Carter as a Dodger: Does Life Get Better? : Baseball: He retains kid’s enthusiasm, showing he is no old man just holding on.

“It’s a Great Life,” as written by Gary Carter, Part I:

The Dodgers have just won another game. Carter, the backup catcher, has started and played nine innings, more than enough to dirty his uniform and put enthusiasm in his voice.

“Quick, somebody ask me, ‘Now that we’ve won the game, where am I going to go?’ ” Carter shouts across the clubhouse.

“OK,” somebody grudgingly asks, “where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to Disneyland!” Carter shouts.

“Oh yeah, like the commercial,” somebody says.

“No commercial,” Carter says. “Tomorrow, I’m really going to Disneyland with my brother and his children. Boy, I can’t wait!”

Now that he has established himself as more than just a 37-year-old catcher trying to hang on for a few more paydays, now that his solid play has influenced the Dodgers to demote Barry Lyons and give Mike Scioscia more rest, Gary Carter’s teammates had better get used to it.

Mr. Nice Guy isn’t going anywhere.

Living amid the many hard-edged Dodger veterans will be a man who actually wanders to the box seats during batting practice to chat with Little Leaguers.

This is a man who likes to have somebody with him when he signs autographs so the person can pull him away, because he can never do it himself.

This is a man who not only sprints on and off the field, but does it with a smile, displaying teeth that can been seen in the upper deck.

This is a man who talks as if he is in junior high school. In situations where most players curse, he substitutes doggone and heck.

This is a man who still refers to himself by his old nickname of “Kid.” He writes it in his cap and on the back of his underwear.

And this is one of the most universally loved men in the game--by the fans.

Other Dodgers may be booed at their former home ballparks but Carter, who has played in three other towns, is cheered everywhere . Even in spring training. Even in places he never has called home.

“And what is wrong with any of that?” Carter asked during a weekend series against the Cincinnati Reds in which he played three of the four games--catching one and playing first base in the other two--and going two for 10 with a double but throwing out two baserunners Friday.

“What is wrong with wanting to put a smile on somebody’s face? What is wrong with trying to make people happy. What is wrong with loving life?

“Tell me, what?”

His hundreds of teammates through 17 big league seasons never have found anything wrong with it. They just have never trusted it.

Carter, who grew up in Fullerton as the local sports star who married the homecoming queen, has come home with a paradoxical reputation. He acts so good that many players think he is bad.

“You hear it all the time . . . Gary is a camera chaser, a brown-noser,” said teammate and friend Brett Butler. “People say that in a playoff game he always knows where the camera is, and he always turns and smiles at it.

“Basically, because he is always in the spotlight, people are jealous of him.”

It didn’t help his reputation with Dodger teammates this spring when Manager Tom Lasorda introduced him in the clubhouse as “a future Hall of Famer.”

As one of the game’s best catchers, Carter probably will make it to Cooperstown. He is only 21 hits shy of 2,000, a landmark he should reach this season.

But baseball players, particularly veterans with cluttered resumes like those who play for the Dodgers, don’t like to hear about achievements.

They want to see them.

In a major accomplishment for a player many considered washed up, Carter has shown them.

In Carter’s nine starts, eight as catcher and one at first base, the Dodgers are 6-3.

As a catcher, thanks to technique work with coaches Mark Cresse and Joe Ferguson and exercises with therapist Pat Screnar, he has thrown out eight of 15 runners trying to steal second, an excellent 53%.

Last season with the San Francisco Giants, when many believed his knees weren’t strong enough to keep him from retirement, Carter threw out only 20%.

He has only two hits in 14 pinch at-bats and overall is hitting only .192. But he has two homers and seven runs batted in, and Lasorda says those numbers suit him just fine.

“We got the guy because he is a winner, and that’s what has been happening,” Lasorda said. “I heard what everybody said about his age when we invited him to camp (as a nonroster player), but I’ll say now what I said then. The guy knows how to win.”

The rest of the Dodgers, skeptical at first, are finally agreeing.

“You got to give the guy credit,” said one player. “No matter what anybody thought about him when he got here, he has done the job.”

“It’s a Great Life,” as written by Gary Carter, Part II:

It is spring training, and Carter is relaxing after a long day of crouching by signing hundreds of autographs. Free of charge. Personal attention included.

Up steps a young man wearing an earring. Carter signs his slip of paper, then asks: “Why are you wearing that earring, son?”

“I dunno,” the boy says.

“You’re just trying to be part of the crowd, aren’t you, son?” Carter says. “Why don’t you show how bold you really are and not wear the earring. Why don’t you take it off and start your own trend?

“Don’t be a follower son, be a leader! You can do it!”

It turns out, all this niceness stems from feeling cheated.

