How Gary Carter's historical reputation has changed over the years

Wednesday 4/8/26

Often I'll read baseball history discussions between people from many years ago. It can be interesting to see how the change in how certain players are viewed. People presently tend to get more wrong, because they use en vogue analytics as an end all be all, especially because they don't know the game that well and they're adverse to thinking. Whereas, the en vogue analytic provides what's tantamount to a number on the Instagram dashboard, and that's what almost everything in our society comes back to. The dashboard figure.

But the dashboard figure rarely proves instructive as pertains reality or truth. It's for the waving around more than anything, and a stand-in for actual knowledge.

But things don't always trend in this direction. A great example of a ballplayer who was viewed one way when he played and another now is Gary Carter.

Even during Carter's heyday, he wasn't seen as at the level of, say, Carlton Fisk. He wasn't talked about as a future Hall of Famer. He was a star, don't get me wrong. One of the best catchers in the game. What you read about him, though, tended to be about how he supposedly loved the camera and was always smiling for it and trying to get his picture taken by it.

This could actually be rather mean-spirited. I never much understood it. Carter was high-wattage, but in this sense, rather than the star sense. He made loads of All-Star teams. He was a given as an All-Star it felt like. But he wasn't considered one of the superstars of the game.

Now, the catcher position itself has something to do with that. I guess maybe the position wasn't considered sexy enough, nor the numbers that almost always take a hit because of playing the position, and it's just easier for the person who doesn't know the game as well as someone who does to say, "That's Dale Murphy, he's a superstar!" rather than do the same thing with Gary Carter during the same era.

But it's interesting, because I'll read these old posts by people who do know baseball and its history, and they got Gary Carter way wrong. People are allowed to pass some really questionable judgments and you can otherwise take them seriously, even learn from them, so long as they don't make it a habit.

This one fellow who mostly knew his stuff was talking about how he believed Gary Carter and Lou Brock were the least deserving players ever voted by the writers into the Hall of Fame. This discussion dated back to 2006, so twenty years ago.

You can make a case for Gary Carter being the best catcher in baseball history. I wouldn't. As I've said, I think he's just a hair behind Carlton Fisk in the catcher pecking order, and it's not as if Fisk is the best catcher ever himself. That's pretty clearly Johnny Bench. (We don't know enough about Josh Gibson I'd say, but it could also be him.)

I give Fisk the ever-so-slight edge on the basis of career value. And yes, I know Carter had more WAR than Fisk. But Fisk was a very good player for quite a bit longer than Carter was.

But I'd argue that in 1982, Gary Carter was the best all-around baseball player in the world. His hitting was elite, his defense was elite. Rarely in the history of the sport has a catcher been as good as Gary Carter was in 1982, if ever.

He should have on the NL MVP that year (instead he finished twelfth in the voting), not the overrated Murphy (who at least did deserve it in 1983). Carter led the league in WAR. Do you know how hard it is for a catcher to do that? WAR works against catchers, just as we've seen how it works on behalf of second basemen. Look at all the second basemen that you don't think of as amazing who averaged 5 WAR or more per 162 for their careers. Now look at the catchers you think were amazing who didn't.

Carter had 8.6 WAR in 1982, then followed that up with 7.1 in 1983, 7.4 in 1984, and 6.9 in 1985. In the strike-shortened 1981 campaign, he had 3.8. In 1980 he had 6.5, 6.0 in 1979, 5.8 in 1978, 5.4 in 1977, when he blasted 31 homers. He finished second in the MVP voting in 1986 and was the important player on the eventual World Champion Mets.

I get that WAR wasn't around in 2006, but Carter also led the NL in the trad stat of RBI in 1984. Do you know how hard that is for a catcher to do? And were it not for Ryne Sandberg, Gary Carter would have been the best player in the world that year as well. But doing a five year sample, the two best baseball players in the world between 1980 and 1985--in other words, for half a decade--are Gary Carter and Mike Schmidt, and the latter is the best at his position all-time.

Carter's problem, as such, was that once he stopped being elite, he wasn't much good at all. He didn't taper off with some solid years. Fisk, who wasn't as consistent as Carter, pulls ahead, in my estimation, because of what he did late in his career in his forties.

But Carter in his prime? His peak? And neither were that short. You were getting one of the two, three, four, five best players in baseball, and at times the very best.

I've followed two attempts at baseball history forums to rank the best players of all-time. I've written about the lists on here. One was from some years ago, then there was a re-polling, you could say, so the list changed some. Both lists had Carter in the fifties. Major Hall of Fame stars aren't that close to the top 100. Fisk is in the top 100, but he's about thirty spots behind Carter.

I've already discussed Lou Brock in these pages as well. To me, Brock is a definite first ballot Hall of Famer. I love Lou Brock. Changed the game with how he ran the bases, and was a stud of studs as a postseason performer. Baseball historians then and now have never cared about what a player does in the postseason. Nor do Hall of Fame voters.

This is insane to me. I mean, why are we here? What are they playing for? Ultimately it's to win the World Series, right?

Sadly, though, Brock's reputation hasn't improved over the years like Carter's. Most think he barely deserves inclusion in the Hall. I'll see him picked someone that a person would remove if they could. They're relying too much on WAR, which only tells one part of a story, and sometimes as if it were a very unreliable narrator.