Gary Carter is gone.

In the first baseball video game I ever played–the Original RBI Baseball on the NES–Gary Carter was the clean-up guy for the New York Mets. They were my team of choice. That GCarter guy could really swing it back in those days. I wanted to learn more about him. As I collected all the Darryl Strawberry Mets items I could find, Carter was a good Robin to his Batman for me.

In one of the first baseball books I ever remember reading–a book about the ’86 Amazin’ Mets in my school library–I read all about the heart and soul of the Mets team. It was not Strawberry they spoke of as I wished, but this Carter character.

Ironically it was Strawberry today who said the following about his former teammate:

“I Wish I Could Have Lived My Life Like Gary Carter…He Was A True Man.”

A sad day for baseball. Gary Carter, gone too soon.

Cool commercial, and I’m hoping for a decent game out of 2ksports. I can’t stop playing NBA 2k12. I just unlocked the Larry Bird ’84 Celts the other night and I am running the point with Larry Legend. If they got anywhere close to their basketball rendition with the baseball game, then we’re onto something.

This is coming from a guy who understands all about ‘finger mechanics’.

Is it baseball season yet?

I love stuff like this. Seeing where we’ve come from and how far we’ve come.

Baseball Prospectus reminds us of a nice little project that Pepper Hastings, the senior editor of Beckett Baseball Monthly; set out to complete. Pepper wanted to obtain a working pay phone number for each of the 26 stadiums in Major League Baseball.

This wreaks of the same kind of classic retro workflows without automation like the score-keeping of fantasy baseball leagues (I still know of one guy who does it that way for traditions sake) and All-Star voting being done solely on the paper ballots that were handed out at the ballpark.

I miss early 90′s baseball, and the innocence we all had back then. There are times when I wish we didn’t have the convenience of a few taps of our smartphones to know a guy’s complete stat line for the night, how many fastballs he threw, and every team’s score in the league for the evening.

It reminds me of the days of missing box scores because my parents didn’t get the paper except on the weekends. If my grandma didn’t save the daily sports page, I would have to catch up on what Eric Davis and Barry Larkin did on certain nights in a two week old edition of Baseball Weekly.

Yet, for some reason I want to go back to the payphone era.

We forgot an anniversary of sorts yesterday.

And last year. I wrote a post about Ken Griffey Jr.’s homecoming to Cincinnati over at 7th Inning ‘Stache a few years back 10 years after the trade that brought Junior home to the Queen City. Give it a read if you have a few minutes.

I miss Griffey’s sweet swing.

Business is about to pick up in the sport of baseball, and business picked up last night on The Baseball Show, Mike Rosenbaum of The Golden Sombrero and M.J. Lloyd of Off-Base Percentage and Halo Hangout discussed the following with me:

-The latest chapter in the Josh Hamilton relapse saga
-M.J. tells a Mickey Mantle story about racing a limousine
-We talk memorabilia, baseball cards, collectibles (who remembers Fleer Ultra?)
-PECOTA Projections, top 5 in each league, Gordon Beckham, Drew Stubbs, Jay Bruce, etc.
-Top Prospects List

As we always do, we cover a variety of subjects in between the main melody line. Another great installment of The Baseball Show awaits you.

There are some salacious rumors going around right now about Josh Hamilton.

I really, really hope that they’re not true. But if they are–I forgive the guy.

For Christmas I came across Hamilton’s book Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back at the book store and decided it would make a great Christmas gift for my wife. Hamilton is her only athlete crush and I think the book probably has some really good life lessons about overcoming adversity that she could apply to her own life. Besides, when she’s finished with it I could definitely use the lessons that Hamilton has learned to apply to my own; I thought.

Before we even crack the book open and start turning pages, the Hamilton relapse story broke. It wasn’t the first time that Hamilton had slipped up. Any addict knows there is a better than even chance that it won’t be the last time. It’s unfortunate, and I hope it goes away quietly and the guy is only involved in subjects pertaining to his play soon enough.

But if Hamilton really was guilty of the things that are being rumored–and I’m not making any excuses for him–I sympathize and feel sorry for him in the same way that I do a figure like Darryl Strawberry.

