He’s the Most Unloved Carter Since Jimmy

Gary Carter is the type of guy who, if he saved a mother’s child from drowning, she would look at him and say, “He had a hat.” And demand to know why he didn’t get it, too.

If he bought a truckload of steak dinners for a starving village in India, they’d say “Dammit, we wanted rare!”

If he saved a damsel from a runaway horse, the horse owner would sue because the horse was going to win the Kentucky Derby if Gary minded his own business.

Carter is the original what-have-you-done-for-me-lately and why-isn’t-it-more-guy. He makes Rodney Dangerfield look like an international idol.

He’s nice to the press, they call him “hot dog.” He’s reserved, they call him uncooperative. He’s reasonably available, they call him phony.

He’s got the most thankless task on the club. Only about 1 player in 200 even would consent to be a catcher. Only about 1 in 10,000 would want to. It’s the coal mine division of baseball. You stoop for a living like a charlady. Your knees hurt, your back aches, you get projectiles hurled at you at velocities of 100 m.p.h. all summer. You get foul balls on the fingernails, Adam’s apple and you come out of some games like the loser in a heavyweight fight.

If you’re Gary Carter, they expect you to hit, too. A lot of catchers, they just ask them not to hurt themselves at the plate. Gary Carter, they want to hit a home run. When he doesn’t, they talk behind his back.

Some catchers get to catch veteran pitchers, wily old galoots such as Grover Cleveland Alexander or Phil Niekro who don’t need anybody to tell them how to pitch or where or with what to whom. They’re the whole encyclopedia of pitching all by themselves.

Gary Carter gets a bunch of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young college boys--one of them even from Yale--and they tend to be over excited and confused out there by turn. It’s up to Gary to soothe them, to settle them down, tell them what to do, how to do it.

He pulled a pretty ragtag Montreal Expo franchise into respectability by force. But when he left, a star player, a colleague, said he was glad Carter had gone, that his seeking the limelight had caused friction.

He donated his time unselfishly to charity (his mother died of leukemia) and the sneerers said: “I wonder what he means by that?”

The Mets won 108 games this year and the pennant by 21 1/2 games but, when Carter--along with the rest of the club--seemed about to go 0 for 50 against an awesome Houston pitching staff in the playoffs, it was Carter they said let the town down. “Call yourself a leader?” bellowed the bleachers. “Carter, you’re nothin’. “ Jimmy Carter got more respect than Gary.

He got millions to play ball, but so did a lot of guys who never had to put 30 pounds of equipment on in a hot summer’s day and block bouncing curveballs with parts of the anatomy that can break--and sometimes do. Carter, it sometimes seemed, was the sole cause of inflation in this country and maybe the spread of the common cold.

The New York Mets were in the midst of a pratfall of cosmic (or even comic) proportions in this fall tournament as the revels adjourned to the seat of all culture, the fountainhead of American democracy. Boston, by God, Mass. The papers were waiting for them. “Mets--Or Myths?” jeered the tabloids. “Sweep Dreams!” crowed another headline. “Word ‘Sweep’ Begins To Creep In The Vocabulary.” They suggested the oddsmakers must have swallowed New York hype to have made this bunch of misfits 13-5 favorites.

The Mets didn’t show up at Fenway Park for a workout Monday and the wise guys thought they detected an incipient goiter. Asking a visiting team to take its first look at Fenway’s infamous Wall one second before it has to is compounding cruel and unusual punishment--like making Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette take a tour of the guillotine the night before the execution or asking the captain of the Titanic if he wanted a picture of the iceberg the instant before it hit.

The Mets started a left-handed pitcher in this Hall of Horrors Tuesday night. Now, starting a left-handed pitcher in Fenway is like ordering hash in a Tijuana rooming house or taking a shower in a Marseilles bathhouse.

This Series was already looming as one-sided as a cholera epidemic, and Gary Carter was expected to steer this left-hander, Bob Ojeda, through this haunted house with junk fastballs and an assortment of sleight-of-hand pitches that would react like cotton balls when met with bats.

This is a little like finding your way through Indian country with a knife and fork or getting through Central Park at night with a gold watch on.

The Mets came out smoking. In the first inning, the little center fielder deposited a home run in the right-field seats, and the next two batters singled. Gary Carter came up and, with an 0-and-1 count, smoked a double to the wall to score Run No. 2, the run which ultimately proved to be the winning one.

In the seventh inning, the Mets’ 4-1 lead seemed scarcely altogether safe when again two batters singled to open the inning and, with two out, the first baseman walked. Gary Carter came up with the bases loaded and the count quickly went to 0 and 2.

Carter expected the pitcher to waste one in that situation. “I had talked to Tom Paciorek and he told me that (Boston pitcher) Oil Can (Boyd) sometimes tried to sneak in a fastball in that situation, that he got impatient. You are in a little bit of a defensive posture in that situation, but when I saw it was a fastball, I went for it.”

Carter hit it to left-center field for a clean base hit and the game was iced.

No one expects Carter to get a ticker-tape parade. They may wonder why he didn’t hit a home run--and turn off the showers and lock up after the team.

He has helped pick up the Mets off the floor, dust them off, go find their hat and give them back some pride in themselves.

For Gary Carter, that’s all in a day’s work. “That’s what they pay him for,” the fans grumble. “I suppose you notice he made outs the other times?”

For Gary Carter, if he changed water into wine, they’d say it was the wrong year. Or say “Dammit, I said ‘red.’ ”