Return of the Prodigal Mets: Doc Gets His Due, as Darryl Waits in the Wings – The Village Voice

From the first time 19-year-old Dwight Gooden toed the rubber on the pitcher’s mound at Shea Stadium, in April 1984, expectations of his unlimited potential were unleashed. During his first two amazing seasons with the Mets, every fan was assured that his ticket to Cooperstown was already punched.

Likewise for Darryl Strawberry, the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year, who launched 26 majestic long balls with 74 runs batted in for the last-place, but quietly improving, Mets.      

Both Strawberry and Gooden were first-round draft picks. Both excelled rapidly through the minor leagues. Both burst on the big-league scene with immediate success and seemingly unlimited potential. And both had their careers curtailed by personal demons. But watching them in their prime was one of the most electric experiences for Mets fans since the team’s first season, in 1962 (when they went 40-120). 

Although neither one spent their entire career with the Mets, the pair are indelibly linked as members of the 1986 World Series championship team, and are now being acknowledged by the Mets with the retirement of their uniform numbers, in succession, this season. Gooden’s No. 16 was unveiled in the outfield on Sunday, April 14; Strawberry’s No. 18 will be retired on June 1. Strawberry suffered a heart attack in March, but was in attendance for Gooden’s ceremony. 

Gooden’s 1984 rookie season appeared to be a harbinger of a Hall of Fame career to follow. Leading the National League with a rookie-record 276 strikeouts while posting a 17-9 record with a 2.60 ERA, Gooden followed Strawberry as the Mets’ second consecutive Rookie of the Year winner. Strawberry knocked in another 26 home runs in 1984, with 97 RBIs, and was named to the first of eight straight National League All-Star teams. Together the two brought renewed optimism and a return to respectability and the Mets reached second place for the first time in 11 years, finishing 6.5 games behind the Chicago Cubs in a closely contested NL East race.

Gooden’s 1985 sophomore season was one for the ages, as he became the youngest pitcher in modern major league history to win 20 games in a season, with a 24-4 record, while leading the NL for the second consecutive year with 268 strikeouts in 276 innings, 16 complete games, and a remarkable 1.53 ERA en route to the National League’s Cy Young Award. 

All of Gooden’s starting assignments were must-see occasions at Shea Stadium or on television. Because he routinely registered strikeout totals in double figures, fans in the left-field corner began hanging a placard hand-painted with the letter “K” for each of Gooden’s strikeouts. “Dr. K” provided the Mets with the team’s biggest marquee star since Tom Seaver. 

On September 6, 1985, Gooden squared off against another former teenage prodigy, Fernando Valenzuela, in the thick of the pennant race, with ramifications for both teams in front of 52,000 fans at Dodger Stadium. The Mets were in second place, one-and-a-half games behind the NL East–leading St. Louis Cardinals. Gooden pitched nine shutout innings with 10 strikeouts; Valenzuela threw 11 shutout innings. Strawberry settled it with a two-run double in the 13th. 

The Mets fought tooth and nail with the Cardinals for the duration of the 1985 season, and were three games back entering a three-game series in St. Louis, on October 1. This time it was Mets hurler Ron Darling and Cardinals starter John Tudor throwing goose eggs through 10 innings. And once again, Strawberry ended it, blasting a moon shot off the big Budweiser scoreboard at Bush Stadium and keeping the Mets in the race just two games back with five left to play. The Mets closed the gap even further the next day, with Gooden throwing his 16th complete game of the season and earning his 24th win. 

Those two October games against the Cardinals provided the peak moments in both Doc’s and Darryl’s brief careers to date, and high-water marks for the Mets franchise and its fans, neither of which had experienced this type of excitement this late in the season since the team’s 1973 NL–pennant winning season.      

Everyone loves a good redemption story, and both Gooden and Strawberry have been afforded ample opportunity to atone for their sins. 

The Mets lost the third game in St. Louis and two of the final three games of the season versus the Montreal Expos at Shea, finishing two back of the Cardinals with a 98-64 record, the second-best in franchise history, behind only the 1969 World Series championship team. 

It was after the 1985 season that Gooden first tried cocaine. While visiting a cousin in Tampa, Gooden’s career and life path were permanently altered. In his 2013 memoir, Doc, as told to Ellis Henican, Gooden recalled: “Then I snorted some cocaine, and it was love at first sniff.”

It was the beginning of a recreational love affair that developed into an addiction that he would grapple with for the rest of his career. By his own admission, Gooden was a regular user of cocaine throughout the 1986 season, mostly on off days. “In between starts, instead of calling home and catching up with my family, I began hanging out and going to parties and night clubs with my new druggie friends,” recalled Gooden in his memoir. It was reflected in his performance as well. His 17-6 record with a 2.84 ERA was still among the best in the major leagues, but subpar by the standards he’d set in the previous two seasons. He dueled admirably against Houston Astros hurlers Mike Scott (the 1986 Cy Young Award winner) and Nolan Ryan in the National League Championship Series, giving up just two runs in his two starts spanning 17 innings. But his tank ran out of gas in the World Series. He was clobbered for eight runs (six earned) in five innings in Game Two, facing Boston Red Sox ace Roger Clemens. He was roughed up again in Game Five, giving up four runs in four innings. Strawberry hit a pair of home runs in the NLCS but hit only .227 in the six games vs. Houston, and was almost a nonentity in the World Series, knocking in his lone home run in the bottom of the eighth inning in the decisive Game Seven, giving the Mets the seventh run in the 8-5 victory. Gooden’s post-season record was a very un-Doc-like 0-3. Although the Mets came back to win the Series in dramatic fashion, Gooden was notoriously absent from the team’s victory parade along Lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes, after spending the previous night on an extended cocaine bender at a drug dealer’s apartment near the Roosevelt Field mall. His behavior finally aroused enough suspicion to warrant a drug test during the following spring-training season.

