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137 6 Loss of the Lefties [Rick] Wise was a reliable pitcher. But Carlton was obviously a great one, and delivering him to Philadelphia was a matter of depositing another two hundred–something wins into the account of one of our division rivals. —Bob Gibson Capped by his twenty-win season in 1971, Steve Carlton was indeed riding high by early 1972. He had invested ten years in the Cardinals’ organization, signing as a nineteen-year-old in 1963 and working for the last five full seasons (and parts of seven overall ) in the Major Leagues. It was unmistakable that he was finally harnessing his immense physical talent, and with Gibson aging, he was asserting himself as a potential number-one starter on the pitching staff. The club was also fully aware that he could be a nuisance when it came to contract negotiations, and Devine did not relish having to now deal with him in the wake of his best year as a professional. Only two years earlier, he had demanded more than twice his 1969 salary for 1970; while not meeting his desired figure, the team nonetheless agreed to a hefty raise, and the result was Carlton posting a nineteen-loss season. As the winter snow continued to pile up in the Midwest, Carlton and the brewery were more than ten thousand dollars apart in salary figures by February 1972. Now, with Carlton hinting at staging a spring training holdout once again, Gussie Busch and his henchmen would have to further extend their creativity to have the pitcher ink his contract and arrive in Florida on time. An idea to this end would spring forth, strangely enough, from the current year’s U.S. presidential election. 138 Gibson’s Last Stand The following November, Nixon would be reelected in a landslide victory over Senator George McGovern despite the lowest voter turnout in almost twenty-five years, with only 55 percent of those eligible casting a ballot. In an effort to stem runaway inflation in the early 1970s, Nixon urged private businesses to place a 5.5 percent cap on employee raises for the coming year as part of his campaign proclamations. Still a sharp businessman with financial acumen, Busch seized the moment and utilized this point in his negotiations with Carlton and a few other Cardinals seeking substantial raises. Carlton, however, ignored the federal guidelines and was seeking an amount in the neighborhood of seventy-five thousand dollars, which was around 20 percent more than the sixty-two thousand Busch was prepared to offer him.Years later in reflection, Devine could not believe how inane the situation would become. “He [Carlton] was being very difficult to sign for the ridiculous amount of $10,000 between what he wanted and what we’d give him. . . . [F]requently, 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.’”Although often difficult to deal with when it came to contracts, Carlton had never been more stubborn, and never at a worse time; Gussie’s view of the “modern player” had certainly not improved since the Flood situation , and because of this, he was about to ignite a near-complete explosion of the pitching roster. At this same time, wanting nearly as much money from the Phillies was Wise, who had performed admirably for his team in 1971 in winning seventeen games (but with as many losses as well) for the last-place club. So, on February 25—just as Nixon was in the middle of his historic eightday meeting with Mao Tse-tung, the first-ever trip for a president to the People ’s Republic of China—the Cardinals began their own “Cultural Revolution” of the pitching staff. Carlton and Wise were exchanged in a trade, in effect relieving both organizations of their prime hassles in salary negotiations. “Wise was a reliable pitcher,” assessed Gibson many years later,“but Carlton was obviously a great one, and delivering him to Philadelphia was a matter of depositing another two hundred–something wins into the account of one of our [at the time] division rivals.” In continuing his reflection, Gibson then referred to another deal involving another young Cardinals pitcher that was still to come in early 1972.“In the course of a year, the organization managed to rid itself of a grand total of...

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