…hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home…
Baseball Hall of Famer and totally not host body of a time-traveling Scott Bakula (your secret’s safe with me, Dr. Beckett!) Gary Carter has died today as the result of a brain tumor discovered last May.
I don’t know* much about baseball, so we’re just gonna shove in a block quote from SI.com. It’s like my high school guidance counselor always used to say, “I don’t know, man, just copy from someone else or something.” Then he’d ask me where he could “score some blaze.” That guy was awesome.
“Nobody loved the game of baseball more than Gary Carter. Nobody enjoyed playing the game of baseball more than Gary Carter. He wore his heart on his sleeve every inning he played,” Mets Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver said.
After Carter’s diagnosis, the Mets began playing a highlight reel of his accomplishments on the video board during games at Citi Field and posted this message: “Our thoughts are with you Gary. From your millions of fans and the New York Mets.”
“His nickname `The Kid’ captured how Gary approached life,” the Mets said Thursday in a statement. “He did everything with enthusiasm and with gusto on and off the field. His smile was infectious. … He was a Hall of Famer in everything he did.”
Hang on, the best nickname anyone could come up with was ‘The Kid’? Step it up, MLB, it’s not like great nicknames are that hard to come by. Hell, I’m known as the World’s Sexiest Grandpa and all I had to do was go to Spencer Gifts and buy a mug that said so.
Nevertheless, Carter seemed like a good enough dude, and he harkens back to a time when professional sports didn’t exist solely to convince me that a guy tossing a ball is the cultural equivalent of ten Industrial Revolutions and a Renaissance. You mean to tell me that draping a 200-foot image of LeBron in a non-ironic Jesus pose over the side of your stadium turned out to be an embarrassing exercise in hyperbolic ego-stroking? Well excuse me while I scramble for my monocle, for you see I have lost it in shock!
*or care
Source: SI.com
Coulda been president, but he was too ‘real.’
