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Steve Carlton

Baseball is an outdoor sport in which a pitcher pitches a hard, fist sized ball to the hitting area of a batter. The batter hits the hard ball with a tapered, smooth, cylindrical bat made up of wood or metal. The batsman scores by running counter-clockwise within the four markers called the bases arranged at the corners of a diamond. Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from similar games such as softball.

Steve Carlton was born on Friday, December 22, 1944, in Miami, Florida. He was 20 years old when he broke into the big leagues on April 12, 1965, with the Saint Louis Cardinals. His height is 6 feet 4 inches and weight is 210 pounds. He played his first game in 1965 and the last game in 1988. The second winningest-lefthander of all time behind Warren Spahn, Carlton is also second on the all time strikeout list behind Nolan Ryan. He was the first pitcher ever to win four Cy Young Awards, and had six 20-win seasons.

When he had his first tryouts in 1963, Scouts questioned whether he could throw hard enough to make the Major League, but Carlton, a dedicated worker at conditioning throughout his career, built himself up with weights and his fastball became his strikeout pitch. He also had a decent curveball with a sharp downward drop and a sneaky pickoff move that tested the limits of the balk rule. In 1969, he began to develop his slider, a pitch that broke down and in to right-handed batters and it became a devastating complement to his fastball in mid-career. He was also dangerous at the plate, with a 0.201 career average and 13 Home Runs. He had begun to show signs of wear in 1983, despite leading the league in strikeouts for the fifth time. In 1984, at the age of 39, he was 13-7 for a 0.500 ballclub. But his ERA, Earned Run Average was up and his strikeout total well down, and he only completed one game.

Steve Carlton had an exceptionally wide stance that gave him a controlled short stride, strong wrists that generated enormous power, and the ability to wait until the last instant before lashing into a pitch.

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