While the Mets were opening the 1987 season, Gooden was entering the first of what would be a series of recurring rehab programs at West Side Manhattan’s Smithers Addiction Treatment and Research Center. After the first one, a 28-day stint, Gooden was scheduled to rejoin the Mets on June 5. Old-school New York Daily News columnist Dick Young scorched Gooden in a back-page column, under the headline: “Stand up and Boo.” “What has Dwight Gooden done exactly since the last game he won for the Mets? He has sniffed coke. He has been stopped by the Tampa police for playing chicken on Dale Mabry Highway … He has brawled with police. He was tested drunk at the hospital. He has gone through … a New York drug rehab institute in the record time of 27 days. All this, I suppose, adds up to his being a typical American hero, and so we will stand and pay homage to Dwight Gooden, I suppose,” wrote Young, adding that those in attendance should stand and boo “to let him know how society feels about the wrong he has done, the damage he has committed to millions of kids who worshiped him.”

But more than 51,000 Mets fans did just the opposite, showering Gooden with a standing ovation as he took the field. “They stood up and cheered. God that made me feel good! They embraced me with a standing ovation,” said Gooden.

Like Gooden, Strawberry struggled with a trifecta of addictions, including alcohol, cocaine, and sex (which also veered into domestic violence), and was indulging heavily in alcohol throughout the 1986 season, even though his two best seasons with the Mets were yet to follow, knocking in 39 home runs in 1987 and 1988. Strawberry entered his first rehabilitation stint at Smithers in February 1990, just prior to his final season with the Mets.  

Everyone loves a good redemption story, and both Gooden and Strawberry have been afforded ample opportunity to atone for their sins. Both were given second chances across town by New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, after wearing out their welcomes with the Mets. After serving a year-long suspension in 1995 and departing from the Mets in shame, Gooden signed a one-year, $950,000 contract with the Yankees, and threw a memorable no-hitter on May 14. Strawberry joined the Yankees midway through the 1995 season, after serving a 60-day suspension for testing positive for cocaine during spring training, with the San Francisco Giants. While Mets fans might not have liked the look of their former heroes in Yankees pinstripes, Strawberry and Gooden were members of the 1996 World Series champion Yankees a decade after winning the Series with the Mets, both making late-season contributions during the pennant race. Strawberry hit 11 home runs with 36 RBI in 63 games; Gooden went on a 9-4 run after throwing his no-hitter. Gooden and Strawberry are the only players to win a World Series as members of both the Mets and Yankees. 

When the Mets announced that the team would be retiring Gooden’s and Strawberry’s numbers, the idea was met with mixed response from the fans. The gut reaction whenever anyone mentions Doc and Darryl has been something to the effect of “what could have been,” had both not been done in by their self-destructive tendencies. Strawberry was suspended by MLB three times after leaving the Mets, twice for positive cocaine tests and once following an arrest for cocaine possession, to which he pleaded no contest.

Social media posts on Mets fan pages were examples of the divided consensus. On the negative side: “Two guys are being rewarded for extremely bad behavior, both were given the talent to be Hall of Famers but chose drugs and cut their careers short.”

But positive comments outweighed the negative by a large percentage; it seems most Mets fans are willing to forgive and forget:

“Good for you Doc. Simply stated there’s nothing better in life than coming out of the meat grinder, finding hope and putting life back together … I can so identify,” wrote one fan on the Sports New York Facebook page. 

“I read all the comments, not one negative comment. I have been teary-eyed the whole time. So many great memories, so much emotion. 1985 and 86, the greatest years ever,” wrote another admirer on the same page. 

Another lifelong Mets fan, and former major league beat writer, Bob Cohn, is in favor of retiring Doc’s and Darryl’s numbers, saying, “I think it’s the right thing to do, if they didn’t it would be a mistake. So many players have so many issues now, where do you draw the line? Before you know it, you’re not retiring anyone’s number.”

But, “Before the bottom fell out, he was an incredible, a likely Hall of Famer had his performance continued. As it turned out, the bottom did fall out. There are several more deserving former Mets than Doc,” wrote another fan on the Dave’s Mets Dugout Facebook page. 

Gooden has reconciled his life decisions and come to terms with the reality of his 16-year major league career and 11 seasons with the Mets. He stood at the podium this past Sunday, a rainy afternoon, and addressed the Mets faithful, many wearing No. 16 Gooden jerseys, who were there to welcome him back. There seemed a consensus in the stands that Gooden should be honored this way, and the dichotomy of his situation was not lost on the former star.

“The things I did on the field, I’ve always had a chance,” he said. “But unfortunately, the struggles I had off the field, I thought it diminished that.”

Doc’s and Darryl’s stories are about a lot more than falling short of their potential. They grew up in a wild decade defined by excessive behavior, and were swept up by it while we watched from the other side of the foul lines. But what we saw them do there was amazing, and worth remembering in its best light. 

“I’ve got to be thankful for the things I did accomplish, and not worry about the things that didn’t happen,” Gooden told the crowd. “Not to blow smoke, but I won just about every award a pitcher can win. I won the World Series with both New York teams, having your number retired, last year I was inducted into the Negro League Museum’s Hall of Game. I have nothing to be ashamed of about my career.”  ❖

Baltimore-based Charlie Vascellaro is a frequent speaker on the academic baseball conference circuit and the author of a biography of Hall of Fame slugger Hank Aaron. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications.