryan were racing each other past Walter Johnson's career strikeout record, which had stood for 56 years. Ryan got there first, in April. Carlton passed Johnson in May, then took the all-time lead from Ryan in June. The lead changed hands several times over the summer. The 12 strikeouts in St. Louis gave him 3,702, and he finished 1983 ahead of Ryan, 3,709 to 3,677. Ryan passed him for good the next year and kept going.

What Happened Next

The winning streak reached 11. The Phillies clinched the division at Wrigley Field 5 days later, beat the Dodgers in the NLCS and lost the World Series to Baltimore in 5 games. Carlton finished the season 15-16.

He pitched until 1988, for 4 more teams, and retired with 329 wins, 11th all-time and 2nd among left-handers behind Spahn. He had 4,136 strikeouts, and he was the first pitcher to win 4 Cy Young Awards. He went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1994 with 95.6% of the vote.

Tom Seaver became the 17th member of the 300 club 2 years later, and Phil Niekro the 18th 2 months after that. There have been 24 in all. Only 6 of them were left-handed.

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