Doc: A Memoir (6 page)

This time, he invited me and a couple of prospects from Tampa Catholic—Richard Monteleone and Lance McCullers—to the newspaper office to watch the major-league draft. Back then, we didn’t have wall-to-wall coverage on ESPN. The
Trib
was the one place in town
that had a live feed of the draft. In the middle of the newsroom was a TV screen that looked like it might be announcing arrivals and departures at the airport. They laid out some donuts and oranges for us to eat.

There were rumors about my prospects.

Coach Reed had been gathering intelligence from his scout friends. “You might go as early as the fifth round,” Coach said.

Others were making what sounded like crazy predictions. Scouts for the Reds and the Cubs had even called my house, saying if they picked a high schooler in the first round, it might be me. And the Cubs had the first pick overall.

As Eddie and I stared up at the screen, the first pick of the draft came and went. The Cubs picked a high schooler all right—but it wasn’t me. They chose Shawon Dunston, a shortstop from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn.

McEwen was sitting next to me, and I leaned over and told him about the phone call from the Cubs scout. “Shake it off,” he said with a laugh. “Everything changes on the fly, Doc. It’s gonna be a long night, but good things are gonna happen.”

As the next couple of picks went by without any mention of Dwight Gooden, Coach Reed’s theory was starting to sound about right. I wouldn’t get drafted early, but I was formulating a plan. I’d work hard and show everyone what a later-round steal I was.

Now it was the Mets’ turn. They had the fifth pick of the first round. But I was daydreaming, busy convincing myself that ultimately the draft order didn’t mean much.

Then I glanced at the board and saw something strange:

5
TH PICK. NY METS. DWIGHT GOODEN. HILLSBOROUGH HIGH. TAMPA, FL
.

Eddie’s eyes popped open, but nothing came out of his mouth. Frantically, he was pointing at the board.

“Doc!” McEwen shouted. “You just went to the Mets!”

Monteleone and McCullers, both forecast to go well ahead of me, looked as shocked as I was.

“I don’t think that’s right, Mr. McEwen,” I said, shaking my head.

“Whaddaya mean?” he asked me.

“I can’t be the fifth pick,” I told him. “Coach Reed didn’t expect me to go until the fifth round. He talked to a lot of scouts.”

“Things change,” McEwen said. “I doubt there’s any mistake.”

“Well, why don’t you call them?”

“Call the Mets?” McEwen asked. Clearly he thought I was crazy. But he picked up the phone.

“No mistake,” he said when he hung up. “Dwight Gooden. First Round. New York Mets.”

He shot me a huge smile.

“Great job, Doc,” the dean of Tampa sportswriting said, shaking my hand.

I couldn’t believe it. I knew I had ability. I didn’t feel like I was undeserving. But there were some very talented players who were drafted after me that year: Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, Will Clark, David Wells, Roger McDowell, Jimmy Key, Bo Jackson, Mitch Williams, Terry Pendleton, Rafael Palmeiro, Todd Worrell, Barry Larkin, and my high school teammate, Floyd Youmans. The list went on and on.

I was too excited to drive the Duster home. I gave Eddie the keys. I couldn’t wait to see the look on my dad’s face.

“We did it!” I yelled as Eddie parked the car and we ran up the sidewalk, as my dad was stepping onto the porch. “Fifth pick! First round. I was the Mets’ first player.”

The look on my dad’s face, right then and there, might have been the happiest I had ever seen on him. That was it. All our time on the diamond. All those Saturdays in the den. The promise I had made to my mother. His dream and my dream, finally mushed into one.

Normally, Dad didn’t show much emotion. Once or twice in my entire life, he said he loved me. But standing out on the porch that evening, he gave me a giant hug. He laughed long and loud. Then he went inside and got on the phone, calling what seemed like everyone he knew, making sure they understood how big this was.

Within a few minutes, news trucks from Channel 8 and Channel 13 were pulling up on our block. Other reporters were calling on the phone. Neighbors came out to see what all the excitement was. Soon, moms in housecoats and dads in Bermuda shorts were giving interviews about what a nice, decent kid I was. My mom was happy too. But she remained pragmatic.

“Will the Mets let you go to college first?” she asked.

Dad and I both laughed. “No, Ella,” Dad said, “It doesn’t work like that. The deal is for now.”

Joe McIlvaine was a tall, geeky-looking fellow who had a short minor-league career as a pitcher in the early 1970s. By 1982, he was director of scouting for the Mets. Even though I’d been the team’s first pick, the fifth in the entire draft, and Joe was the team’s top scout, he confessed to me that he’d never seen me pitch. Every time he’d been in Tampa, he said, I was playing third base or outfield. He’d relied on scouting reports that local guys sent in.

But now his job was to sign me.

The night I was drafted, he called my house to congratulate me. He said he’d be flying down to Tampa, contract in hand.

Throughout the spring, quite a few agents had called the house, offering to represent me. Dad had met with several, but we didn’t hire any of them. He got on the phone and told Joe: “I look forward to meeting with you.” Then he looked at me and said, “I’ll handle this.”

Joe showed up in Tampa a couple of days later. Dad banished Mom and me from the living room. Through my closed bedroom door, I
could hear Dad and Joe murmuring for what seemed like hours. But I couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Finally, Dad called me in.

“Son,” he said soberly, “we’ve still got some work to do on this contract. We’re a long way apart.” Looking at the Mets’ top scout, he added, “Forty thousand is not right for a fifth pick.”

“It’s okay,” Joe said, smiling weakly. His words were optimistic, but he looked worn-out.

Here was my dad, driving a relentless bargain with the head of scouting for the New York Mets. He was either making me rich or blowing the deal for me. I wasn’t sure which. But he was definitely putting the screws to Joe.