If any of his former teammates really wanted to know why Gary Carter behaves like Mister Rogers, all they needed to do was ask, and he would tell them about losing the person most important to him at 12.

And then, maybe, they would have understood.

Carter vividly remembers that mid-May afternoon in 1966 when his mother, Inge Carter, left their Fullerton home for the hospital.

“She had been in the hospital recently, and she hadn’t been feeling good, but as a kid, I didn’t think anything of it,” Carter recalled. “I remember kissing her goodby and saying, ‘I love you, Mom. See you soon!’ ”

Because he was not allowed to visit the hospital, Carter called his mother every night for the next week. She sounded fine, so he was stunned when his father phoned him from the hospital a week after she had been admitted, just before Saturday morning youth league practice.

“My dad, who was the coach of the team, told me that my mom had a 50-50 chance to live, and that I should tell everyone practice was canceled,” Carter said. “That still didn’t mean anything to me. What was 50-50? I canceled practice, but then my buddies and I went to a different field and held our own practice for the rest of the afternoon.”

About 5 p.m., the game was interrupted by several neighbor children racing their bikes onto the field.

“The kids said, ‘Hey, your Mom died,’ ” Carter said. “Didn’t say they were sorry or anything. Just said, ‘Hey, your Mom died.’ ”

Carter raced home on his bike and found his older brother, Gordon, crying in the back yard. When he realized what had happened, he ran inside and flung himself on his bed, crying.

“I don’t remember anything else from that day,” Carter said.

Inge Carter had died of leukemia. She was 37.

Twenty-five years later, Carter cannot get it out of his mind that he never knew how sick she was and that he never had a chance to say goodby.

“There have been many days since then when I have asked my father, ‘Dad, why didn’t you tell me she was sick? Dad, I really feel cheated!’ ” Carter said. “It was just my father’s way to keep it inside, so he could avoid hurting us.

“But today it hurts, it always hurts, that I was not able to thank my mother for what she did for me.”

So Carter has made the rest of his life an attempt to show those thanks.

“In her memory, I’m going to be the best person I can be,” Carter said. “I’m going to act as she would want me to act. I’m not going to cheat her or myself. She is like this bird on my shoulder.

“When it comes to the final judgment day, I want to see her again. I want to be reunited with her in heaven.”

In his mother’s memory, Carter has been the national sports chairman for the Leukemia Society of America since 1985. He conducts a golf tournament for the charity and spends much of the winter attending fund-raisers.

He also remembers his mom in simpler ways.

After signing with the Dodgers at the end of spring training, Carter rented a home in Fullerton across the street from the cemetery where Inge Carter is buried.

“I went over there on Mother’s Day with a big basket of flowers,” he said. “It’s kind of nice, living so close.”

“It’s a Great Life,” as written by Gary Carter, Part III:

It is 11 Sunday morning. Batting practice for the Dodger reserves is optional, yet there are three players taking swings.

Two are youngsters. The third is Carter, which you could tell even with your eyes closed, because the Dodger Stadium quiet is pierced by his scream.

“Hey Doggy! Hey Doggy!” he shouts to Tony Perez, the Cincinnati Reds’ coach who is stifling a yawn in the visitors’ dugout.

“Why are doing out here?” Perez says sleepily.

“This is the only way I get to have any fun right now!” Carter shouts. “Isn’t this great?”

So is this guy real, or what?

“People tend to think of him in a different way. . . . They tend to be suspicious of him. . . . Some think he is not so sincere,” said his brother Gordon, a local restaurateur. “But really, he’s very, very genuine. He has always been like this, even as a kid. Always wanting to fit in, always wanting people to like him.

“He knows he’s not going to change how some people think of him. But he’s never changed.”

Gordon was pressed for a memory of Carter being angry. Doesn’t everybody get angry?

“Once, during the 1986 World Series when he played for the (New York) Mets, Gary came home after a loss and was real quiet,” Gordon said. “We’re all sitting around the family room, discussing the game, and then he just disappeared.

“I went looking for him and found him in the kitchen, rearranging the pantry, putting the pork and beans in one row and the cream of mushroom soup in another row and so on. Believe it or not, that’s how he was showing his anger.”

What he doesn’t like to talk about are all those darn nice things he does. Things involving school buses, for instance.

“How did you find out about that?” he asked. “I really don’t tell anybody about it.”

When the Lake Park Baptist School attended by his children in West Palm Beach, Fla., could not offer bus services within a block of everyone in his neighborhood, he felt he had no choice.

Carter bought the bus.

Now the local children do not need to be chaperoned to distant street corners, and they arrive home from school an hour earlier.

“Of course, that can be a problem,” he said. “One of my little girls (Kimmy) now says, ‘I can act any way I want on the bus, because my Daddy owns it.’ ”

Pause. “But I only think that happened once. And I think she was just kidding.”