Glioblastoma is not a baseball term. It does not appear in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary between “gliding” (“a flaw in a pitcher’s delivery”) and “global draft” (“a proposed international draft”). However, if Paul Dickson does a fourth edition of the dictionary, he might want to consider including this strange word that has burst into our consciousness.

Glioblastoma is the name of the brain tumor Gary Carter has been found to have. Names of brain tumors are as unintelligible as names of steroids. The people who deal with them know them and can distinguish one from another, but it’s not for the layman.

For example, who knows glioblastoma from hemangiopericytoma? If you do, go directly to medical school. There is a future for you in medicine.

Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher, is only the most recent former baseball player to have been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive (why not just say it, deadly) brain tumor that is as dreaded as its sound.

This is a roster of former players who were struck out by glioblastoma:

• Dick Howser (1987)
• Dan Quisenberry (1998)
• Tug McGraw (2004)
• Johnny Oates (2004)
• John Vukovich (2007)
• Bobby Murcer (2008)

Two other former players, Bobby Bonds and Ken Brett, were stricken with brain tumors, but efforts to determine the kind were unsuccessful. Both died in 2003.

In Bonds’ case, he also had lung cancer and kidney cancer, and he had open-heart surgery, suffering all of those ailments within a little more than a year before he died.

George Brett said Saturday he didn’t know the name of the tumor his brother had but that he actually had two tumors at different times. Ken was fine for three or four years after the first tumor was removed, Brettt said, but got another and didn’t survive that one for long.

Glioblastoma victims rarely survive for long. Here is the same list of players with the length of time they lived after they were diagnosed with the tumor:

• Oates                  38 months
• Murcer               19 months
• Vukovich            18 months
• Howser               12 months
• Quisenberry        9 months
• McGraw               9 months

Putting their post-diagnosis lives in perspective, consider these statistics from the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States. The registry lists 14 types of brain tumors with total cases and survival rates.

Glioblastomas, which represent 17 percent of all primary brain tumors, provided by far the most cases, nearly 20,000, and produced, again by far, the lowest survival rates.

When Carter was diagnosed, a newspaper columnist came up with a link among the baseball players who had glioblastomas. Most of them played or coached in stadiums that had artificial turf—Kansas City, Philadelphia, Montreal.

If that connection were valid, though, that would account for only six deaths. What about the other 19,791 deaths recorded in the most recent statistical study?

“Brain tumors do not discriminate,” the American Brain Tumor Association says on its Web site, abta.org. “Primary brain tumors – those that begin in the brain and tend to stay in the brain – occur in people of all ages, but they are statistically more frequent in children and older adults.”

Of 19,797 patients who were diagnosed in the period 1995-2007, only 34.6 percent survived one year. That means 65 percent of glioblastoma victims died within a year after they were diagnosed. The percentages dropped from there: 12.63 percent survived two years, 7.31 percent three years, 5.40 percent four years, 4.75 percent five years and only 2.80 percent, or 554 of 19,797, were alive 10 years later.

Despite the awful statistics, one neuro-oncologist, Carter’s, takes a positive approach to survival. “The survival rate is increasing,” Dr. Henry Friedman said in a telephone interview Saturday. “We’re seeing a small increase in the number of survivors.”

Dr. Friedman offered no numbers to support his view, and another doctor who is intimately involved with brain tumors said he was not convinced that claim is valid, “Henry Friedman is always saying we’re making progress,” he said.

Friedman is co-deputy director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Center at Duke University. The center conducts clinical trials seeking treatment methods that will at least extend patients’ lives. It is a difficult, if not impossible, task. My wife’s 42-year-old nephew, Michael Levine, was in one of the Duke trials, but he died in April, less than two years after he was diagnosed.

Murcer, the popular New York Yankees’ center fielder and later broadcaster, was in a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2008 and seemed to be doing well, responding to treatment for several months. But he suddenly stopped making progress, went the other way and died.

In my first conversation after he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, I was able to make him forget about his deadly tumor for a minute or two. I told him about my encounter with a brain tumor. He couldn’t believe what I was telling him.

I’ll leave most of what I told him for another time, but I relate the brain tumor part of it because I am writing this column on June 4, the eighth anniversary of the operation that made me tumor free.

Hemangiopericytoma – that was the name of my tumor. It was malignant, though we didn’t know that ugly fact for two and a half months because I had I had been transferred to another hospital, and the neurosurgeon’s office had ignored my wife’s repeated requests for a pathology report.

