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Klap incapable of writing a simple "good guy, I hope he's OK" column about a Met in potential life-threatening danger.
In a clubhouse with few rules (and no one to enforce them, anyway) there always was one caveat when you approached Gary Carter’s locker: Prepare for a filibuster. One question could net you the Gettysburg Address, but that’s not what made “The Kid” unique among the ’86 Mets.
It was his cheerful nature – an optimism that was out of place amid his teammates’ savage in-fighting. Carter was the Mets’ co-captain, yet he never was part of the team’s inner circle. He was too nice for that, which is why news that he’d been diagnosed with four brain tumors was so devastating. Good guys like Carter deserve better. |
Mets were out of hand. Carter talked too much. Mets were unpleasant to be around. Mets didn't even like each other. They certainly couldn't fully accept a nice man. He didn't deserve this...but maybe somebody else did?
This is one of those darker signposts that we pass during the course of our lives, the ones that manage to age us. Somehow, “The Kid” already is 57; where did the years go? Has it really been a quarter-century since Jesse Orosco was leaping into Carter’s arms after striking out Marty Barrett to end Game 7 of the World Series?
The image is as permanent as a tattoo, even if time has extracted its revenge on a number of ’80s-era Mets. Lenny Dykstra was arrested last month on bankruptcy fraud charges and faces up to five years in federal prison. Dwight Gooden, an Old Tappan resident, continues to battle addiction and recently was sentenced to five years’ probation for driving under the influence of cocaine and sleeping pills while taking his 5-year-old son to school. |
Carter is ill -- and several other Mets have broken the law lately...take that, Mets, for stealing the 1986 World Series from my precious Yankees who deserve to win every year.
| It took years for the Mets to make peace with Carter’s flaws – he talked too much, and he wasn’t afraid to promote himself, especially when his name was on the Hall of Fame ballot. And he made present-day enemies, Keith Hernandez among them, when he openly campaigned for Willie Randolph’s job in 2008. |
Great guy, but boy has he not been perfect, and this seems like a good time to bring up why he's far from perfect.
But Carter had an instinct about selling the Mets – and the sport – that was ahead of his time. In the ’80s, ballplayers were too cool and often too disoriented to interact with fans. The Mets were outdrawing the Yankees every year between 1984-92; the players were all on a first-name basis with the city.
Kid, Nails, Mex, Straw, Doc – it didn’t matter whether they signed autographs or not, because the Mets ruled the world – including the bars and clubs – on the other side of midnight.
Carter didn’t live that way. Like Mookie Wilson, he was happily married, faithful to his wife, Sandy, didn’t drink, didn’t touch drugs. That made Carter an outcast in the clubhouse. Carter knew he often was mocked by Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry, among others. But The Kid never returned fire, either on or off the record, instead concentrating on playing hard and interacting with the media. |
I seriously don't get any of the above three paragraphs in relation to what this is supposed to be about. He was the ONLY baseball player who signed autographs back then? The Mets drew fans because they were a bunch of drunks? Did he "concentrate" on interacting with the media, or was he someone who understood it was part of his job to answer questions, lengthily or otherwise? (And how come Ray Knight, acknowledged leader in that clubhouse, always gets left out of these formulations -- he was, by all indications, happily married and not a hellraiser off the field.)
| Carter’s postgame smile was that of a prophet’s: He sensed the coming of the golden era, which the Mets never have duplicated. Carter taught New York that nothing was beyond the imagination – a lesson that, sadly, is being relearned today. |
His smile was that of a prophet's? WTF? He was the only one who recognized that coming to a 90-win team filled with outstanding young pitching and several solid and better hitters was going to create a golden era (filled with savage infighting wherein nobody but him signed an autograph and everybody stayed out too late and got what they ultimately deserved, except Carter didn't)? And if "nothing was beyond the imagination," how is that a lesson to relearn sadly?
This, I suppose, is what Klapisch has to sell where the Mets are concerned. "The '80s Mets," as he likes to refer to them, were the team that put him on the map but apparently weren't nice to him, so he goes to the well over and over again...which is neither here nor there most days (when he's too busy praising the MFYs to notice the Mets), but how is it he can't focus 800 words on a Hall of Fame catcher diagnosed with four tumors on his brain without dredging everything about everybody else up?
"Hack Curry" was a play on words. "Hack Klapisch" is an accurate critical synopsis.
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