Authors: Dwight Gooden,Ellis Henican
That summer of 1989, all those fast and breaking balls were finally catching up with me. First, I felt a dull ache in my right arm and shoulder. The ache wouldn’t go away. Just before the All-Star Break, I was having trouble raising my arm above my head. The doctors looked me over and agreed. I needed a break. On July 2, they put me on the shelf for what would wind up being two months. The issue was eventually diagnosed as a small muscle tear. I was scared. I was depressed. I didn’t know how serious this was. Would my arm ever be the same? Those were the kinds of thoughts going through my head. Getting injured was a whole new experience for me. Except for going to Smithers, I had never been on the disabled list before. The doctors kept working on me. I did some physical therapy, then toward the end of the season, I thought I was ready. Davey agreed to let me try. After a couple of innings of warm-ups in the bullpen, he sent me in as relief to face the Phillies. I threw forty-five pitches in three scoreless innings. But when I got off the field, I had to admit that my arm didn’t feel better. If anything, it felt worse.
I was devastated.
I exercised through the off-season with Larry Mayol, a trainer in St. Petersburg who’d worked for the Mets in the early 1980s before going into private practice. Trainers like Larry are geniuses. And with some of the painful exercises they put athletes through, they are torturers too. But the results are undeniable. I think Larry knew more than most doctors did about the mechanics of the human body. He and I spent months strengthening my arm and shoulder. And the effort paid off. I won nineteen games the following season.
I was doing well staying away from drugs. I was still drinking—plenty. But I was being drug tested regularly, and I wasn’t touching cocaine. To their credit, my Mets teammates didn’t try to tempt me to start using again, not even the ones who were using themselves. It took some respect and understanding on their part, and I really appreciated it. I supposed they recognized that for any addict, even for one
who’s been clean a while, staying that way is always a daily struggle. So they indulged in whatever ways they chose to, and in those years I kept my distance. Dr. Lans often went on road trips with us. His main job, it seemed, was making sure Darryl and I stayed productive and healthy. Clearly, this hadn’t been a smashing success for him or for us, although I really don’t think I could blame him. When Dr. Lans was on a road trip, I didn’t even like to go out drinking. I didn’t want him seeing me hungover in the morning. And I didn’t want to plant any new suspicions in his mind.
Still, partying remained a big part of the Mets’ identity—too big to continue without serious repercussions in seasons to come. When Darryl emerged from rehab and returned to the team, I think we all knew that 1990 would be his last season with the team, given his public troubles and his legendary contract disputes. What was difficult for me to stomach was how abruptly the Mets got rid of Davey Johnson. Winning the National League East in 1988 and finishing second in 1989 didn’t buy Davey much protection. Our slow start in 1990 was too much for Frank Cashen to accept. Davey was fired by the end of May. Looking back, I can see that he was always too much of a player’s manager for the Mets brass. I’m convinced he sealed his fate when he ripped up that bill for the damaged airplane. Bud Harrelson replaced Davey. My repaired arm kept performing. I stayed clean. And we were in contention for much of the second half of the season before fading to the Pirates.
By then, I began approaching seasons more conservatively. I wasn’t nineteen anymore. I’d thrown an awful lot of pitches in my career. I went from being Dr. K to plain-old Doc again. When I talked to the media, I made a point of saying, “Just call me Doctor now.” Early on, I craved strikeouts. Now I just wanted to win games, whatever that might take. Now my focus was pitch location, not trying to overpower the hitters.
Without guaranteed strikeout pitches, I began luring the hitters to put the ball in play, trusting our fielders to get the job done. I probably should have been thinking that all through the 1980s. I’m sure that would have lengthened my career. But Dr. K was all about the strikeouts.
By the early ’90s, our fielding had become a patchwork of talented guys playing out of position. We had Gregg Jefferies at second base and a constant rotation of players at third. Dave Magadan shifted from first base to third base. Howard Johnson spent a year in the outfield then came back to third. Bobby Bonilla played at least four positions before spending a season at third. On top of that, we probably had a dozen different shortstops. I’m not making excuses. There were many reasons we weren’t the ’86 Mets. I didn’t have the stuff I’d had before my arm troubles. But our fielding was part of the reason my ERA was creeping up. Often, the fielders just couldn’t get to the ball to make a play.
