Gary Carter is a Hall-of-Fame catcher for the Expos and Mets. He has a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer. Is there a chance that those two things are related?
Taking a step back…this isn’t a particularly strange question to ask. When there is an accident, the natural tendency is to look for correlations. If someone gets hit by a bus, you think, "that’s a really unsafe intersection," or "the bus drivers in this town are really terrible," or "that guy was always texting while walking." If someone is involved in a car crash, you wonder if the roads were wet, if alcohol was involved, if the driver had a license. I do this…I bet you do, too.
We do this with illnesses, too...you catch a cold, your mother scolds you for not wearing your jacket last week. We’re slightly less inclined to consider cause-and-effect when it comes to illness, but we still do it. A loved one has a heart attack…he shouldn’t have smoked, should’ve eaten better.
We respond this way because we’d like to think that there is cause and effect in the universe: people don’t just get hit by buses, or crash their cars…there must be extenuating circumstances. We don’t want to believe that accidents can happen; that inexplicable events can occur to all of us, at any time. We look for correlations because we want assurance that it won’t be us.
Cancer is a challenge...it defies all notions of order and fairness. You smoke? You might get lung cancer. You run marathons and eat fish and veggies and have the lungs of Secretariat…you stillmight get lung cancer. It is harder to draw correlations about cancer, because it goes across the board. You want cause and effect…everything causes cancer.
Gary Carter has cancer…we don’t look for cause-and-effect, because there is no cause-and-effect. Cancer just happens. Aggressive brain cancer? It’s still cancer…its weird and unpredictable and very sad. There’s no bad intersection, no alcohol involved, and no one forgot to wear their jacket. It just happened.
And…we miss it. We miss a possible correlation. We miss an obvious correlation. We miss it because cancer is everywhere, because we know that it absolutely could be us.
Gary Carter caught more major league games than all but three players in baseball history. And Gary Carter has aggressive, advanced cancer in his brain.
Are those facts related?
Fast Math
We’re going to do some fast math, here. If you want to skip this, I won’t take it personally.
A few questions: How many pitches did Gary Carter catch in the major leagues? How many per season? How many per game?
We can work out a decent approximation of this. Carter caught 2056 major league games. The average pitchers for a team will throw 140-150 pitches per game, give or take. Let’s say 145 pitches.
2056 * 145 = 298,120.
Gary Carter caught about 300,000 major league pitches. That’s not counting warm-up tosses, or bullpen sessions. That’s not counting his years in the minor leagues, either.
This is an important number…one that we’ll return to later on down the line. Three hundred thousand pitches….which averages to about 20,000 pitches a season.
I’ll throw in another approximate number: 90,000. That’s the number of pitches that Nolan Ryan threw in the major leagues. Again, we’re not talking about warm-ups or bullpen sessions or All-Star games or the minor leagues….in the majors, in games, the Von Ryan Express threw about ninety thousand pitches to major league batters.
This is just to illustrate a difference between pitchers and catchers: Nolan Ryan had an insanely long career….but he was involved in about one-third the number of pitches that Gary Carter was involved in. Over a long career, a catcher will be involved in many more pitches than a pitcher.
So we have some rough estimates: 300,000 pitches caught during Gary Carter’s career, 20,000 pitches per season, 145 pitches per game. Those aren’t exact numbers. I think they’re good enough.
One more question: how many radar guns are used during a major league baseball game?
Police in Connecticut
The state of Connecticut has banned the use of hand-held radar guns by police officers. Instead, officers use radar guns mounted to the side of the car. This was done because people were worried that radar guns might cause cancer.
Might…a direct correlation hasn’t been proven. A few studies have been conducted to see if there is a link between radar guns and cancer…OSHA did a large (and largely inconclusive) study involving police officers and cancer. There have been lawsuits, of course.
The American Cancer Association website actually mentions radar guns: "To date there is very little evidence to support such a connection, but studies to look at this possibility are ongoing, and governmental recommendations have been made to reduce any possible risk." No evidence, but they’re looking into it.
The ‘might’ of all this has to do with the way radar guns work: radar guns emit high frequency radio waves, waves that are in the ‘microwave range’ The wave goes out and hits an object and bounces back altered, and the gun is able to calculate speed by the degree that the way radio waves are changed.
Most of the worries about radar guns have involved police officers. This makes sense, as most of our everyday interactions with radar guns involve police officers. But…the interaction that a police officer has with a radar gun is drastically different that the interaction a major league baseball player has with a radar gun. Police officers target those high frequency radio waves away from themselves.
But professional baseball players are targets. Scout and stadium radar guns are aimed in a straight line to the pitcher. By extension, a lot of radar guns pass the catcher. Or the umpire. A scout using a radar gun will sit directly behind home plate, and aim the gun to the pitcher’s release point. If the radar gun is on eye-level to the people sitting in the front seats, the radar gun will be angled up somewhat…a pitcher’s mound is 10.5 inches tall, and most pitchers are about 6 feet tall. They probably release the ball at a height of six or six-and-a-half feet.
The catcher is in line with the radio wave emitted by the radar gun. The umpire is in line with the radar gun reading. The batter is in line with the radio wave emitted by the radar gun.
This is where our fast math gets unpleasant. If we assume that one radar gun used during a major league game, each catcher is exposed to 140-150 rounds of high frequency radio waves per game. An umpire is exposed to twice as many…280-300 rounds of high frequency radio waves.
Gary Carter caught about 300,000 pitches in the major leagues…assuming one radar gun, that’s 300,000 exposures over the course of his career. If there are three radar guns used during a major league game, that’s close to a million exposures.
One would think that the exposure for a pitcher would be worse. After all, the pitcher is the actual target of the radar gun: he’s the guy getting fired on. But…the pitcher is much farther away from the radar guns as a catcher is…a pitcher is ninety feet away from the first row of stands, while a catcher is just thirty feet from the backstop. Additionally, the radio waves would connect to the pitcher just once….the waves go out, hit the pitcher, and come back to the gun. But those waves can potentially hit the catcher twice…they come back a second time.
Gary Carter, during his fine career as a major league catcher, was exposed to a lot of high frequency radio waves. And Gary Carter is now battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, one that will almost certainly kill him.
It’s a small sample size…a sample size of one. Is that enough?
The Next Steps
I think that Major League Baseball should investigate whether or not frequent exposure to radar guns is dangerous. There are plenty of smart people working in professional baseball, and there are plenty of smart baseball fans…someone should be able to find an answer.
Major League Baseball could investigate it quietly…just my druthers, but I’d prefer it if they did it with some transparency. Transparency leads to multiple avenues of examination: if major league baseball announced that they wanted to research this subject, dozens of university laboratories would come up with hundreds of interesting, diverse studies. Dozens of fans could access databases, crunch numbers, find answers.
(One place to look is the ranks of professional umpires…if there is a correlation between radar gun use and cancer, it might show up among the umpires. Scouts, too…are there high cancer rates among professional scouts?)
Major League Baseball could also reduce the number of radar guns in the professional leagues…I remember going to minor league games and seeing dozens of radar guns in use. Maybe we can cut that number back…maybe scouts can agree to share information about pitch speed.
I’ll say it again: I don’t know if a correlation between radar guns and cancer exists…I don’t know that Gary Carter’s cancer has anything at all to do with his long career as a major league catcher.
But…if there is a correlation, I’d like to know about it. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com. He wishes Mr. Carter and his family the very best in the difficult weeks and months to come.