Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (8 page)

In spring training of 1989, while lining up for a team picture, Strawberry suddenly took a swing at Hernandez, the Mets first baseman, shouting, “I’ve been tired of you for years!”

“That was where it really started to unravel for Darryl,” Darling says. “He lost a lot of respect, and I think he was embarrassed. Keith and Gary were at the ends of their careers, and the team was passing to Darryl and Dwight. And they were never able to lead the team in the same way.”

As the pressure grew and as the Mets failed again and again to make it back to the World Series, Strawberry began to see himself more and more as a victim. “Other guys would have a bad year and people would make excuses for them,” he says, “but if we didn’t win it was my fault. My own teammates would say things about me. I could never figure that out.

“Listen, I hold myself accountable for all that’s happened. I take full responsibility for what I did. But me and Doc were two young stars, black players, who came to New York, and the expectations were extremely high. I don’t think any other two players in any sport came to New York at that age with expectations so high. The pressure, it was so great. That’s why I want to help kids now. I didn’t have anyone say, ‘Let me help you.’ If I had had someone like that around, maybe I’d have had a different way of dealing with it.”

WHEN STRAWBERRY, at 21, and Gooden, at 19, joined the Mets, they became part of a team that played hard and lived harder. That group evolved into a ball club fueled by an intense desire to be the best but very often driven also by alcohol, amphetamines, gambling and drugs. Young, impressionable and unsophisticated, Strawberry and Gooden were driftwood in the current.

“When Doc came out of Smithers in 1987,” Garland says, “he talked to me about how prevalent the drug use was on the team. He started calling off names. He rattled off more than 10—more than half the team. Probably around 14 or 15. And I thought the ’84, ’85 and ’86 teams were wilder.”

Gooden recalls the time on a team charter in 1986 when the door to one of the bathrooms popped open, revealing a teammate inside using cocaine. “A lot of us saw it,” Gooden says. “We just looked at each other and said, ‘Nobody saw nothing.’”

Between 1986 and ’91, of the 22 Mets players who appeared in the 1986 World Series, eight were arrested following incidents that were alcohol- and/or battery-related (Strawberry, Gooden, Darling, Rick Aguilera, Lenny Dykstra, Kevin Mitchell, Bob Ojeda and Tim Teufel) and a ninth was disciplined by baseball for cocaine use (Hernandez). The charges against Aguilera, Mitchell and Ojeda were eventually dropped.

Johnson, the New York manager from 1984 through part of the ’90 season, has admitted he drank too much in those years. He kept a refrigerator stocked with beer in his Shea Stadium office. A former Mets player even remembers one of the coaches smoking pot on a beach in Florida during one spring training.

Moreover, Johnson says he knew “a couple of the New York veterans, not including Strawberry, were using amphetamines.” Says Garland, “The guys who used amphetamines, maybe the numbers weren’t great, but those who did use them used them almost every day. They depended on them so much they felt like they couldn’t play without them.”

After the 1986 season the Mets traded Mitchell, who had grown up around gangs in San Diego, because he scared the suits in the front office. They worried he was corrupting Strawberry and Gooden. “It was a mistake,” Johnson says. “Mitch would have one or two drinks, but that’s it. He was a good influence on them. He played hard. He had the street smarts they lacked. He could spot trouble and tell people to get lost. They needed that.”

The most influential player on those Mets teams of the mid- to late-1980s was Hernandez, the smarmy first baseman who, during 1985 drug trials in Pittsburgh involving 23 baseball players, admitted using cocaine while he was with St. Louis in the early ’80s. Hernandez advised Strawberry on how to break out of a batting slump: Go out and get totally smashed. Strawberry remembers the time Hernandez told him he’d found the perfect drink, of which he needed only five or six in a night: “Dry martini,” Strawberry says, laughing.

The other veteran pillar of the team, Carter, was ignored or, worse, ridiculed. His crime? He was a conservative family man. “There was a lack of respect for Gary Carter,” Garland says. “He was clearly in an overwhelming minority—or I should say an underwhelming minority.”

The game was changing in those years, what with salaries and the memorabilia business beginning to boom; with the social status of players shifting, as revered icons became disposable celebrities; and with cocaine, as it was in the rest of American society, readily available.