Going into the 1991 season, I didn’t stick with the off-season regime Larry Mayol had prepared for me, and I suffered because of it. On opening day, I went eight innings in the rain against the Phillies. That wasn’t my call. Bud Harrelson, starting his first full season as manager, really wanted that first win. In spring training, I hadn’t been throwing more than sixty pitches a game. I might have pitched twice that in our 2–1 victory.
Pitching had begun to hurt. The only thing that kept my mind off of my pain was our newborn daughter, Ashley, who arrived shortly after the 1991 season had started. Monica and I set up a room for her in our house on Long Island. I loved Dwight Junior. But he was living with his mother in Florida. For once in my life, I had something that brought me daily joy other than baseball. By mid-August, we were fifteen games out of first place. So after Shea games, I was thrilled to drive home and just be a dad.
My father’s health had deteriorated so much that he spent a chunk
of 1991 in New York City at the Hospital for Special Surgery, where more attention could be paid to his kidney function. It wasn’t easy seeing him in such poor shape. But we got to spend more time together than we had in years. I was maturing. He got to see his granddaughter. And we could talk baseball in person in the middle of a season, which is something we hadn’t done in years.
At the same time, the Mets weren’t giving me much to smile about. It wasn’t fun being at the ballpark and not in the pennant race. Hearing guys talk about their off-season plans in August was depressing. And I could tell something was really wrong with my arm. By September, the doctors determined I had a partial tear of my rotator cuff and labrum. I’d have to undergo surgery if I wanted to play again next year. The defeatist talk around the clubhouse was that if we didn’t make the playoffs, at least we would probably be in second place. I started wondering what it might be like to play for some other team.
Looking back, I can see now that spring training of 1992 was the beginning of the end of the Mets for me. I had a rush of bad news early that year. My mom’s mom passed away, which was tough on my whole family. Then Darryl Strawberry’s first autobiography,
Darryl,
came out in March. In it, he basically accused me—falsely—of getting high during the 1986 playoff series. “If he was using cocaine during the series, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least because the pressure was so intense it made everyone do crazy things,” Darryl wrote about me. The media were all over that loaded sentence.
Thanks, man. I thought we were friends.
Now a new season was about to begin. And instead of answering questions about baseball and our hopes for the season, I was being grilled about stuff that happened six years earlier, propelled by the false allegations of my supposed good friend.
Yes, I’d gotten high
after
the Series. No, not
during
the postseason play.
That may not have seemed important to Darryl. It was very important to me.
In the course of 342 pages, Darryl credited himself for most of the good things that happened on the team in the eight years he was a Met and blamed his teammates, the front office, racism, you name it—anything but Darryl—for the shortcomings. And to make the book even harder to swallow, he’d asked me to write the introduction, which I did before I ever read the book, saying a whole bunch of nice things about him.
“A person I came to rely on as a friend… Darryl stood up for me… stormed out on the field to help me”—
blah, blah, blah.
“Everyone who reads this book can now meet the Darryl Strawberry I know—the real Darryl.”
Um, not quite.
I spoke to Darryl after the book came out. I told him I was really pissed. “You don’t say these kind of things about your friends,” I said. “Stuff that’s not even true.” He got all sheepish with me and apologized. That was just Darryl. He was constantly doing that. He’d say something terrible about one of his teammates, then feel bad about it. Or he’d get confronted about what he said. Quickly, he’d apologize. Then, soon enough he was out trashing his teammates again.
When reporters asked him why he wrote that about me, he admitted that he hadn’t seen me using during the playoffs or the World Series. “I was talking about my year in ’86 being involved in heavy drinking and partying,” he said. “The issue came up about other players.” He said his coauthor, Art Rust Jr., asked him about coke and me: “Did you think he was using?”
“I said I wouldn’t be surprised because the next spring he checked himself into Smithers,” Darryl said, hedging yet again. “Now what’s wrong with that?”
