The summer of Super Steve still sticks to the soul of this fan who saw greatness up close

Phillies seasons come and go, even with the dog days, and before you know it, 50 of them have piled up like sunflower seed shells on the dugout floor.

Every once in a while, though, there is a season that sticks to a baseball fan’s soul and makes a permanent deposit in the memory bank. Steve Carlton had one of those seasons in 1972. Long before he became the Hall of Famer known as Lefty, he was Super Steve.

In that summer of ‘72, the Phillies were playing their second season at Veterans Stadium, the concrete hulk at Broad Street and Pattison Avenue that looked an awful lot like Three Rivers Stadium and Busch Stadium and Riverfront Stadium. Pro sports teams made multipurpose, AstroTurfed ballparks the in thing in the Seventies. What did they know?

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The ‘72 Phillies were way more unsightly than their home turf. They finished 59-97 and cost Frank “Skipper” Lucchesi his job. Somehow, though, through the grace of God, they had Super Steve Carlton on their side, riding superhuman endurance and an absolutely unhittable slider into arguably the greatest season by a pitcher — ever.

The Seventies were a time of sideshows, both at the ballpark and in the nation: Kiteman. The Great Wallenda. The tacky, somehow endearing Vet. Richard Milhous Nixon. It was a time to make history as well, and Carlton carved out his own as the Cy Young Award centerpiece of an otherwise rotten ballclub. Good thing the Phillies snookered the Cardinals out of Carlton in a straight-up trade for Rick Wise during spring training. (Both pitchers were holding out.)

How Super was Steve in ‘72? With a 27-10 record, he was the pitcher of record in 45.7% of his team’s wins, a major league mark that is probably unbreakable. He pitched a superhuman 30 complete games that season and 254 in his career. (For context: Fellow Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson had 100 career complete games, but never more than 12 in one season.) Carlton’s ERA was 1.97, a career best achieved in a season when he pitched a herculean 346⅓ innings. (More context: Hall of Famer Roy Halladay led the majors with a career-high 266 innings in 2003, when he won the Cy Young.)

You were there at the 1972 season’s onset at the Vet, accompanied by grade school buddies, when Kiteman careened off his 150-foot ramp and crashed. (Seemed like a good idea at the time …) The 1972 home opener came late, on April 17, because of a players’ strike, and Kiteman’s mission was to ride a hang glider of sorts from the Yellow Submarine seats in the 700 Level to the field below and deliver a baseball for the first pitch.

He did not come close. It is said that his launch angle was not good. Kiteman, a hardware store owner named Richard Johnson, splatted into the stands, arose, and feebly tossed the ball toward the field; it landed in the bullpen. He was not seriously hurt. At least Carlton did not have to follow that act, having beaten the Cubs, 4-2, in the season opener at Wrigley Field. (Chicago’s Burt Hooton pitched a no-hitter against the Phillies in the season’s second game.)

Carlton began the season with five victories in his first six starts, including four complete games. Early on, he was dubbed Super Steve by sportswriters and fans, not a terribly creative nickname but somehow fitting in the era of Jesus Christ Superstar. Athletes seemed to wear nicknames more comfortably in the Seventies. Smokin’ Joe Frazier had a good one, as did Charlie Hustle and Hammerin’ Hank. Greg Luzinski became the Bull and Broadway Joe Namath was still around.

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Super Steve lived up to his billing and became a rare thing at Veterans Stadium: a draw. As Carlton’s season gained momentum, Phillies fans would check the pitching rotation and buy tickets for his games — not so much when Woodie Fryman (4-10) or Ken Reynolds (2-15) or Bill Champion (4-14) was on the mound.

In 1972, it was possible for a kid to take SEPTA’s Barren Hill bus — at the edge of the city in Seventies Suburbia — to City Hall, then the stadium bus down Broad Street to the Vet, for less than $1 round trip. (The Pattison Avenue stop on the Broad Street Subway would not open for another year.) The price of a general admission Phillies ticket: 50 cents for kids 14 and under. So, the cost to attend a Phillies game, including transportation, was less than $2.

You tell your son this and he asks, with a nearly straight face, whether this was the Great Depression.

