I imagine that Gary Carter, who passed away yesterday at just 57 years of age, would've told you his best day involved a lot of time spent with his wife, children and/or grandchildren. I'm just as sure that he'd have his own idea of what his best day in baseball was -- his two-homer game in the World Series would be a good bet, or the time he caught Charlie Lea's no-hitter. (Odd, sad side note: Lea, two and a half years younger than Carter, died after a heart attack just three months ago.) Here, I'm going to focus on the regular season, and mostly on hitting. What was the single greatest game of Carter's career?
There's a lot to choose from, obviously. Carter was a Hall of Famer (and a more than deserving one) who appeared in 2,296 games, and 2,056 of them as catcher -- fourth most all-time. He had twenty-eight career multi-homer games, 105 games with at least three hits, 42 with four or more RBI [edit: I was looking at incomplete data, so had to fix the numbers]. But here, subjectively selected and ordered, are what might be his five best:
