The Kid’s An Attention Whore? Tell Us Something About Gary Carter We Don’t Know

Former Cards 1B Jack Clark had a phoner with St. Louis’ flagship station KTRS-AM yesterday and revealed he’s not quite let go of his hostility towards the New York Mets of the mid-’80’s.  From the New York Times’ Ken Belson :

Clark told McGraw Milhaven, the morning host at the station, that the mutual hatred ran so deep that he purposely snubbed the Mets when they played together in All-Star Games.

“I wanted to let them know I wasn’t glad to be there with them and their teammate, didn’t want to be on any team or be a teammate with them, and we were going to battle,” said Clark, who provides commentary on some Cardinals games and manages the Springfield Sliders, a summer collegiate league team in Illinois.

Clark took particular aim at Gary Carter, the Mets’ catcher in those years, saying that he “talked his way more into the Hall of Fame than deserving it.” Carter, he said, craved the spotlight, which was “pretty sickening and disgusting to everybody else.”

Carter, who manages the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League, said he was surprised by Clark’s comments.

“He’s entitled to his own opinion, but the numbers speak for themselves, and I don’t think anybody can talk their way into the Hall of Fame,” Carter said in a statement relayed by the team’s public-relations officer.

In the interview, Clark reignited an old issue when he said that Howard Johnson, a Mets third baseman in those years, used a corked bat. Whitey Herzog, the Cardinals’ manager at the time, made a similar claim.

In 1987, one of Johnson’s bats was X-rayed. The X-rays were negative. Clark appeared not to know that.

“That just goes to show those guys were trying to cheat and, you know, it didn’t end up working for them anyhow,” he said, seemingly glossing over the Mets’ World Series title in 1986. “So if his was corked, I’m sure a few other guys’ over there were corked, also.”

Johnson, now the Mets’ batting coach, said Clark seemed to have forgotten a few key facts.

“It’s kind of funny, because in my most productive years, I used a model that he gave me, an M253,” Johnson said in Milwaukee, where the Mets were playing the Brewers.

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