{"id":1764,"date":"2012-01-24T18:49:09","date_gmt":"2012-01-24T18:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beta.mbtn.net\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2015-04-20T20:16:50","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T02:16:50","slug":"rooting-for-immortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/?p=1764","title":{"rendered":"Rooting for Immortality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8\"<\/a>The troubling news on Gary Carter’s health is raising anew the question of whether — and when — the Mets will get around to retiring\u00a0No. 8. Thanks to a tip from MBTN commenter “Gored82” in the below story I clicked over to\u00a0Mike Silva’s Baseball Dige<\/a>st<\/a>\u00a0which was running a poll on fan opinions on the matter. Those readers overwhelmingly approved the idea by a 92% margin, seemingly agreeing with Mike that Carter’s contributions to the 80s success merited the honor even though his tenure was relatively short and his good seasons in a Mets uniform even shorter.<\/p>\n

It’s obvious to me the Mets\u00a0intended<\/em>\u00a0to retire No. 8 upon Carter’s enshirement in Cooperstown — they took 8 out of circulation upon his 2003 election — but I suspect they lost their conviction to when Carter went to the Hall “as an Expo” not a Met, and subsequently eschewed an offer to manage the Mets’ farm club in Binghamton. Following that, Carter made remarks in the press that were interpreted as “campaining” for Willie Randolph’s job. Petty squabbles with players? These Mets? In the meantime the re-emergence of Darryl Strawberry and to\u00a0 a lesser extent, Dwight Gooden into the Mets graces, and the ever-growing legend of Keith Hernandez, who becomes a greater Met personality with every broadcast, made the idea of singling out Carter seem unwise. I would guess that the same poll a few years ago would have produced less dramatic results, although still probably favorable, since in my experience, fans just like to see numbers retired. Immortality is something to root for.<\/p>\n

I’ve suggested before the Mets “retire” No. 86 as a tribute to the lot of them. I’ve argued long and hard that they re-issue these numbers to appropriate candidates. But what seems more likely right now is they ultimately resolve this by tackling Hernandez and Carter at once.<\/p>\n

I discussed this with Mike on his radio show the other night (I follow Steven Travers discussing his Tom Seaver book).\u00a0Click here to listen to a replay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The troubling news on Gary Carter’s health is raising anew the question of whether — and when — the Mets will get around to retiring\u00a0No. 8. Thanks to a tip from MBTN commenter “Gored82” in the below story I clicked over to\u00a0Mike Silva’s Baseball Digest\u00a0which was running a poll on fan opinions on the matter. … Continue reading “Rooting for Immortality”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[101],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gary-carter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mbtn.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}