Carter’s Capper

The catcher known as the Kid was seldom without a smile, a few dozen words and an optimistic attitude, all of which is magnified now as he prepares to be inducted into the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., on Sunday.

Sitting in the office where the Gary Carter Foundation provides books, computers and hope to schools in underprivileged areas of South Florida, the 49-year-old Carter is as much the Kid as he was growing up in Fullerton, playing baseball and football at Sunny Hills High, and ultimately opting to sign with the Montreal Expos (he had long hoped to be drafted by the Dodgers) rather than become the quarterback in Pepper Rodgers’ UCLA wishbone.

If there was disappointment that he wasn’t elected to the Hall until his sixth year on the ballot and that his plaque depicted him in an Expo cap rather than that of the New York Mets, nothing will now dim the effervescence that also marked a 19-year big league career in which he would find his own spotlight amid the long shadows of catchers Johnny Bench and Carlton Fisk.

“Winning a World Series championship with the Mets in 1986 was the highlight of my career, but this is the culmination,” he said of his imminent induction. “It would have been an honor to be elected on the first ballot, of course, but I’m not thinking of those five years now.

“I read somewhere that Eddie Murray and I are only the 97th and 98th players to be voted in, and so to be in the top 100 is an honor in itself.”

All of which is not to say that there isn’t a measure of regret and sadness.

Carter would have loved to have his dad with him Sunday, but Jim Carter died of failing health at 84 in January, only 17 days after his son called to tell him he had been elected to the Hall.

“I know how much it meant to him, how much he would have loved to be there,” Carter said, “but I know he’ll have the best seat in the house anyway. Dad will be on my left shoulder, Mom on my right. They’ll be right there with me, but I’m not going to talk about them until the end of my speech or I’ll never get through it.”

Even now, sitting in a conference room illuminated by the rays of a warm sun, Carter was having trouble getting through it. There were tears in his eyes, emotion in his voice, as he recalled how his mom died of leukemia when he was 12 and his dad was all things -- mom, dad, coach -- and always there, always upbeat, always reminding sons Gary and Gordon of the value of wearing a smile, treating people properly.

“I wanted to live his legacy, make my life a reflection of his,” Carter said.

The process, at times, produced derision among teammates, a similar reaction to what Steve Garvey experienced in the Dodger clubhouse.

The Kid couldn’t always be that nice, that sincere.

Wasn’t he a little too good to be true?

“It was just something I had to live with,” Carter said. “I loved baseball and what I was doing and I felt that a large part of it was being accommodating to the fans and media. I mean, the game wouldn’t be the same without them, and I always tried to be there for the media whether I had a good game or bad game.

“I wasn’t kissing up and wasn’t trying to steal headlines, as some teammates occasionally suggested. I simply thought it was part of my responsibility. The other players had the same opportunity and responsibility but didn’t always act on it. In my case, I was just trying to be the way my father was.”

In the Carter family, older brother Gordon, who now lives in Santa Ana, set a competitive tone, playing on two NCAA champions as a center fielder at USC and briefly in the San Francisco Giants’ farm system before opting for a career operating restaurants.

“Everything he did I wanted to do better,” said Gary, who was four years younger and a third baseman, shortstop and pitcher at Sunny Hills, as well as an All-American quarterback who would marry the homecoming queen, a reality pairing that has lasted 28 years and produced three children: teachers Christy, 25, and Kimmy, 22, (she set several softball records at Florida State) and Douglas James, 18, a theater arts major at Sanford University in Birmingham, Ala.

Whether the future Sandy Carter realized at the time how deeply her high school beau hoped to play for the Dodgers is uncertain, but a reflective Carter listed almost the entire Dodger roster of those years and said that when his dad came home with tickets for Dodger Stadium, “I was as excited as if I was going to Disneyland.”

Among Carter’s high school classmates was Laura Lasorda, whose father, Tom, was then managing the Dodgers’ triple-A farm club and clearly too busy to pick up on his daughter’s recommendation that he scout the hot young athlete at Sunny Hills, a development, Carter said with a laugh, he didn’t let his manager forget when he finally joined Lasorda and the Dodgers as backup catcher to Mike Scioscia in 1991, Carter’s next-to-last season.

“I guess Tommy didn’t think that much of his own daughter’s scouting eye,” Carter said.

Instead, Montreal scout Bob Zuk doggedly pursued Carter, cleverly put out the word that Carter probably would play football at UCLA, and nervously watched Carter survive the first two rounds of the 1972 June draft (the Dodgers selected the long-forgotten John Harbin and Cleo Smith) before being picked by the Expos in the third round, the 53rd overall selection.

It was Zuk who envisioned Carter as a catcher, and it was with the Expos, only in their third year, that Carter, having received a $35,000 signing bonus, found a talent-hungry organization in which he could rapidly advance and that would provide the opportunity and training at a new position.

In his induction speech, Carter said, he will pay homage to three instructors pivotal in his development: minor league manager Karl Kuehl for the confidence he showed in Carter’s first two seasons, minor league catching coach Bill McKenzie, and major league coach Norm Sherry, who refined McKenzie’s basics.

“Never in a million years would I have dreamed that I’d be drafted by a team that played 3,000 miles away in a foreign country,” Carter said, “but it was the best thing for my career in that it gave me a chance to move quickly through a new organization. There’s no way to know how it would have played out with the Dodgers.”

In the first game Carter played with the Expos in Dodger Stadium, he struck out four times against Andy Messersmith, a first and last in a career in which he acquired the reputation of a Dodger killer and more.

