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In summer, Carew putters in the yard. Come autumn, he cleans the rain gutters and in winter, the man from Panama shovels snow. Carew is rooted now, and the mercurial moods that marked his early career seldom surface. "When I ask Charryse what Daddy does, she says, 'Daddy strikes out. I explain to her that Daddy doesn't strike out very often. But how can you get mad at fans when your own kids knock you? I leave my game at the park. When I go home to play with my kids, they don't care if I went 0 for 4. They're happy to see me. In the end, it's your family that matters. They're there no matter what happens in a baseball game."
Carew has also settled into the Twin Cities. Last spring he won the Roberto Clemente Award, given annually to the major league player who has done distinguished community service. The honor is bestowed for a player's public acts—heading fund drives and the like. But private and unpublicized deeds most distinguish Carew's style. He regularly travels to the Mayo Clinic to visit patients. Once he had a run-in with a traffic cop who pointedly called him "boy" as he wrote up the ticket. The policeman later had the temerity to ask Carew to visit his father, who was dying of cancer. Carew went. After an emotional bedside scene with the son and father, Carew returned to tell his wife: "I guess this is how you change people, one at a time."
About the only thing that gnaws at Carew is his contractual problems with the tightfisted Twins. In 1975, the team turned down his request for a salary of $140,000 a year—modest by big league standards for a man of his skills—and the case went to arbitration. During the negotiations, Owner Griffith told the arbitrator that Carew was not worth a high salary because he was just a singles hitter. Never mind that he had hit .364; there were not enough home runs (3). The arbitrator naively accepted the club's reasoning and fixed Carew's salary at $120,000. The incident hurt Carew's pride more than his pocketbook, and the following season, he punched out 14 home runs just to show that he could reach the fences. This year he should drive in more than 100 runs, a singular feat for a hitter of singles. Carew also now leads the league in triples —with 14—and his slugging percentage of .619 is tops in the majors.*
It is doubtful that the Twins will decide to pay Carew what he is worth during the next contract talks after the 1978 season. Although he would prefer to play in Minneapolis, Carew is resigned to the possibility of ending up on another team. Salaries are a standard by which players are judged, and he wants the financial recognition, if not the bright lights that his status deserves. "I wouldn't want to go to New York. It's a zoo. If I move, I'd like to go to Seattle or Toronto, to new clubs that are building."