Astros 5, Phillies 3Game 5 - Sunday Afternoon, April 14th in Houston
Record - 1-4, Tied for 5th Place, 4 games behind the Mets
One Sentence Summary: Nolan Ryan outdueled Steve Carlton, pitching a complete game and striking out nine in this 5-3 Astros win.
What It Means: A Sunday afternoon game, inside, with Ryan facing off against Carlton, and the attendance was only 15,277? That's crazy to me.
What Happened: Ryan allowed six hits and two of the three runs he allowed were unearned. Carlton helped himself with a two-run double off Ryan in the third. Von Hayes also had two hits off Ryan with a double. Mike Schmidt went 0 for 4 as his early season slump continued. Jose Cruz had three hits for the Astros.
Carlton went five innings, allowing five runs (four earned) on nine hits with an unsightly five walks. Pat Zachry and Larry Andersen threw three shutout innings to close the game, and Andersen's scoreless outing helped lower his ERA to 15.43.
Featured Card: I have four cards in my collection featuring Ryan and Carlton together. They're on league leaders cards together in the 1973 and 1975 Topps sets, and they share two different cards in the 1984 Topps set. This card highlights Ryan, Carlton and Gaylord Perry all surpassing the career strikeout total of Walter Johnson during the 1983 season. Ryan did it first, but by the end of season Carlton had a slim lead over Ryan - 3,709 to 3,677.
2 comments:
Cool card. I remember reading an article either online or in a magazine that followed these three guys and the race to pass Johnson.
I wonder if we'll ever see something like that again? Three future Hall of Famers each chasing down the leader in a significant statistical category in the same season.
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