The Spirit of St. Louis - Excerpt
The Spirit of St. Louis:
A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns
Overview & Peter Golenbock Comments
An Excerpt From The Spirit of St. Louis
The Cardinals
Gussie Busch Gets Rid of Steve Carlton
In 1971 the Cardinals' star player was a tall left-hander by the name of Steve Carlton, who had burst on the scene in 1969 with a 19-strikeout performance against the New York Mets.
Carlton was not your normal guy. Communicating with him was not always easy. On the mound, he would tune out all distrac-ions. Off the mound, he did the same. If he considered you the distraction, he'd direct at you an icy stare. Teammates considered him to be a recluse. He hated to sign autographs. He refused to talk to reporters for long stretches at a time. He was devoted to the martial arts. He studied Far East religions. He was a wine connoisseur. He pissed people off with his stand-offishness and arrogance.
Carlton was also the finest left handed pitcher of his generation. In a career that would last twenty-four years, he would win 329 games, ninth all-time, with an ERA of 3.22. His 4,136 strikeouts were second all-time only to Nolan Ryan. Unfortunately, most of his career was not spent in St. Louis but rather in Philadelphia.
In 1971 he had forged a 20-9 record and was demanding a raise of $10,000 more than what Gussie Busch wanted to pay him for the '72 season.
President Richard Nixon had ordered wage and price controls for the country at that time, and Busch informed Carlton it was his patriotic duty to honor the President's request to a salary ceiling.
Carlton held his ground. The pitcher, who could be churlish when unhappy, angered Gussie Busch so badly that as spring training approached, Busch finally ordered general manager Bing Devine to trade him. Devine well knew what a great pitcher Carlton promised to be, but he was boxed in because Busch would not bend on the question of giving Carlton the extra $10,000, and neither would Carlton.
Bing Devine: "We hadn't been able to sign Carlton. There was no free agency, so he didn't have the freedom to say, `Sign me or else.' He was being very difficult to sign for the ridiculous amount of $10,000 between what he wanted and what we'd give him. Many times Mr. Busch gave me a little leeway in th4e budget, but in the case of Carlton, Mr. Busch developed the feeling that Carlton was a `smart-aleck' young guy, `and I'm not used to having young smart-alecks tell me what do do.'
"Frequently Mr. Busch and I would have conversations where he'd say, `Have you got Carlton signed yet? If you haven't got him signed, figure out what you're going to do with him.'
"I was hoping we could get through this and not have it develop into a major issue. Finally I began talking to clubs, saying, `If we can't sign Carlton, maybe we'll have to trade him.' And one of the people I talked to was Joghn Quinn of Philadelphia. John Quinn said, `I think we'd be interested in Carlton.' And we talked about the people who could be in the deal and talked about it like the way we had talked about Brock over a period of weeks.
"Often I would get early morning phone calls. I do get up early. I don't always leave the house early. One morning the phone rang. It was Dick Meyer. This time he said, `What have you done about Steve Carlton?' I said, `What do you mean?' Dick said, `Do you have a trade you can make for him, something you want to talk to us about?' I said, `Yeah, I think I could probably make a deal with the Phillies. Why?' He said, `Because my ulcer is acting up, and I don't like having people [Mr. Busch] affect health and how I feel.' He said, `Mr. Busch comes in every morning and says, `Have you gotten Carlton signed? If you don't have him signed, do you have him traded? If you don't have him traded, why not?' So Dick said, `I'm tired of putting up with that and having my ulcer act up, so my best suggestion to you is that you do me a favor and trade him today.'
"I said, `You mean today, period.' He said, `Yeah, today, but I'll give you a little leeway. But I think we ought to get the deal made so I can tell Mr. Busch, `It's done.' And that was it. I traded him to the Phils for Rick Wise.
"Three, four years later, after Carlton had established himself as a Hall of Fame pitcher, I remember talking to Dick Meyer kind of facetiously one day. I said, `What do you think would have happened if I would have really bowed my neck and made it a major issue with Mr. Busch about Carlton?' He said, `I'm going to tell you something. You'd have been gone first -- and Steve Carlton right behind you.'
"I thought that probably was true."
The Browns
Manager Marty Marion of Satchel Paige
Marty Marion: "I managed Satchel Paige. Oh Lord. You can have Satchel. You can have him. You know why? He ran the club, not me! Everything Satchel wanted, Veeck would do. Veeck loved Satchel. Oh God.
"What did he do? He almost got us killed. We didn't have enough baseballs even to take batting practice. Bill was trying to get money everywhere he could, so he scheduled an exhibition game in Providence, Rhode Island.
"We were on our way to play Boston the next day, had an off day, and lo and behold, we had a good crowd, a sellout, in Providence. During the regular games nobody cared whether he pitched or not because he wasn't that good -- he didn't have good stuff -- but in his heyday he was great, or at least they tell me he was. And they had advertised he was going to pitch. Satch was a showman, you know. He packed them in. There must have been 15,000 people there at the ballpark, and about the third inning the sportswriters started coming down from the press box. They asked, `Marty, where is Satchel Paige?' I didn't even know he wasn't there. I said, `If you find him, I'll pitch him.' Any- way, turns out Satchel skipped the game. He went straight on into Boston.
"Bill Durney, our traveling secretary, came and said, `Everyone wants their money back. They are ready to lynch us.'
I said, `Well, Bill, you get the money and you get out of here.' And they WERE threatening to lynch us. It was a bad situation.
"The next morning we went to the Kenmore Hotel in Boston. I walked in from the train, and there's Satchel, sitting in the lobby. I said, `Satchel, you almost got us lynched. They wanted their money back.' Satch said, `Oh pooh.' He didn't have an excuse or nothing. He wasn't sick. I said, `That will cost you $5,000. I'm calling Mr. Veeck right now.' Bill Durney said to me, `Hell, Veeck ain't gonna take his money.' And he didn't.
"But that was ol' Satch.
"One day when I was the manager we were having our clubhouse meeting, and ol' Sugar Cain said, `Marty, why is it that you make all us white boys do all these things, and you don't ever make Satchel run?' I said, `I guess you got me there, because, number one, Satchel can't run, and number two, when you get to be sixty- five years of age, you can do that.' But Satchel wouldn't do nothing. You couldn't tell him nothing. He'd sit in his big rocking chair down in the bullpen. Oh, he was a character.
"Funny thing about him, though. He didn't mind a white guy getting a hit off of him, but if a black player got a hit off of him, he really didn't like that at all. He wanted to be king of the black people. And boy, he was king. Everybody looked up to Satchel.
"But he was a bad guy to have on a club. He'd keep every- body up all night on the train, telling all these stories, and everybody'd listen. I used to listen to him too.
"He was a pretty black person, and when he'd get through taking a shower, he'd pull this talcum powder all over him.
After he got through doing that, he was whiter than I am. And then he'd put this snake oil on him and rub his arm. What a character! He was good copy, but bad for the manager.
"Satchel would no more pay attention to me than the man in the moon. He knew Veeck wasn't going to take any money from him. That's the only way you can get back at them, take their dough.
"Even so, I loved Veeck. Bill lived high on the hog, and I'm a very conservative person. Other than that, you couldn't help but love Veeck. He paid you well. It was hard working for him under those circumstances because he would sell players and wouldn't even ask me. And when I'd mention trying to get a player, he'd say, `Marty, we don't have any money.' But Veeck was good to work for. Everybody loved Bill. He was popular with the players. Until he traded them."