Too good to be true

The quaint notion that one ought not speak ill of the dead went out the window right about the time the world went wired.

Now it’s apparently fine to speak anything of them at all, even before they’re cold.

In that light, it has been fascinating to chart the reaction to the death of Gary Carter on Thursday at age 57.

His battle with brain cancer had been well documented, and a recent turn for the worse had been reported by his family. The sad news, then, was not unexpected, which gave everyone a little bit of time to think.

That’s not such a bad thing.

Around the time of his Hall of Fame induction in 2003, it wasn’t hard to pick up a sense that Carter was not the most popular player among his peers during his tenures with the Montreal Expos and New York Mets.

In both places, the fans loved him – they loved the smile, they loved the hustle, they loved the sense that a guy being paid to play a kid’s game actually got a kick out of it – and Carter equally loved the attention. The other players nicknamed him “Lights” in Montreal because when the cameras turned on, he was there.

That’s not an unfamiliar dynamic in professional sports, where some players inevitably come to understand the power of the media to enhance their individual brands. It is no accident that the same guys tend to pop up again and again after games in television and radio clips and newspapers quotes (a bit less so these days, now that teams strictly dictate access). They go out of their way to make themselves available, which to a skeptical teammate can certainly seem self-serving – because it is.

That was Carter in Montreal where he was adored; at his height a star equal in magnitude to any Canadien, and that was Carter on the big media stage in New York, where he was the most popular Met of them all.

Put it together with his squeaky clean, God-fearing, family-man persona, and to some of those in the clubhouse, it all came to seem a bit much.

Plus consider the context. Baseball in the 1980s was a bit different than baseball in the early 21st century. On both of those Expos and Mets teams, recreational cocaine use was common.

Many a Montreal player fully exploited the myriad of distractions found on Crescent Street environs and the New York team that famously won the 1986 World Series – as subsequent memoirs attest – could have played its home games at the stadium in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Carter in those days was not exactly one of the boys, which made it all the easier for some of them to cast him as a “phony.”

In death, though, and during the months preceding when that became inevitable, some perspective obviously crept in.

There is no denying Carter’s myriad of accomplishments as a ballplayer. Forget what you saw during that final season swansong with the Expos. The perpetual all star may well have been the best catcher of his generation – arguably the best since Johnny Bench. And of course it was his two-out single in the bottom of the 10th inning that started the famous winning rally in Game 6 of the ’86 World Series, culminating in the groundball that went between Bill Buckner’s legs.

As a man, as one after another of his former teammates said following the news that Carter had died, he really was that guy you saw on TV. He really was a great catcher. He really did find joy in playing the game.

He really was a square, a straight arrow, an out-front Christian. He really did love the spotlight, and taking the long view, there’s nothing much wrong with that.

That really was his smile, he really was “The Kid,” he was all that that image encompassed.

He is gone now, and even for those whose skin he sometimes got under, he really is appreciated, and missed.