Says Darling, “Darryl and, to a lesser extent, Dwight were the first athletes I’d ever seen who surrounded themselves with an inner circle of about eight to 10 associates. I felt like I never really knew either one of them. These people will tell the big star whatever he wants to hear. Their whole existence is contingent on one thing: making the man happy. It was not a real world.”

The vortex of these changes—the money, the empty adulation, the cocaine—spun more quickly for a team from New York. The Mets became such a sexy, star-studded team that they were chased by fans carrying video cameras, the newest high-tech assault weapon of an increasingly aggressive audience. Just getting out of a hotel became an exercise in subterfuge.

The Mets were a portable party. Who among them would dare to be the grinch who turned down the music? What stick-in-the-mud would confront a teammate about drinking too much? The dynamics of the baseball clubhouse, especially the New York clubhouse, would not allow that. “All ballplayers like their beer,” says a Mets insider. “The difference with this team was they liked all the stuff harder than beer.”

And so any talk about overindulging was done with a wink and a chuckle. Strawberry would see Gooden with liquor and say, “Man, you drinking again?” And Gooden would catch Strawberry doing likewise and remark, “Man, you’re an alcoholic.” Just something else to laugh about, that’s all it was.

When Gooden got out of Smithers in 1987, his counselor there, Allan Lans, was given added responsibility as the Mets’ psychiatrist. But Lans was distrusted by many players, who figured he was a spy for management. Gooden would joke to Strawberry, “Doctor Lans says you’re a time bomb waiting to go off,” and later Doc would simply say, “Tick, tick, tick….” as he walked by Strawberry.

Strawberry often left the clubhouse after games with cans of beer in a paper bag. On travel days, he and Gooden would pack large bottles of vodka in their carry bags to take aboard the team charter planes.

“If we wouldn’t have partied so much, we would have won more,” Strawberry says. “We had a team full of drunks. We’d go into a town and couldn’t wait to go out drinking and partying, always asking each other, ‘Hey, where you going tonight?’ If we had 24 guys on the team in those days, at least half of them were hard drinkers or drug users. That was a hard-living team.”

“What I remember,” Gooden says, “is we’d be on the road and we’d come back into the clubhouse after batting practice and we’d be saying, ‘Yeah, let’s kick some ass and then go out and show everyone we own this town.’ Whether it was Montreal or St. Louis or whatever, we wanted people to know it, like we were taking over the place.”

Several players were so heavily involved with poker that Johnson or one of his coaches occasionally sat in for a few hands in the clubhouse. “My fear,” Johnson says, “was that the stakes were getting out of control, and one player would be into another player for a dangerous amount of money. I didn’t want to see guys get hurt financially. Then there’d be animosity.”

Johnson was fired during the 1990 season, in great part because Mets management saw the players getting away from him. He disputes Strawberry’s assessment that the team drank itself out of more titles. “I enjoyed those teams, and we were in contention every year,” he says.

But Magadan, sometimes one of Strawberry’s harsher critics, says, “I would agree with Darryl on that. We just lost perspective. I think a lot of guys lost sight of what our goals were. We’d go on a six-game road trip, say to Chicago and St. Louis. And instead of thinking, Let’s win five out of six or six out of six, guys would be thinking, In Chicago I can go out to this restaurant and this bar, and in St. Louis I can go here and there. It was almost as if the games were getting in the way for some guys. They’d rather skip them and just go out.”

LAST AUGUST, on one of his first nights back home in St. Petersburg after his stay at the Betty Ford Center and his counseling sessions in New York, Gooden grabbed a cold beer from his refrigerator and jumped into his black Mercedes. One for the road. He headed north on I-275 to Tampa for a night out with friends. Already under a 60-day suspension from major league baseball, he was risking an even harsher sentence. So what? He was feeling worthless and alone. Everyone seemed to be giving up on him.

The beer started his familiar chain reaction: a few more beers that led to hard liquor that led to cocaine. “If I don’t drink, I have no desire to use coke,” Gooden says. “You could put a bag of coke in front of me right now and I’d have no desire for it at all. Once I drink, especially when I get drunk, the desire is there. The hard stuff leads to coke. It was the same thing over and over.

“My problems have never been here in St. Pete. I was always getting into trouble in Tampa. It’s strange. I have a son in Tampa, and I go there all the time to see him. If I go to Tampa during the day, I’m fine. But in Tampa after the sun goes down, it’s like I’m a vampire. I change. Get a beer for the ride, meet my friends, go to a club, and I’m in trouble.