In so many ways we are nothing like super-human athlete Josh Hamilton. He can hit a ball like only a few people that have walked this earth could. He can abuse his body and still be in absolutely freakish shape. He hits home runs in the World Series that should clinch championships. But in one way, we’re all like Josh Hamilton. We try, and we try again; and yet we fail because we are weak, because we are imperfect, and because we are human.

Try as we may to push the heavy rock up the hill–we will most certainly fall many times before reaching the top. Many of us sit there at the bottom of the hill and we look at the rock, wondering how we had came so close to reaching the top but we lacked the strength to gain the proper footing to get the rock all the way up to the top. We sit there for a while, and we might even sit in misery; disgusted with ourselves that we have failed. But I know what I will do–and I think I know what Hamilton will do. That rock will be picked up again and when the time is right he’ll head back up the hill in search for the top, hoping one day he can find the perfect route to get there, carrying the full weight on him.

I still admire the guy because in one small way I see my own struggles within his. Anyone who doesn’t is either a better person than I am because they’ve never fallen back into habits they wished to escape or never had them to begin with. I’m simply not that fortunate. And there’s no rhyme or apparent reason as to why we are not successful no matter how much we desire to be.

I’ve always been a big fan of Josh Hamilton the ballplayer. Right now I’m really pulling for Josh Hamilton the person.

I like Peter Gammons, and I like Jason Heyward. Naturally, anytime anything occurs involving both of them and I run across it, that item will end up on this blog.

Had I not made the trip over to Baseball Musings today I would have missed this. Gammons wrote on MLB.com about Heyward’s injury affecting his swing last season.

In June, batting .234, Heyward went on the disabled list to try to rest and rehab his shoulder. At one point, Chipper Jones suggested Heyward might need to learn to play with pain, which was whispered behind the outfielder’s back, and in August, Heyward was struggling so badly that he played sparingly.

“I knew how I felt,” Heyward says. “I knew what I could and couldn’t do. My swing got altered. I changed my hands to make up for the shoulder by changing my base load approach, and that got me more out of line. I tried to slow down and regroup, but it never worked on a consistent basis. When things go the way they were going, it would have done no good to try to answer people, who are going to believe what they’re going to believe. It hurt me, because I love to play; I wanted to be in there every day and contributing. It would have accomplished nothing to get into some war of words. I just focused on doing the best I could do each day, and when the season ended get my shoulder healed.”

If you follow Heyward on Twitter, the guy has been working like an animal to get in great shape and I think he’s going to rebound in a big way in 2012. This is good–baseball gets back one of it’s blossoming young stars and I get a one of my keepers in my most important fantasy baseball leagues to contribute usefully once again. It’s win/win all over the place.

There’s a reason that through the years I’ve continued to check Deadspin every morning despite having less and less time to peruse sites like Deadspin. Through different editors and content and site structure, Deadspin has always been good at bringing to light items like this.

Heyman has always seemed to me to be a very tactful and reliable baseball reporter. I’ve followed him for about two years, and only today do I realize that the tone of some of his tweets would make it seem as though he’s bathing in a pile of Ben Franklin’s every night and smacking people with expensive veal cutlets when they make him angry. And thank you for this, Deadspin.

Don’t be surprised if an elitist Heyman tweet appears someday sounding something like this:

@JonHeymanCBS need to get a new dining room set. these homeless people aren’t as comfortable as the day i bought them. harder to sit on when they get real skinny. later.

• Jon Heyman’s Tweets Make Him Seem Like the Richest Man Alive. [Deadspin]

Pat Burrell is expected to formally announce that he is retiring any day now, effectively stealing some news during Super Bowl week. He hardly leaves the game empty handed. Two world series rings, 292 career big league home runs, and he was a career .834 OPS guy.

Then there’s the stories. If we’ve heard some of them there’s a good chance there’s a bunch we haven’t heard.

Pat definitely always reminded us of that jock ballplayer who never quite outgrew the huge status he received at University of Miami. He was the high man on the totem pole there, probably pissing on freshman in the showers and bullying his way to the sack lunches of his choosing. In the minor leagues we heard tales of him casually throwing pennies at Jewish teammates as they sat in their locker. When he got to the big leagues and arrived in Philly, he was the king of the jungle. Any woman he wanted he helped himself to. And probably a few that he knew he shouldn’t have had anything to do with after the fact.

What would baseball be without guys like Pat ‘The Bat’? A career gone by too quickly to say the least.