Signature Sundays - Steve Carlton with the Giants?

For this week's Signature Sundays post, I've got my latest pickup from 2005 Upper Deck Baseball Heroes to share with you...

A nice on-card autograph of HOFer Steve Carlton!  Like most baseball fans, I associate Carlton with the Phillies, but he bounced around on some very short stints with 4 different teams at the tail end of his career.  The Giants were the first of those teams, after Steve was released by the Phillies during the 1986 season.  He appeared in just 6 games total with San Francisco, so it's interesting to have a card that depicts his time there.  As the card indicates, he did record his 4,000th career strikeout (against Eric Davis) during his brief time with the team.

Carlton was a sure-fire, first-ballot HOFer, and one of the best strikeout pitchers ever to take the mound.  He's also one of the best left-handed pitchers in baseball history, period.  Steve still stands 4th all-time in career strikeouts behind only Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens.  He's 11th all-time in wins (2nd all-time for lefties), but if you eliminate guys with names like Pud Galvin and Kid Nichols who played in the 1800s then he ranks even higher than that.  Oh yeah, and 4 Cy Young Awards.

Steve represents my 6th emerald autograph from the 2005 Upper Deck Baseball Heroes set.  The cards are numbered to /99, and all autographs are on card.  The 100 card set features just 20 subjects with 5 cards each, and some of them (Musial, Berra, Sandberg, etc) command a pretty penny if and when you can even find them.  I'm grateful that I've been able to accumulate even a half dozen so far, and am certainly always on the lookout for others...