PORT ST. LUCIE — The 1986 Mets were known for their distinctly different personalities and Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter were perfect examples.
“There’s no doubt we didn’t go about everything the same way,” Hernandez said yesterday. “But I always knew how important he was to the fabric of our team.”
Hernandez, now an analyst for SNY’s Mets’ telecasts, broke down more than once in an interview with SNY Thursday shortly after Carter’s death from brain cancer at 57. Yesterday, he remembered what made Carter such a special teammate.
“I was ecstatic when we got him in that trade,” Hernandez said of the December 1984 deal that brought Carter to the Mets from the Expos. “I knew how big it was to have a powerful right-handed bat to go along with me and Darryl [Strawberry] from the left side. But most importantly, like [former general manager] Frank Cashen said, is what it did for our young starting rotation.”
But as important as Carter’s handling of the pitching staff and his presence in the lineup was, his competitiveness stood out even more.
“I always remember his knees being iced, every single day,” Hernandez said. “He was in constant pain and discomfort. You had to be inspired by that.”
They seemed to clash at times, but Hernandez said what made players dislike Carter as an opponent made them appreciate him when they were teammates.
“He wanted to win so badly and that wasn’t something you could totally understand until you played with him,” Hernandez said. “This game is full of followers and you couldn’t have had a better person to follow onto a baseball field than Gary.”
That extended off the field as well.
“One of the things that stood out about him was that he always answered his fan mail,” Hernandez said. “Most guys, they either have someone else open it or ignore it, but he was there at his locker, ripping open envelopes, reading every letter. You never saw guys do that — and he got a lot of mail.”
Carter was embraced by New York during and after his playing days and that was proven again last night, when the Empire State Building was lit in blue and orange in the catcher’s memory, and he didn’t stop having an impact as he fought his disease.
The last time Tim Teufel saw Gary Carter was at Carter’s fund-raising dinner last month, and Teufel was struck by what his former teammate told the crowd.
“He kind of hobbled into the event,” Teufel said. “They handed him the microphone and he had one of those ‘Lou Gehrig’ moments. He talked about having a great life. He was thanking people. The room was filled with Hall-of-Famers. He expressed thanks for the life that he had.”
Though Carter never got to manage in the majors, he still made an impression on those who made it there.
“I played for him in ’05 [for the Gulf Coast League Mets],” said Mets catcher Josh Thole. “The attitude he brought was, hands down, the best I’ve ever seen.”
Thole played first base and caught for Carter.
“I was 18 years old, playing my first year and Gary really emphasized treating us like men,” Thole said. “It didn’t matter if you were 16 coming from the Dominican or if you were 22 coming from college. Everyone was treated the same way.”
Thole said the lessons he learned from Carter are still relevant.
“Every day he had something for us,” he said. “He was an incredible person when it came to teaching the game. It wasn’t necessarily catching. It was how to play the game. That’s what he was real big on. If you went out and played hard … he was a go-get-’em kind of guy.”
Hernandez would agree.