When we eventually learned that the tumor was malignant, we told very few people. We preferred our privacy. I guess sports stars have to make their cancers public. Carter announces his brain tumor. Harmon Killebrew announces his impending death from esophageal cancer.

I never had any doubt that I would survive even though I had no basis for that feeling except for my ultra-positive attitude and my wife, the most wonderful advocate a hospitalized man could have.

I don’t know what the survival rate is for malignant hemangiopericytoma even now because it didn’t make the glioblastoma list, and I didn’t ask. I am told it is a very rare tumor so there are probably no statistics.

I do know that I prefer hemangiopericytoma to glioblastoma, but I also would have preferred a benign tumor to a malignant one. I know people who have had benign brain tumors. I know a woman who had one, had it removed and went back to work the second week after surgery.

Why are some tumors benign and some malignant? Why is one malignant tumor a hemangiopericytoma and another a glioblastoma?

“No one knows the answer to that; that’s the Nobel Prize,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bruce, a neurosurgeon at Columbia University Medical Center and a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the American Brain Tumor Association.

Bruce said a combination of genetics and environment could create differences. Location also makes a difference, he added. “Mostly location and how invasive it is into the brain.”

Location was also cited by Dr. John Golfinos, chairman of the neurosurgery department at New York University Langone Medical Center.

“Think about tumors that grow away from other parts of the body; you get to them early and take them out,” Golfinos said “You can’t remove the brain. Other cancers push away. A brain tumor follows the brain path and you get to the stage of malignancy.”

I asked Golfinos how doctors deal with terrible tumors. At N.Y.U., he said, he has the responsibility of speaking to families of patients.

“It’s very difficult for the families,” he said, “because the patient changes before the family’s eyes.”

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OLDER AND WISER

At the age of 58, just about a year older than Gary Carter, George Brett took simple and swift action when he learned that Carter had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. His own brother died of brain cancer, but the Hall of Fame third baseman was younger then.

“When I saw that,” Brett related, pausing on a fishing trip with his son, “I called the Royals’ team doctor and asked him if a body scan was a good thing to get. He said absolutely, he gets one every year. So I called and made an appointment for Monday morning at 6:30.

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GOOD FOR GRASS, BAD FOR GAMES

You couldn’t blame Katy Feeney if she offered up a daily chant of “rain, rain, go away, come again another day.”

As Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for scheduling, Feeney carries around an umbrella hoping such preparedness will ward off the rain that drowned the schedule the first two months.

Last year produced 20 rainouts all season, Feeney said. In the first two months of this season, she noted, poor weather had forced postponement of 31 games.

Feeney’s umbrella trick, however, was working even if she was just thinking it and really wasn’t carrying an umbrella. Teams played 52 games the first four days of June without having one game washed out.

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RUNNER, NOT CATCHERS, NEEDS PROTECTION

There’s something in the water in the San Francisco Bay, and the general managers of the area’s two teams are apparently drinking it. How else explain their words and deeds last week in the aftermath of the home-plate collision that wrecked Buster Posey’s left leg and ended his season prematurely.

Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager, was quoted as having told the team’s catcher, Kurt Suzuki, that he is not to block the plate if there is a play at that location.

Will Beane next tell the Athletics’ second baseman and shortstop not to take throws at second because they might get spiked or run over?

Runners have been barreling into catchers forever; ask Ray Fosse about Pete Rose in the All-Star game. It’s unfortunate that Posey is injured and out, but it’s part of the game unless you want to change the game. Well, they pamper the pitchers. Maybe the catchers are next.

As for Beane’s counterpart across the bay, Brian Sabean, he might as well have put out a contract on Scott Cousins with comments he made on a San Francisco radio station harshly criticizing the rookie Florida outfielder. As it was, Cousins received death threats.

Cousins, who in my view did nothing wrong, issued a statement saying he hoped that Sabean had made the comments in the heat of the moment, but there was no heat of the moment. Sabean made the comments nearly a week after the collision.

The Giants issued a statement saying that Sabean had made the comments out of frustration, but didn’t his mother teach him when he was a boy that when he got frustrated or angry he should count to 10 before saying or doing anything?

Joe Torre, now an executive in the commissioner’s office, spoke with Sabean Friday, but words aren’t enough. Fine him a substantial amount of money and wash his mouth out with soap.