A Quick Note on the Passing of Gary Carter

Here's my one-and-a-half cents regarding Gary Carter, who died today.

Back in the early 1980s, my brother and I and another pair of brothers who lived a couple of doors down supplemented our baseball card collection with a baseball sticker collection. Baseball sticker books contained two pages for each team, and something like five spots per page where you were to pasted the stickers for the appropriate players. The best player on the team arrived in a thicker, foil sticker.

We spent what little money we had on these stickers — I cringe when I see that Pokemon cards cost like four bucks a pack today — and, unlike the baseball cards of the time, the stickers have absolutely no value as an investment.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GARY CARTER?
On each team's set of pages, there was a bit of information about the team, including the name and address of its home stadium.

During that sticker-collecting summer, I shared with my friends an idea: Let's write to our favorite ballplayers, using the addresses for the stadiums, and ask for their autographs.

So that's what we did one afternoon, huddled around our friends' picnic table, writing letters. "You can't just come out and say, 'I want an autograph.' That would be rude," I strategized. So we wrote our letters like this:

Dear [Baseball Player]:
You are my favorite baseball player. I think the way you play ball is really [awesome, or mint, or whatever slang we used to use back then]. I like watching you play for [your team]. Can I have an autographed picture of you?

It was the soft sales pitch that worked, I theorized.

Somehow we got our hands on some stamps -- we probably just took some without asking -- then mailed them out. And waited. And waited.

Eventually, we got some replies. Interestingly, we made sure that nobody wrote to the same person, as if we were trying to pull some kind of scam, so any replies came at different times. In most cases, if we did get a reply, it was just an autographed photo, not personalized or anything. But it didn't matter, because WE GOT MAIL. FROM A BASEBALL PLAYER.

The most memorable reply I'd received was from Gary Carter. He was still on the Expos (he wouldn't arrive in New York until 1985), and I didn't know anything about him except that he was a catcher and an all-star. But I wrote to him anyway.

Gary Carter sent me a photo that of course I eventually misplaced and may go back to my parents' house to tear apart in an attempt to locate it though I haven't seen it in more than 20 years, and what I can remember about it is that it was a photo of him in his catcher's outfit, no mask, smiling and relaxed — it wasn't an action shot. And on the photo he wrote "Dear Anthony" (making it personal) and "God bless."

Even as a (likely) 10-year-old, I was touched by that "God bless," coming from a stranger. It was a very nice thing to say.

Gary Carter had been diagnosed with brain cancer last May. Last month it got much worse. Yesterday he died.

Thanks for the photo, Gary. God bless.