Lefty and Tim by William C. Kashatus
How Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver Became Baseball’s Best Battery
Lefty and Tim: How Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver Became Baseball’s Best Battery, written by William C. Kashatus, is a dual biography of Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver.
While the book does focus on their childhood and a bit of their post-playing career, it is mostly about the time they played together, either for the St. Louis Cardinals or the Philadelphia Phillies. Luckily, Kashatus was able to sit down with the Hall of Fame broadcaster for a few interviews. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about Carlton. That being said, Kashatus was able to get access to a few of the rare interviews given out by Carlton after he retired.
Carlton wasn’t big with the media and it worsened throughout his career. One couldn’t blame him, especially with how they went after him when they struggled. Maybe one could have seen it coming in the way he basically forced himself out of a Cardinals uniform. I do think Carlton opening up would have made for a more interesting book but it is what it is. There’s nothing here about the Hall of Fame pitcher being a conspiracy theorist or the subsequent back-and-forth.
Growing up in Memphis, McCarver had been scouted by Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey. It was during this time that Dickey told him to “be a pitcher’s friend.” What Dickey meant by this was “being a tough friend when the pitcher needed that or be a reassuring friend if that’s what the pitcher needed.” The Yankees would go onto offer McCarver a $60,000 signing bonus but he ended up signing with the Cardinals after then-farm director Walter Shannon offered a $75,000 signing bonus with $6,000 guaranteed yearly for five years. At the time, it was the largest signing bonus ever offered by the Cards.
In any event, McCarver was the personal catcher for Carlton for much of his time with the Cardinals and Phillies. If the Phillies knew that Carlton would benefit from McCarver, maybe they wouldn’t have traded him away. They were paired as a battery for 228 games between the two clubs with Carlton winning in 71% of the games. As of this writing, Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina (2007-2022) hold the record with 328 games, breaking the previous 324-game record owned by Mickey Lolich and Bill Freehan (1963-1975).
McCarver and Carlton came from very different approaches. They both thought that they should call the pitches. In any event, they grew to become friends off the diamond, which helped them to gain an understanding of each other. More importantly, it also helped them grow to trust each other. Without that trust, Lefty would probably not become a Hall of Fame pitcher. The fact that McCarver caught him as a young pitcher may have helped in revitalizing Lefty’s career when he came back to the Phillies in the late 1970s.
They played during a very different era of baseball—pitching dominated the decade and then the mound was lowered following 1968. Teams were still slowly integrating in the 1950s and 1960s—it is not unfair to say that racism was awful in the US. There are a few pages on McCarver’s relationship with Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson. Mccarver’s relationship with Gibby was different than that of Lefty. McCarver reflected back on their conversation on the morning after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. McCarver recalled saying that he proved that “it was possible for people to change their attitudes.”
Meanwhile, the 1970s brought about labor tensions and free agency. In fact, Tim McCarver was a part of the same trade that sent Curt Flood to the Phillies. Flood didn’t report and baseball history would never again be the same.
I do have a bone to pick about page 115 where Kashatus is discussing Carlton’s 1972 season, specifically a few August games. He references Carlton tying Curt Simmons’s club record for shutouts by a left-hander with six. Where things get interesting and historically wrong is writing that Willie McGee stepped up to the plate. McGee didn’t even make his MLB debut until May 10, 1982, nearly a decade after the game in question. He most definitely did not play in the game. Oh yeah, the inning was a three up-three down situation so there were zero “Redbirds runners at the corners” in a two-out situation when Ted Simmons stepped up to the plate. Page 150 of McCarver’s book, Few and Chosen, is sourced here and after looking over the page, I am even more confused. Furthermore, the catcher had already been traded by the Phillies at this point.
Lefty and Tim is surprisingly a quick read. I started at some point on August 12 and was done reading on August 17. Excluding forewords, appendixes, notes, etc. the main text of the book is only 259 pages. It might look daunting from the outside but at no point does it ever feel that way.
Lefty and Tim offers baseball fans valuable insight into McCarver and Carlton as both humans and ballplayers. There’s no doubting that they were an odd couple but without their relationship, it’s unlikely that Carlton would have been inducted into Cooperstown or that we’d be reading this book.