Doc: A Memoir (12 page)

The loss I really hated was June 18 in Montreal, 7–4. I walked six batters in six innings, the most I’d walked since my rookie season in 1984. That night in Montreal, Tim Wallach became the first batter ever to hit two home runs in one game against me. To make the sting even worse, my childhood pal Floyd Youmans was pitching for the Expos. When Floyd and I met for dinner after the game, he shrugged and said: “So you’re not Superman.”

I didn’t like to hear it. But he had a point. I was learning that I might not be. Two days later, the Associated Press asked, “What’s wrong with Dwight Gooden?”

A pattern began to develop. No matter how well I was pitching, I was putting more pressure on myself. Was I as good as last year? I wondered. Was my Cy Young year a fluke, or was something really inside me, something repeatable? The K Korner was restless. The fans wanted strikeouts—more strikeouts. I found myself worrying more about strikeouts than who I was facing at the plate. I hated seeing sports page headlines that read:
“METS WIN, BUT GOODEN ONLY FANS FIVE.”

Even though my mom knew nothing about fastballs, I needed someone to talk to. I called her one day when I was feeling low. “Maybe I can’t do it again,” I said.

She knew me better than anyone. She’d seen me doubt myself many
times before. She knew I needed a shot of confidence. “If you did it,” she told me, “that means it can be done. And if it can be done, you can do it.”

No one could do that for me like my mom.

To this day, I have tried to pinpoint how much my off-time drug use affected my on-field performance—and exactly when the damage began. And how much was I hurt by overusing my arm or other causes? I am haunted by those questions even now.

But give the coke credit: it helped me shove some of that pressure and anxiety aside. I didn’t use every day or even every other day. But as the season rolled on, my use slowly began to escalate. A friend of mine from Tampa hooked me up with a connection in New York on Long Island. Whatever I needed, he could supply. I knew enough not to get high the day or two before a pitching start. But once in a while after I pitched, I’d go out that night and party, drinking and using cocaine. I was sliding predictably out of control.

In between starts, instead of calling home and catching up with my family, I began hanging out and going to parties and nightclubs with my new druggie friends. If Carlene wasn’t around, I’d run around with women I had met in clubs on Long Island. These weren’t the kinds of women I would date and bring home to meet my mom in Tampa. But they were happy to go out with me, get high, and fool around. Once in a while, I’d go into Manhattan to a club called Bentley’s, where the women and the drugs were even looser. My life off the field was becoming booty calls and blow.

Tim Raines, the great base-stealing outfielder for the Expos, has said that his drug problem grew so severe in Montreal that he kept coke in his pocket and sometimes did lines during a game. That could be true. I don’t know. I know there’s been similar speculation about me, that I played while I was high on cocaine. But me? High on the field in ’86 or ever? No way.

I would have been far too hyper and jittery out there. My precision
would have been shot. All those people watching me. The paranoia setting in. I’d have made that second wild inning against Pittsburgh look like a model of ball control.

And then there would have been the issue of stopping. When I did coke, I could never do just a line or two and say, “Enough.” I’d have been sneaking into the dugout, snorting lines every inning or two. I’d have been wrecked by the sixth, for sure.

People look back on the 1986 Mets and say, “Now that was one wild group of guys!” We were young. We were loaded with talent. We had a city that loved us and fans who were desperate to win. We were an in-your-face team for an in-your-face city, perfectly matched with the times. Brawling with opposing players. Tearing up the nighttime across the National League. Stomping around New York with attitude and bravado. Rioting inside our own team plane. Someone even told some crazy story about slicing off the head of a cat. That one never happened.

I hate to undermine our bad-boy image, but here’s the truth: most of what we did that season really wasn’t all that wild. Darryl, Lenny, Ron, and I—when we got together on an off-night or after a game, we weren’t doing much more than drinking or playing poker. We weren’t exactly known for being faithful to the women in our lives. Our wives and girlfriends had plenty of reason to be mad. When they were away, we did meet other women in bars. We did take some of them home with us, sometimes two and three at a time. We boasted about our conquests, the way idiot clueless guys have done as long as there have been idiot clueless guys. And sometimes, we got caught.

