Lefty & Tim: How Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver Became Baseball's Best Battery by William C. Kashatus (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lefty & Tim: How Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver Became Baseball's Best Battery by William C. Kashatus Mitchell Nathanson William C. Kashatus. Lefty & Tim: How Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver Became Baseball's Best Battery. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 337 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Throughout the mid-to late 1970s there wasn't a more visible tandem in baseball than "Lefty and Tim." The 1940s had "Spahn and Sain," the '60s had "Mantle and Maris," and the '80s would have "Whitaker and Trammell." But the 1970s belonged to "Lefty and Tim," the subject of William Kashatus's new book on the pitcher-catcher duo of Steve Carlton and Tim McCarver. They were a fascinating pair—one refused to talk while the other seemed to never shut up. One was a silky-smooth Hall of Famer while the other was a stocky baseball workingman. One may very well have been bananas, and the other had his feet firmly on the ground such that after baseball he'd become one of the most insightful and articulate game analysts network television has ever seen. There's a lot to write about here. Kashatus writes about some of it. He covers the on-field and game-related aspect of the duo's relationship well. As fans of a certain vintage might remember, during the Phillies' era of near greatness during the late '70s, McCarver became Carlton's personal catcher, helping the formerly "Super Steve" regain the form he displayed during his 1972 Cy Young Award-winning season when he won twenty-seven [End Page 128] games for a club that won only thirty-two more when he wasn't on the mound. Over the next few years, as the Phillies gradually improved, Carlton improbably declined, losing twenty games in 1973 and becoming a somewhat ordinary pitcher in both '74 and '75. McCarver, who caught Carlton while the pair were with the Cardinals in the '60s, arrived in Philadelphia midway through the 1975 season as a seemingly washed-up catcher looking for a broadcasting job and wound up behind the plate nearly every time Carlton pitched for the remainder of the decade, helping him return to form. As Kashatus notes, it was McCarver's insistence that Carlton rely more heavily on his devastating slider that brought him back from the abyss. Carlton would go on to win another Cy Young Award in 1977 and then, with the slider as his "out" pitch, win two more after McCarver retired, in 1980 and 1982. It's not too much to suggest that Carlton would never have even sniffed the Hall of Fame were it not for Tim McCarver, and Kashatus does a fine job of making this point, both in the text and the extended appendices. Where Kashatus falls short is in his analysis of the complicated psyche of Steve Carlton. Carlton refused to speak with him for the book, which is certainly no crime given that Carlton has rarely spoken to anybody on the record since the mid- '70s, but his absence here is missed, nevertheless. Carlton has occasionally given interviews over the years, and at times his views can be head scratchers. In 2013 he allowed Pat Jordan into his brain for a Deadspin article and spun one conspiracy theory after another, talking of how "the Elders of Zion rule the world" and of a committee of 300 who meet every year at a roundtable in Rome to likewise control world affairs. It was nutty stuff, but none of this is even hinted at within the pages of Lefty and Tim. Instead, readers are left with Kashatus's take that Carlton was simply a fun-loving guy who, after being burned by the media a few times, decided to stop cooperating and speaking with reporters. Those unaware of Carlton's worldview won't notice what's missing within the pages of this book; those drawn to the book at least in part out of a desire to understand Carlton better, given what they've read of him over the past several years in articles like Jordan's, are going to feel like they're getting only a honey-glazed portion...