No, only the Phillies were depressing back then, except for Super Steve. They did have a 21-year-old Luzinski in his first full season, when he hit 18 home runs. (Mike Schmidt had a 13-game cup of coffee at season’s end — and batted .196 in his first full, flailing season in 1973.) Mostly, though, a few fans showed up at the Vet expecting the Phillies to lose on days when Carlton was not on the hill. It became a tradition for you and your friends to scale the 700 Level steps during games and walk all the way around the top of the stadium. It seemed higher than Everest up there. A play-by-play man named Harry Kalas was in his second season with the Phillies, and you caught a glimpse of him once when you and your buddies sneaked into the 400 Level.

Not all of the Carlton memories from that season were picture-perfect, though. He actually had a string of five straight losses in May that dropped his record to 5-6. Then the weather heated up and so did he, rolling off 15 straight wins. Carlton would not be beaten again until Aug. 21, and even then he pitched 11 innings in a 2-1 loss to the Braves.

Early in Carlton’s run, he lasted 10 innings, striking out 12, and received no-decision in a 1-0 loss to Houston at the Astrodome. A few hours later, on June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington and Nixon’s presidency began its death spiral. Ah, the Seventies …

On June 25, Carlton silenced the Expos, 1-0, in a complete game in Montreal and also flattened shortstop Tim Foli with a pitch that hit him in the head. Amid the brawl that followed, Expos manager Gene Mauch (yes, that Gene Mauch) threw a punch at Carlton.

“I’m sorry about Foli. I didn’t mean to hit him in the head,” Carlton told the writers afterward. “And I’m sorry about Gene Mauch. I meant to hit him all over.”

Carlton foiled the Pirates, 2-0, with a three-hitter on Aug. 9. “Hitting him tonight,” exasperated Pirates great Willie Stargell said afterward, “was like trying to drink coffee with a fork.”

After Carlton’s next start, the Phillies pulled off arguably the greatest sideshow of all: On Aug. 13, a 67-year-old circus performer named Karl Wallenda walked 640 feet across the top of the stadium on a steel cable between games of a doubleheader. (Piece of cake. The Great Wallenda had done the same thing in a circus at Busch Stadium a year before.) For good measure, Wallenda did a headstand on the tightrope in the middle of his act.

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You were among the 30,207 in attendance who held their breath until Wallenda was safe and sound. Wilmington News Journal photographer Fred Comegys climbed onto the roof of the Vet during Wallenda’s feat and snapped a panoramic photo that appeared in Life magazine. “A ladder was right there,” Comegys would tell you years later. “I just climbed up there and shot it.”

Carlton avoided the drama by pitching the first game that day, allowing only three hits in an efficient 2-1 victory over those Expos in a complete game (of course). The game took only an hour and 48 minutes, a textbook example of this fact: Carlton did not mess around on the mound. His games routinely took about two hours to complete, something that is almost unfathomable in today’s game. Of course, there weren’t many pitching changes to slow things down.

There was no slowing down Super Steve — or his impact on the fans — in 1972. The night he won his 15th straight game, a 9-4 victory against the Reds, a crowd of 53,377 poured into the Vet to watch. The night before, 10,385 fans were there.

The season’s dog days had no effect on Carlton’s stamina, either. He pitched a complete game in every one of his last eight starts that season — six wins, two losses. Unfortunately, only 12,216 fans were on hand at the Vet to see Carlton’s last start there, a 2-1 victory over the Pirates on Sept. 28. (Stargell, still using a fork, went 0-for-4.) Carlton closed it out with an 11-1 win against the Cubs at Wrigley, the same place where his remarkable season began.

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“Mentally and physically, I’m pretty tired right now,” he said in the visitors’ clubhouse. No wonder. The Phillies rewarded him in 1973 by making him baseball’s highest-paid pitcher at $165,000 a season — and Carlton lost 20 games that year. No matter. After that hiccup, he went on to collect three more Cy Young Awards and pitch the Phils to their first World Series title. On his Hall of Fame plaque, he wears a Phillies cap.

That greatness began in ‘72, the summer of Super Steve.