Lopsided trades make a popular topic of conversation among sports aficionados. While it’s natural to focus on the player who goes on to greatness, it’s too easy to discount the accomplishments of “the other guy.” One famously lopsided trade occurred in 1972 when the St. Louis Cardinals traded Steve Carlton to the Phillies for Rick Wise. Carlton went on to have a Hall of Fame career. But Wise was a fine pitcher in his own right and won nearly 200 Major League games. He also gave one of the greatest single game performances in baseball history. In discussing this trade and its aftermath, a word or two should be said in praise of the other guy.
The Trade
On February 25, 1972, the Phillies traded pitcher Rick Wise to the Cardinals for Steve Carlton. Each pitcher was holding out for a raise. Wise wanted to nearly double his salary from $35,000 to $65,000 a year. Carlton wanted to raise his salary from $40,000 to $65,000 ($528,000 in 2026 dollars). This was before free agency. Both Wise and Carlton came off fine seasons. Wise went 17-14 with a 2.88 ERA on a last place team. Carlton went 20-9 with a 3.56 ERA. Most saw the trade as fairly even. Longtime Philadelphia sportswriter Bill Conlin claimed that Wise would be a 20-game winner with the Cardinals “unless his arm atrophies.” Wise never did win 20 games but he went on to have some good years with the Cardinals and Red Sox. Still, Wise’s career totals were no match for Carlton’s, as shown below.
When Bad Teams Happen to Good Pitchers
The lopsided nature of the trade became apparent in 1972. Wise had a pretty good year, going 16-16 with a 3.11 ERA on a mediocre St. Louis team that had slipped to fourth place with a 75-81 record. His wins above replacement (WAR) of 5.3 was higher than in 1971 and second highest on the team. But Carlton had a season for the ages, going 27-10 on an awful Phillies team that won only 59 games. Carlton led the league in practically every pitching category, including wins, ERA, strikeouts, and WAR. He won the Cy Young Award unanimously. His WAR of 12.5 was the second highest by a pitcher in the past 100 years.
If anything, Carlton’s 12.5 WAR may be an understatement. It would imply that a borderline major league pitcher would still win 14 to 15 games with the 1972 Phillies. The closest to a replacement level starting pitcher on that team was Ken Reynolds, who posted a WAR of 0.5. Reynolds went 2-15 that year.
Carlton’s 1972 season makes it easy to forget Wise’s 1971 season, where he overachieved with a last place team, albeit less dramatically. Wise’s record compares favorably to that of other good pitchers on bad teams.
Advocates of advanced baseball metrics often dismiss a pitcher’s wins as a “team statistic.” Well, baseball is a team sport. Of course, a pitcher’s wins will depend in part on his teammates. But do many people dismiss Magic Johnson’s assist number because he was feeding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rather than, say, Chris Dudley? It can be useful to compare a pitcher’s record to his team’s overall record to identify underperformers or overperformers. In this case, Wise had a better record with a worse team than either Phil Niekro in 1978 or Nolan Ryanin 1987. Some “overperformers” may have merely played on bad teams that hit well. But Wise also received less run support than anyone on this list except the luckless Dave Roberts with the Padres.
The 1971 Phillies were a poor hitting team, finishing second-to-last in the league in terms of runs scored. They hit even worse when Wise was on the mound. Curiously, Wise was a good hitting pitcher. There is a distinction between a “good hitting pitcher” and a good hitter. Pitchers are usually the weakest hitter in the lineup. The Mendoza Line set a batting average of .200 as an informal benchmark for terrible hitting among position players. But .200 marks a pretty good batting average for a pitcher. Wise hit .237 in 1971 with six home runs. His slugging average of .464 was fourth best on the team.
Carlton and Ned Garver received noticeably more run support in their starts compared to their teams’ other starters. The St. Louis Browns averaged 1.25 more runs scored when Garver started. Garver’s bat probably helped. He hit .305 that year while the Browns’ position players averaged only .249. The Phillies averaged 0.83 more runs when Carlton pitched. Carlton batted close to the Mendoza Line that year at .198, which probably helped a bit. For whatever reason, the 1951 Browns and 1972 Phillies were better teams when Garver and Carlton pitched.
Wise’s Big Day
On June 23, 1971, Wise pitched a no-hit, no-run complete game against the Cincinnati Reds. He allowed only one walk. But that’s not all. He helped his own cause by hitting two home runs. No-hitters are a big deal and usually happen only a couple of times a year across Major League Baseball. Steve Carlton never pitched a no hitter during his great career. Only three other pitchers have hit home runs during their no hitters (Wes Ferrell, Jim Tobin, and Earl Wilson). Wise is the only pitcher to hit two. Wise hit two homers again (including a grand slam) on August 18, 1972, enroute to a 5-3 complete game victory.
On October 17, 2025, Shohei Ohtani hit three home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers while also pitching six scoreless innings. Ohtani’s performance that day was widely proclaimed as the greatest single game performance in baseball history. Ohtani’s performance was indeed amazing, but a case can be made that Wise’s was even more remarkable.
Deciding which game was more remarkable depends on some combination of empirical data, probability theory, and value judgments. After all, we are comparing two events that had never happened before or since. One way to look at it is to compare the relative likelihood of each hitting and pitching event. There have been about 70 times where a pitcher hit at least two homers in a game. Jim Tobin (again!) once hit three. (Tobin also won that game but didn’t pitch especially well. Depending on whether you count Ohtani himself, Wise’s two homers were 35 to 70 times more likely than Ohtani’s three.
Now let’s compare the pitching performances. We can approach this in terms of probability theory or based on empirical data. The probability approach considers a no hitter as a series of binary events: a hit or an out. While a pitcher will on average get an out 75% of the time, doing that 27 straight times is quite rare. In Wise’s case, pitching a no hitter against the Reds with a .241 team batting average had a probability of 0.058%. For Ohtani, allowing two hits over six innings against the Brewers (team batting average of .258) had a probability of 7.777%. By this method, Ohtani’s six inning two-hitter was 138 times more likely than Wise’s complete game no-hitter.
We can also take a more empirical approach to comparing the two. While it’s easy to find a list of no-hitters, the prevalence of two-hit six inning shutouts is much less readily available. We can more easily compare no-hitter totals to shutouts. (Ohtani didn’t technically pitch a shutout since Dodger relievers allowed a run later in the game, but that wasn’t his fault.) Between 1969 and 2025, there have been 160 no-hitters, including 20 combined no-hitters. There have been 15,221 shutouts (including combined shutouts) over the same period. That would make Ohtani’s shutout 90 times more likely that Wise’s no-hitter. Taken together, Wise’s combination of pitching and hitting comes out as even more exceptional than Ohtani’s.
Ohtani also recorded ten strikeouts, giving his performance a bit more pizazz. Wise struck out only three. Probably the best argument for Ohtani was the setting. Ohtani’s performance came in a playoff game that clinched the pennant for the Dodgers. Wise’s came in June in a game involving two non-contenders. The Reds were defending NL champs and had some great players like Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Johnny Bench. But they were having an off year and were also no-hit earlier that month. Whether Wise gave a better performance than Ohtani is up for debate. Regardless, it was a magical, memorable performance.
Leave a Reply