“Why did it happen? That’s one of the things I’m trying to work out with my counselor. It’s tough trying to pinpoint it. It’s not any one thing. It’s not that simple. Why go out and get s--- faced to the max? I still can’t pinpoint it.”

Gooden was the greatest pitching prodigy ever. He struck out more batters (276), in 1984, than any rookie ever had. At 20 he was the youngest Opening Day pitcher this century and the youngest Cy Young Award winner ever. He is the only pitcher this century to have 200 strikeouts in each of his first three seasons. Of the first 100 games he started in the big leagues, he lost only 19.

“He was by far the greatest pitcher I’d ever seen,” Darling says. “I pitched behind him in the rotation, so I always charted his pitches. Those first two years, I swear, it seemed like he was 0 and 2 on 75 percent of the hitters. It was like Little League, where the other team has no chance except to bunt. If you told me Dwight was going to win 300 games and strike out 400 people one year, I’d have believed it. That’s how good he was.”

In the months after he was voted Rookie of the Year in 1984, Gooden, then living in Tampa, began using cocaine occasionally behind closed bedroom doors at house parties. Life was so easy. It had to be celebrated. “My nearest sister is 13 years older than me,” says Gooden, who has five older siblings. “I don’t want to say I was spoiled, but I had what I wanted growing up. Once I got to the big leagues, it happened so quickly for me. I got caught up in it.”

Says Strawberry, “Doc came into the big leagues at 19. By 20 he was a big drunk hanging out in strip clubs.”

“Not true,” Gooden says. “It was my third year when I started to drink heavily.”

By then, 1986, rumors about his drug use began to swirl. People called the Mets front office claiming to have knowledge of it. Gooden missed an exhibition game because of a friend’s car accident, he claimed. He missed the team’s ticker-tape parade following the World Series victory because, he says now, he was hung over from the night before and overslept. He called off his engagement to Carlene Pearson and fathered a son, Dwight Jr., by another woman, Debra Hamilton of Tampa. Then he had a brawl with the Tampa police after they stopped his car.

So on March 24, 1987, at Gooden’s urging, his agent, Jim Neader, met with Mets vice president Al Harazin to work out a voluntary drug-testing plan. Gooden was supposed to attend the meeting but did not show. “Test for everything,” Neader said. The next day, Neader told Harazin, “Go ahead, test away.” So the following day, the Mets took a urine sample and sent it to St. Petersburg General Hospital.

“I feel like I have to do it,” Gooden said at the time. “I want to convince the Mets more than I do anyone else.”

On March 30 a test came up positive for cocaine. On April Fools’ Day the Mets confronted Gooden with the test result. His first reaction was to deny it. Then he broke down and cried. “It was an absolute bombshell,” Johnson says. “I thought it wasn’t true. He was on time, worked hard and set a good example for the other pitchers. He had one of the best work ethics I’ve seen.”

Gooden’s life was a lie, and the Mets unwittingly helped perpetuate it. Under the overzealous mothering of the front office and its publicity staff, Gooden was told when to speak, whom to speak to and, sometimes, what to say. Such was management’s paranoia that during Gooden’s first workout at Shea Stadium after his first drug rehabilitation, reporters were sequestered in an auxiliary locker room with a guard posted at the door. The press was even refused access to the press box. The Mets weren’t about to let Gooden become a loose cannon like Strawberry. Problem was, they failed to let Gooden be himself.

“I became this person I really wasn’t,” he says. “People said I was this quiet, nice, shy kid. Sometimes I just wanted to yell, ‘s---’ or ‘f---’ or just blow somebody out. But I’d always stop myself and say, ‘I’m not supposed to be like this.’ Jay [Horwitz, the team’s public relations director] would ask me to do an interview, and even if I didn’t want to do it, I’d say, ‘O.K., I’ll do it.’”

“The problem with Dwight,” Johnson says, “is he couldn’t say no. He was too nice. Evidently he knew people in Tampa who could get you in trouble. It was like he was the lucky one, and it would be wrong for him not to be their friend, like he wanted to prove to them he wasn’t acting like a big shot and turning his back on them.”

Says Gooden, “That’s 100 percent true. I have to be more vocal—in any situation.” Gooden, despite Horwitz’s concern, decided on his own to be interviewed for this story. “I’m not going to sit back and just take things in anymore,” he says. “I have to be me. I’m going to be a little more selfish.”