Darryl’s literary hand grenade wasn’t the biggest challenge of that ugly spring. A woman I had sex with during spring training in 1991
decided a year later to tell local police that she’d been raped—setting off another media frenzy and shaking my whole world. Jeff Torborg, our new manager, must have been wondering why he’d ever accepted this crazy job.
Here’s what happened: on March 30, I’d been out for drinks with outfielders Vince Coleman and Daryl Boston at a nightclub in Jupiter, Florida, called Jox. It wasn’t far from our spring training facility in Port St. Lucie. The whole area was fairly sleepy back then. Every spring, the Mets were about the only attraction in town. At night, we’d go out drinking and looking for women, and women would go out drinking and looking for Mets. The hookups were never hard to come by. This particular night, I met a thirty-one-year-old woman, and we started talking upstairs. It was getting late. Vince and Daryl decided to go back to the house I was renting and crash. The woman and I stayed at the club, dancing and getting to know each other. Then she drove us back to my place. When we got there, Vince and Daryl were on the couch in the living room, playing
R.B.I. Baseball
on the Nintendo. We walked past the two of them and into the bedroom, where she and I had sex. When we came out, she hung around for more drinks.
“You ever been with three guys in a night?” Vince asked, jokingly.
“Two,” she said. “Never three.”
Vince then asked if she wanted to go into the bedroom with him, and she said yes. Before the night was over, all of us had had sex with her.
I was married. This was wrong. But it wasn’t rape.
The following day, players were comparing notes on their nights out. Daryl Boston told Ron Darling what had happened back at my house. When Daryl described the woman, Ron said, “Oh, man, didn’t you know? She’s going out with David.”
Nothing happened for a long time. Then, suddenly, a whole season later, she went to the cops. And Frank Cashen, yet again, was calling
me into his office for a serious chat. I truly had no idea this one was coming.
“Do you have an attorney?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“You’re being accused of rape.”
This wasn’t the first time Frank had to make a speech like this to a player. David Cone had been the focus of a sex-assault investigation in Philadelphia toward the end of the previous season. From what I heard, he’d shunned an “old reliable” and chosen a different groupie, leaving the first woman upset enough to accuse him of assaulting her. Wasn’t that what Hubie Brooks had warned about my rookie year? Frank told David he could be arrested at any moment. In the end, he wasn’t. Fairly quickly, the authorities decided not to charge him at all, but not before the woman’s allegation was all over the media.
I told Frank I’d get a lawyer. In Port St. Lucie, I was concerned about how the local folks would react as word spread that three black ballplayers had been accused of raping a white woman. I was also concerned about spending the next decade or two in a Florida prison. All of the New York papers sent more reporters down to cover the story. They began to fight with one another over scoops on the case. For six weeks, what was left of my reputation was debated and trashed.
Vince, Daryl, and I all passed polygraphs, and the woman’s case began to fall apart. It turned out she had some history making similar allegations. On April 15, State Attorney Bruce Colton announced the cases were being dropped. Citing “an accumulation of problems” with the evidence, Colton said that prosecutors had come to doubt “whether there was a likelihood of a conviction.”
But I definitely didn’t get off free. Nor did those who loved me. Monica, pregnant with our second daughter, was crushed by the whole episode, as was my mother, who was still dealing with the grief from her own mom’s death. They always believed I didn’t rape the woman.
But Monica wasn’t buying my story that nothing had happened between me and the woman. I never admitted anything to Monica. I just counted myself lucky the case never went to trial. For sure, I would have had to testify.
Nineteen ninety-two turned into 1993. Jeff Torborg was replaced by Dallas Green, the John Wayne of major-league baseball. Dallas looked at me and saw the last of the bad-boy Mets, and I think he wanted me gone. By 1994, I certainly made that easy for him.
Sliding Back
O
PENING DAY AT WRIGLEY
isn’t supposed to feel good. Winter is always slow to pack in Chicago. On this day, April 4, 1994, the temperature said fifty-three degrees. To a pitcher raised in Tampa, it felt more like forty-three, maybe thirty-three with the wind chill.