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Carl Yastrzemski's batting average happens to be about .300 right now. While he was predisposed to quit the Boston Red Sox after this season, his 23rd, the thought of dawdling must be almost irresistible to a man nearly 44 who finds he can still hit. But Yastrzemski says, "I don't want to chance it any further." A particularly helpless May slump made him fret that he had stayed too long. His Hall of Fame folio (3,390 hits, 451 home runs) is complete. Yaz has been walked intentionally a record 187 times. As a leftfielder, he was as solid as the Fenway Wall. And still he worries about preserving memories, have played for one team, one area, and I hope I have represented it with class and am remembered as a winner," he says. It is just that he will miss playing baseball. "I love it, I absolutely love it. I love stepping into the batter's box." The day Yastrzemski steps out, museum curators will mark him for promptest delivery.
When today's senior pitchers began to muster 21 years ago, the 3,000-strikeout ledger consisted of Walter Johnson's name alone. Now he has the company of Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan, or Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, along with Gaylord Perry, Tom Seaver, Ferguson Jenkins, Don Sutton and Hall of Famer Bob Gibson. Whatever inference is drawn about the hitters, this list reads like a page from Burke's Peerage.
Lefty and Righty—Carlton, 38, and Ryan, 36—keep amending the record to and fro. Carlton nears the bench-mark 300 victories, but he avoids discussing his accomplishments, or anything else, and refuses delivery on Cy Young Awards. Four of them were starting to clutter Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium when Carlton's former catcher, Tim McCarver, almost his private backstop from St. Louis days, had them shipped to the Hall of Fame. Says McCarver: "The thing about Lefty is, he finds awards, compliments, even conversations, limiting. He's afraid of being satisfied." When Carlton goes to join his plaques, he'll have had exactly five years to think of something to say.
Ryan has taken 1,000 fewer innings gathering his strikeouts, but he also has won 80 fewer games, only 25 more than he has lost. New Yorkers in particular tend to denigrate Ryan's record, recalling the first four seasons with the Mets, his unfamiliarity with home plate. But no other major leaguer ever pitched five no-hitters. "I never anticipated a career as fulfilling as this," says Ryan. He is the opposite of his friend Don Sutton, who began counting toward 300 victories at No. 1 (35 shy of the mark after 18 seasons, Sutton expects he will need them all). Ryan says, "I never set any goals. I struggled to get four years in, then hoped for ten. It was frustrating, I wanted to quit lots of times. But I made it not only through all the criticism but past all the bitterness." Now Ryan describes the pleasure he derives from pitching as "pressure in perspective." And he says, "It's funny, but I'm glad it didn't come easy."