Rico Carty, a Dominican baseball star whose early exceptional promise was thwarted by untimely injuries, died on Saturday. He was 85.
His death was reported by Major League Baseball and the Atlanta Braves, one of his former teams. They did not specify where he died or the cause.
After a blazing hot start in the major leagues that included a dazzling rookie year, his progress was impeded by broken bones, hamstring problems and even tuberculosis. Carty, who was 6-foot-3 and called himself the Beeg Boy, nevertheless played until he was 40, amassing 1,677 hits and 204 home runs. Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty was born on Sept. 1, 1939, in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic. His father, Leopoldo, worked in a sugar mill, and his mother, Olivia, was a midwife. He had 15 brothers and sisters.
After dabbling in boxing, he turned his focus to baseball and soon attracted the attention of major league scouts.
“I had no idea how serious those offers really were,” Carty said in a 2008 interview with Baseball Prospectus. “I said yes to everyone that gave me one, just in case the others didn’t work out. In the end I signed with nine major league and three winter ball teams.”
His rights were eventually awarded in 1959 to the Milwaukee Braves, who have since moved to Atlanta. The team converted him to an outfielder from a catcher.
His first full season, in 1964, was one to remember. Playing mostly in left field, he hit .330, second in the majors after only the Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, and hit 22 home runs.
But he missed much of the 1965 season with back problems. He returned in 1966, the Braves’ first season in Atlanta, and hit .326. But he slumped in 1967 and then missed all of 1968 after contracting tuberculosis.
Shoulder separation cost him games in 1969, but he was available for Atlanta’s playoff series against the New York Mets. In what would turn out to be his only postseason appearance, he was 3 for 10 and scored four runs, but the Braves were swept by three-games-to-none.
As if he were making up for lost time, he got off to a stunning start in 1970. He was hitting an unfathomable .436 at the end of May.
Yet because the All-Star ballots were finalized over the winter, his name was not included. Fans mounted a write-in campaign, and he received more than 500,000 votes, enough to get him the third starting spot in the National League outfield alongside Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.
“I never thought I had a chance,” Carty told The New York Times that July. “I cannot thank the fans enough for going to the trouble of writing in my name.” Steve Garvey, in 1974, is the only other player to be elected as a write-in.
Few would have guessed it at the time, but 1970 wound up being Carty’s only All-Star selection. He could not stay as hot as he was in April and May but did finish with a .366 average to lead the league for the only time in his career. Yet that momentum was snapped in 1971 when he missed the entire season with a broken leg.
In August of that year, Carty got into an altercation with two off-duty police officers in Atlanta after one of them, he said, called him a racial slur. A uniformed officer intervened, and Carty wound up with two black eyes and bruises. Mayor Sam Massell of Atlanta said the officers had used “blatant brutality,” and all three were dismissed. All charges against Carty were dropped.
After missing much of the 1972 season with injuries, he was traded to the Texas Rangers. The timing seemed good. Texas is part of the American League, which that season was introducing the position of designated hitter, a player who bats, usually instead of the pitcher, but does not have to field.
Carty seemed a natural for this role; while an outstanding hitter, he often struggled in the field. Though he said he preferred to play outfield, he was slotted in as the Rangers’ D.H. But he hit poorly, lost the job, was sent to the Chicago Cubs and then finished the year with a third team, the Oakland Athletics.
It was the start of an odyssey of bouncing around from team to team: His further major league stops were in Cleveland and Toronto. In Atlanta, he got into scuffles with teammates, Ron Reed in 1970 and Aaron in 1972. The fights were seen as emblematic of an inability to get along with teammates and contributed, along with his inconsistent form and injury issues, to the many trades in the latter part of his career.
“He was an equal-opportunity combatant, engaging in physical and/or verbal conflicts with teammates, managers, umpires, fans, local police and at least one front office,” stated a 2018 biography of Carty by the Society for American Baseball Research.
In his final season in Toronto, in 1979, Carty hit .256 and accidentally stabbed himself with a toothpick when he reached into his carry-on bag. He was released in March 1980, at 40, and his career ended.
In his post-baseball career, he ran the Fundacion Rico Carty, an organization that helps address poverty in the Dominican Republic.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Through the injuries and the setbacks, one thing was always true: When he was healthy, Carty could hit a baseball.
Asked by Forbes in 2019 about the faster pitching in the modern game, Carty replied: “You think Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Dick Allen, Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda couldn’t hit this pitching?
“I’d kill it.”
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