Carter would endure nine knee operations, average an improbable 148 games during an eight-year span early in his career, and set the National League record for catchers at 2,056 games, a figure surpassed only by Fisk’s 2,226 and a plateau he doubts any catcher will “play long enough or be crazy enough” to attain, particularly “the way they’re protected” now from overuse.

He would appear in 11 All-Star games, twice winning the MVP award, set several NL and major league defensive records while winning three Gold Gloves, and become one of only four Hall of Fame catchers (Bench, Fisk and Yogi Berra being the others) to collect 2,000 hits, drive in 1,200 runs, slug 300 homers and score 1,000 runs.

Although a Sports Illustrated cover in 1983 proclaimed him to be the “best in the business,” Carter believes he didn’t create “a stir or receive the national recognition” that he did during his five years with the Mets, starting in 1985.

His induction speech, he said, would make special note of Bench for “befriending me” at the 1975 All-Star game, where Bench gave him a picture that was inscribed, “In a few years it’s all yours.”

“I think what he was saying is that he saw a little bit of him in me,” Carter said, “and since he was the icon of catchers, I just wanted to follow in his footsteps.

“When he wrote that, I felt I was carrying the torch in the National League, and I ultimately felt that if he was the catcher of the ‘70s, I was recognized as the catcher of the ‘80s in that league.

“I also think that what Johnny saw in me was the hustle of Pete Rose and similar desire and love of the game that he had, and that with that combination, he was saying this kid might be as good if not better than me and might make it to the Hall of Fame.”

That might have been a lot to read into a short inscription, but in certain measures it worked out as Carter interpreted it.

He is headed to the Hall of Fame, where Cooperstown officials insisted he be recognized as an Expo, having played twice as long in Montreal and compiled twice as many statistics as he did in New York.

No problem, Carter said.

“All I was saying initially is that my heart was torn between two cities,” he said. “I had five great years with the Mets, won a World Series with them, have spent the last three years with them as a roving instructor and felt that more people recognize me now as a Met because of the World Series. I also spent 16 1/2 great years as a player and broadcaster with the Expos, but I was concerned that with the Montreal situation now in disarray, with a chance that the Expos might not even exist in another year, my association with them, all of that history, would have been lost.

“I’m fine the way it was worked out, but I realize unfortunately there was some disillusionment in Canada among fans who thought it should have been a no-brainer and that I should have decided from the start to go in as an Expo. I was hurt by that reaction because I consider the Expos to be family.”

As it is, Carter probably will be the first and last Expo in the Hall, and the wounds in Canada have appeared to heal. At least two busloads of fans will motor from Montreal to Cooperstown. Former teammates Andre Dawson, Tim Raines and Steve Rogers are expected to attend the induction, along with former Montreal executive John McHale and current officials Tony Tavares and Omar Minaya, among others.

In addition, Carter will be honored at Olympic Stadium on Aug. 2 with distribution of 5,000 commemorative coins and 20,000 color pictures.

At the recent All-Star game, where he served as the NL’s honorary captain, he wore an Expo uniform and showed his familiar enthusiasm and verbosity, as if it were 1992 again and he was back in Montreal for his final season, delivering a game-winning double in the last of his 7,971 at-bats. That provided what he called a storybook conclusion to a career in which his two-out single in the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series will always be remembered, he said, as his biggest hit, because it ignited the three-run, game-winning rally (capped by Bill Buckner’s error) that carried the Mets into Game 7 and the ultimate victory.

Five years later, in a part-time role with his once-beloved Dodgers and a teammate of fellow inductee Murray (“the consummate professional,” he will say of him in his speech), Carter had a twilight shot at a second World Series only to have the Dodgers lose to San Francisco on the final day of the season and finish one game behind the Atlanta Braves.

Released at the end of that 1991 season, he returned to Montreal for a last hurrah in the city where he had learned to speak French through Berlitz, begun his Hall of Fame career at a position still new to him and first wore the cap in which the Kid will be bronzed forever.

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Gary Carter’s Career Statistics

Highlights

* Batted .429 in 1981 playoffs for the Expos, who lost to the Dodgers in NL championship series.

* Led the Mets to victory in the 1986 World Series against Boston. Batted .276, hit two home runs and drove in nine in a seven-game series.

* Selected to 11 All-Star games and was MVP in 1981 and 1984.

* Won Gold Gloves in 1980, 1981 and 1982 as a catcher.

* Finished in top six of NL MVP voting in 1980 (2nd), 1981 (6th), 1985 (6th) and 1986 (3rd).

* Had a NL-leading 106 RBIs for the Expos in 1984.

* One of six catchers with more than 300 home runs and 1,000 RBIs. Others are Johnny Bench (389-1,376), Carlton Fisk (376-1,330), Yogi Berra (358-1,430), Mike Piazza (354-1,088) and Lance Parrish (324-1,070).

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Eye Catching

Ranking Gary Carter among other elite catchers:

(* Hall of Famer):

*--* HOME RUNS RBIs Johnny Bench* 389 Berra 1,430 Carlton Fisk* 376 Bench 1,376 Yogi Berra* 358 Fisk 1,330 Mike Piazza 354 Carter 1,225 Gary Carter* 324 Dickey 1,209 Lance Parrish 324 Hartnett 1,179 Roy Campanella* 242 Piazza 1,088 Gabby Hartnett* 236 Parrish 1,070 Bill Dickey* 202 Campanella 856 Mickey Cochrane* 119 Cochrane 832

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