It is no easy thing to eulogize an athlete. We think we know them, but we don’t; we have simply watched them do their work.But then, the athletes we’ve spent heavy time observing—baseball players maybe, in their interminable seasons, or basketball players, practically scurrying nude on a petri dish—we can at least get a good idea of. There’s something about the familiarity that overrides the distance: If I spent a life observing a bunch of bank tellers, they’d certainly become more than strangers.So many of us would like to think we in some way knew Gary Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher for the Expos and Mets who died Thursday. As a young Expos fan, I certainly thought that I did, but admit it was news to me until yesterday that he was Christian. Still, I, and others, took a lot in. We knew, for example, that he started his career in the outfield and had a quarterback scholarship to UCLA. We knew he bought a house in Florida with his Expos signing bonus. We knew he was the best player in Canada for a long while—and for a year, in the NL—and then left, and excelled in old age (for a catcher) like few do. We know he went into the Hall of Fame as an Expo, the way he went out, and that he tried to manage the Mets but didn’t want to live in Binghamton, and that he campaigned for Willy Randolph’s job and that he had, and fought, brain cancer and lost.Carter was maybe the best latecomer to the hardest sport’s hardest position there has ever been. A line in Bill James’s Historical Abstract has umpire Eric Gregg calling Carter better than Johnny Bench, considered the best ever at this position—and Carter only started catching once he got paid for it.He was a positive man, sunny-faced to the point of derision. We have an idea of how he felt about that (“My happiness crowds people a little," he wrote in post-Mets championship book) but we don’t know what it was like to have been the guy with the wife on the Mets plane, or the Christian in Montreal, or the rookie running sprints too hard because that’s how he ran sprints. Some of us watched many, many games, but we don’t know how he did things or why he kept doing things even when his peers disagreed. We don’t know if it was diffidence, or if he was hard-wired, or if he was an egomaniac, but we also don’t know what it’s like catching through three decades—few baseball players know what that’s like, either.Most of what we can say about Carter doesn’t hold up as well his baseball-reference page, which is more honest a look at one’s life than most people deserve, but he seemed, then and now, a tryer. Carter tried for the better, and for the worse; in baseball, and sometimes when he didn’t have to or at things he shouldn’t have, in situations when he may have known better. He tried with naked ambition: learning French in Montreal, playing and mastering the catching position; he tried when it mattered and when it didn’t. He didn’t care that he tried, or that it bothered people. If he did, we couldn’t tell, and he certainly didn’t change. Catching is a hard enough thing to do, and he had figured that out fine. If the chorus had something to say, he wasn’t listening. There was no way he was wrong about anything else.