One time in St. Louis, there were these two girls—they were sisters. Darryl and I had met them before and we’d messed around. Carlene didn’t make this particular trip but Darryl’s wife, Lisa, did, so he couldn’t hook up with the sisters. They were both mine. The next morning, I was in the hotel room with the girls. I heard a knock at the
door. I was still half asleep. I thought it must be housekeeping. I didn’t even look through the peephole. I just opened the door.

It was Carlene! In St. Louis! At my door!

“Oh, shit!” I thought. But she was already marching past me and into the hotel room. She saw the girls in the bed. She broke down in tears. There was no way to explain. She shot back out of the room and got a flight back home. The sisters totally flipped out.

“Should we leave?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “You probably should leave.”

I knew Carlene and Darryl’s wife, Lisa, were close friends. I knew there was only one way Carlene would’ve flown halfway across the country without telling me first. I asked Darryl if he told Lisa about me and the sisters.

“I didn’t tell her to tell Carlene,” he said. “I just told her, ‘Doc’s got these girls staying with him in his room.’” As tight as Lisa and Carlene were, he had to know that wouldn’t stay secret for long. But wasn’t Darryl my friend? As far as I was concerned, friends—let alone teammates—don’t do that to each other.

All I could think was, “Thanks, Darryl.”

We were aggressive young men with money in our pockets and testosterone to burn. But in a funny way, we were all still fairly young and innocent. I know I was. Drinking, carousing, staying out late—that was just our way of letting loose and having fun. That and a little drug use on the side.

We were much more a team of drinkers than of druggies. Throughout the season, I never saw cocaine on the team plane or shared in hotel rooms. People did drugs the way I did—alone or with friends from outside. We kept that stuff separate and quiet and to ourselves. I thought I was being discreet, the way most drug users do, I guess. But word was obviously trickling around the leagues: some players were doing more than getting drunk at night. And my name was one of the ones that kept coming up.

During the second half of the season, Gene Orza and Donald Fehr from the Major League Baseball Players Association called me in for a meeting. I went to their office in Manhattan.

“There are rumors out there that you’re hanging out in the wrong places, doing illegal stuff,” Gene said. At a charity dinner that summer, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth had told Ray Knight that he’d heard a black superstar on the Mets was doing illegal drugs. Ray had asked Darryl about it. Without hesitation, Darryl had said, “It’s Doc.”

The reality is it could have been either one of us. It could have been players of a different race, as well. Darryl was just savvy at deflecting it, then later denying he’d said anything. Naturally, when confronted by the union heads, I denied it. I didn’t point a finger at Darryl or anyone else. I just said it wasn’t me.

“Will you take a urine test?” Donald wanted to know.

I stalled. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

I asked Jim, my agent. He said I was under no obligation to do a urine test. Jim was a nice guy and had no power over how I conducted myself. He didn’t pry into what was going on.

Afterward, the Mets never officially called me in for a talk or anything. Davey came up to me once before a game and asked if everything was okay, and I told him I was fine. Obviously, it wasn’t. But that was as far as it went. I had fairly open relationships with Davey and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. I felt like I could tell them almost anything—except for the truth about this.

Even with all that swirling around, I could still get out there and really pitch. We clinched the National League East on September 17, a night game, with a 4–2 win over the Cubs in front of 49,989 crazed Mets fans at Shea. I pitched all nine innings. I was smokin’, and I don’t mean pot. That was one of my very best moments in baseball, ever. From the sixth inning on, the fans were on their feet. We’d laid the foundation
over the past three seasons. They could hardly wait to taste the rewards.

The fact that I could deliver that is something I have never stopped feeling grateful for.

The Mets hadn’t won anything since 1969. Hadn’t been to the postseason since 1973. The dugout was full of Mets executives and their families. Cops with helmets were waiting off to the side of both dugouts and stationed all the way around the field. The last out was Chico Walker, a lefty. I got him to a 1–2 count. Keith Hernandez came over to the mound and shouted “fastball” emphatically. I ended up throwing Chico a curve, one of the few times I didn’t take Keith’s advice. Chico hit a ground ball to Wally Backman at second base. Wally fell to his knees to secure the ball, making absolutely sure he didn’t bobble or lose it. Then he threw to first, easily getting Chico out. As Keith caught Wally’s throw, one of the first fans on the field was already running past him. Even before Chico was officially called out, two dozen people jumped the wall and were out on the field. There were so many people out there, Keith joked to me later, he figured if Wally hadn’t stopped the ball, one of the cheering fans would have.

