Carter’s death a loss for baseball and for card collectors

Posted Feb 16, 2012 by Bob D'Angelo

Updated Feb 16, 2012 at 10:37 PM

The death of Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter on Thursday at age 57 due to brain cancer truly leaves a void among baseball fans — and card collectors, too.

I honestly can’t tell you if Carter’s love of collecting cards extended deep into his adult life, but the man I interviewed in March 1981 during spring training boasted a pretty awesome collection. Even by today’s standards, it would stack up pretty well.

I caught up with “The Kid” in West Palm Beach, where the Montreal Expos shared a spring training facility with the Atlanta Braves. I was a young sportswriter at The Stuart News on Florida’s east coast, a small paper located about 45 minutes north of Palm Beach County.

It was mid-morning on a lazy Sunday, and Carter was sitting in the third-base dugout with a reporter from Japan, who asked him to assess every pitching staff in the National League. I was waiting for an incredulous look, a rolling of the eyes or a refusal, but instead Carter happily went down the list of every NL pitching staff, not missing a beat. I thought to myself in an amused sort of way that the Expos were going to finish dead last, since Carter talked up every opposing rotation in glowing terms. And then he talked about the Expos, too, which then made me think the NL races were all going to end in a tie.

But my reason for talking with Carter that day had little to do with his credentials, which were becoming more pronounced by 1981 and would culminate in Hall of Fame numbers. Sure, Carter played for 19 years with the Expos, Mets, Giants and Dodgers. He was an 11-time All-Star and was that game’s MVP in 1981, hitting a pair of solo homers as baseball had ended its strike and was preparing for the second half of the season. Carter hit 324 homers and drove in 1,225 runs and won three Gold Gloves. Those numbers got him into Cooperstown in 2003.

I was interested in his baseball card collection.

When I asked Carter about it, his eyes lit up. He proudly told me he had complete sets of Topps cards from 1972 to 1980 and also from 1959 (the first set he ever completed) and that he owned between 15,000 and 20,000 cards. He told me his goal was to get complete sets from 1957 to the present. He chose 1957 because that was the first year Topps went to its current size of cards (cards from 1952 to 1956 were larger and in many cases, a lot clunkier).

“If I could reach that then I’d be satisfied,” he said.

I asked him that since he was a big collector, what his reaction was when he saw his first baseball card, a 1975 Topps rookie card he shared with catcher Marc Hill of the Giants, and Detroit Tigers outfielders Danny Meyer and Leon Roberts.

“I was elated,” he said, a big grin spreading across his face. “That was like a dream come true to see myself.

“That was one thing I wanted when I was collecting as a kid. I said ‘hey, it would be great to get myself on one of those cards one day — and that’s what happened.”

Carter wasn’t into collecting cards for the money, and remember, this was before the memorabilia boom, so prices were still fairly reasonable. He called his collection a scrapbook, to view men who were teammates and men he played against.

“I’ve got a Hank Aaron card that’s worth about $700 if you’re going by the price list,” Carter said, probably referring to Aaron’s 1954 Topps rookie card. “I don’t look at it that way. I don’t put a price on any of my cards, I don’t care who it is.”

Here are some card stats about Carter, courtesy of Chris Olds, the editor of Beckett Baseball magazine. Olds writes that Carter appears on 2,746 different cards. He signed 858 different certified cards and had 1,126 memorabilia cards. Carter’s most recent autograph cards were showcased in the 2011 Topps Tribute set; he had 10 different signed cards.

.You could tell Carter not only loved his cards, but also the game of baseball. During his career, particularly with the World Series champion Mets of 1986, Carter was mocked by his teammates as a goody-goody and a phony.  In addition to his “Kid” nickname, his teammates called him “Camera” because he was friendly with reporters and they believed he was self-promoting himself.

But as any Mets fans will tell you, it was Carter who started the legendary rally in the bottom of the 10th inning in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Carter singled with two outs and nobody on base and the Mets trailing 5-3, and got the ball rolling for one of the most improbable rallies in World Series history.

Earlier tonight, USA Today writer Mike Dodd quoted a comment made by former Mets infielder Wally Backman about Carter to Bergen Record columnist Bob Klapisch.

“We used to make fun of him, the way he’d sign every damn autograph. We had to hold the bus for him sometimes, because he didn’t know how to say no. He didn’t want to say no,” Backman told Klapisch. “But you know what? He was right. He really loved the game.”

I took a photo of Carter in the batting cage before I interviewed him that morning, and I snapped a picture tonight from an old scrapbook I have, which shows that particular photo and the headline written for the story. It’s here within this post, in all of its grainy black-and-white glory. Lousy photo then, lousy photo now. Photography was not my forte, but at a small newspaper you were expected to wear many hats.

I asked Carter some baseball questions too, and when we were done we shook hands. I turned to leave, already mentally writing my story, when the next interviewer stepped up. I almost fell over; it was Hall of Fame outfielder Duke Snider.

As I wrote at the time, “it’s one thing to dream of being a Hall of Famer; it’s quite another to be interviewed by one.”