In my excitement, I raised my arms and looked at Gary Carter, who was running toward me. By then, fans had already stolen his mask and helmet. But instead of waiting for Gary, I turned and tried to run off the field. Thousands of fans were rushing toward us. Darryl lost his glove. Many of the players instinctively grabbed the caps off their heads, hoping to save them. But that was mostly futile. The caps were snatched and gone. I was hugged, then tackled and nearly buried alive. I looked up and realized I was at the bottom of a growing human pile. I was happy. Then, all of a sudden I was on the ground and scared. I couldn’t get up for what seemed like forever but was probably forty-five seconds at most. I didn’t know who was on top of me. At one point, Keith jumped onto the pile. Davey sent police to the mound to rescue
me. But it was Greg Pavlich, our bullpen coach, who managed to swat some of the fans away. He pulled me up from the pile, and we made a mad dash to the dugout, where anyone who dared to enter was assaulted with ice, water, talcum powder, beer, shaving cream, and green dye. “I don’t think they know how to celebrate,” Davey said, some mystery liquid dripping down his face. “It might be more dangerous in here than out there.”

We went to Houston to face the Astros and their star pitcher Mike Scott in the playoffs. If they were going to beat us, it’d be on his shoulders. He had over three hundred strikeouts that year, pitched in the All-Star Game, and would go on to win the Cy Young Award—not to mention the MVP of this playoff series. He had a ninety-one-mile-an-hour fastball, but that wasn’t as intimidating as the rumors that he scuffed the ball. All season long, people tried to catch him. But they never did. All I know is that whatever he was doing, the ball danced like a Wiffle ball. We had a lot of hard-charging characters on our team, but the idea that he scuffed the ball turned them into butter.

I pitched against Mike in game one and gave up a homer to Glen Davis in the second inning. I lasted eight innings without giving up another run. But we couldn’t hit Mike and lost 1–0. Guys were frustrated, inspecting the balls, complaining to the ump, you name it. I used the same balls Mike did. I could see that some of them were scuffed. But Mike looked clear, and no one could prove otherwise.

We won the next two, then lost one—to Mike Scott again. The series was tied 2–2 when I went against Nolan Ryan in game five. For me, it was a dream come true. Nolan was a pitcher I’d watched on Saturday afternoons in complete awe with my dad ten years earlier. He was such a dominant pitcher that coming to the plate to face him made my knees turn to jelly. He wasn’t even that big of a guy. He had big legs and a high kick, and that’s where most of his power came from. It was a long game. Neither one of us, Nolan or I, was willing to go to the showers. I went ten innings, gave up two runs, and didn’t get the decision.
Gary Carter saved us in the bottom of the twelfth with an RBI single, scoring Wally Backman and getting the win. Up 3–2.

We flew back to Houston to play game six the very next day. This was really our game seven. If we lost, we’d be going back up against Mike Scott, and he was deep inside our heads by then. We all had the same feeling. We weren’t going to hit the guy. Talk about losing the game even before you get out there! Our only chance was to avoid playing the game. The Astros jumped out to an early 3–0 lead on us in one of the most nerve-racking playoff games of all time, and I wasn’t even pitching. It took us sixteen innings to finally put the Astros away, 7–6. Jesse Orosco came in and somehow picked up his third win. We were going to the World Series at last.

The game had run so long, from 3:05 to 8:30, we had to rush from our lockers to William P. Hobby Airport. The only time we had to celebrate was on our chartered plane back to New York. Which we did. With gusto. Beers came out. Then little bottles of the hard stuff. Then people started throwing slices of cake. Then one of the players’ wives threw up in a seat back, and Darryl thought it might be fun to see how far back an airline seat could really recline. The answer? All the way back to flat, if you pushed it hard enough and broke the back off. By the time we got off, the whole cabin was smeared with food and alcohol and worse. Two rows of seats were destroyed. It looked like someone had tipped over a dumpster in there on Mardi Gras Day.