“I’ll go back to New York and see what I can do,” Joe said. “Then we’ll take it from there.”

“Good,” Dad told him. “We appreciate it.”

That was that. After the Mets man was gone, Dad motioned Mom and me into the kitchen. We all sat at the table. “Their offer is nowhere near where it needs to be,” Dad said.

“Everything else in the contract is fine,” he continued, suddenly sounding like a lawyer or an agent. “Except the money.”

I was confused. How did my father, who had a third-grade education and had worked his whole life at a chemical plant, know what should be in a major-league baseball contract? It was the same as the way I wondered how he learned all those pitching drills he put me through. Dad just knew stuff. I had my concerns, but I didn’t say anything.

My mother spoke up. “Dan,” she said, sounding slightly panicked, “did Dwight just lose his chance?”

“Oh, it’s all a game,” Dad said, not seeming at all concerned. “It’s just a game they play with everybody.”

A few days later, Joe was back in town. He took my mom, my dad,
my sister Betty, and her husband, Harold, out for a three-hour dinner. Dad made me stay at home. I’m sure he thought I’d reach across the table and sign whatever paper the scout pulled out of his briefcase.

Joe raised the offer, but Dad still wouldn’t budge. “Not enough,” he told the scout. Joe left town again without a deal.

For a couple of weeks, the phone didn’t ring. I know because I sat by it for hours every day. “Relax,” Dad said. “They’re not going to drop the ball on the fifth pick in the draft.”

I wasn’t sure. I started thinking seriously about the University of Miami and their baseball team. “I’ll be the only guy ever drafted fifth who couldn’t make a deal,” I thought.

Joe kept returning. The offer inched up. But the standoff continued. “Good luck to you, Dwight,” he said finally, shaking my hand after talks with Dad had stalled yet again. “I’m sure you’ve got a bright future ahead of you.”

As I stood at the doorway and watched Joe walk to his car, I was ready to run after him, yelling, “I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it!”—if Dad didn’t tackle me in the yard first. I was losing faith in my father’s judgment.

My mom caught the look on my face.

“Dan, you need to go stop him and get this done,” she said firmly. Again, Dad refused.

In the end, Joe came back with one more offer. An $85,000 signing bonus on top of the $40,000 that was then the standard first-year major-league salary, which sounded like a huge pile of money to me. But really, I just wanted to play baseball.

Getting There

I
HELD IT TOGETHER
at Tampa International Airport as I told Mom, Dad, and Betty good-bye. But even before the plane pushed back from the gate, I was bawling in my economy seat. I don’t know what the other passengers thought, seeing this tall, skinny seventeen-year-old wiping tears from his eyes. But I cried until the flight attendant brought me a Coke and some pretzels. I had never been away from my family for more than two weeks. Now I was flying off to start a full season of New York Mets rookie ball in Kingsport, Tennessee. I was excited. My dream was coming true. But I couldn’t have been any more homesick if I was moving to China.

The Kingsport Mets played in a converted high school stadium with a falling-down left-field fence. I moved into the owner’s basement. Slowly, I figured out that the Dominican players really didn’t speak English. They weren’t just messing with me. Dad told me I couldn’t spend the bonus money right away. I survived on the $2.50 dinner specials
at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The guys on the team were friendly enough. My old pal Floyd Youmans was there from Belmont Heights Little League and Hillsborough High. He’d been drafted right behind me, in round two.

The night of the draft, Floyd had called me to say he’d been drafted. “By who?” I asked. When he told me “the Mets,” I figured he’d heard that I’d been drafted by New York and he was pulling my leg. “Yeah? That’s great,” I said, playing along. “What round?” He told me the Mets had picked him in the second round and I quickly countered that I’d gone in the first. Since Floyd hadn’t been watching a live feed and I’d left the
Trib
office right after my name came on the screen, it took us a few days to figure out that both stories were real. And now we were teammates again. Together we didn’t exactly burn up the Appalachian League, finishing the 1982 season at 28–40, good enough for last place. Compared with my teammates, I played really well. I made the Appalachian League All-Star Game. But I was still so shy and homesick, even with Floyd around, most nights I couldn’t wait to call my family.

“Son, you gotta stop calling so often,” my dad finally said. “The phone bills are sky-high.”

Then Mom got on the phone and whispered, “Call as much as you need. Don’t worry about that old fool.” For once, Dad was the hard-ass and Mom was the softie.

Kingsport was where I first met Davey Johnson, then a roving instructor for the Mets organization. I think I impressed him with my knowledge of the game. Davey saw me in the bullpen one day positioning the catcher outside, then inside, then down the middle, so I could hit my chosen spots with my curveball.

“How the hell do you know all that?” he asked me.

“My dad taught me,” I said. Then I proceeded to show Davey the different grips I used to make the ball dance and dive. I think that stuck with him.

There wasn’t much glamour in rookie ball, but I could tell the Mets
higher-ups were keeping an eye on their first-round draft pick. When I begged our manager, Ed Olsen, to let me pinch-hit in extra innings one day, Ed said sure. I didn’t come close to getting on base. And when the game report landed in New York, word bounced back immediately from the team’s front office: “What the hell are you guys doing down there?”

They didn’t want their top pitching prospect facing some fastballing teenager with no control. I had a total of one at bat that year.

There was no fighting it anymore. I was a pitcher for good.

At the end of that rookie ball season, my father finally let me dip into the bonus money. I replaced my ratty ’74 Duster with a silver 1983 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 with a four-speed automatic transmission and Crossfire 305 V8, detailed to my precise specifications. That car had tinted windows, fancy rims, Playboy Bunny decals, and “Mr. Dwight” painted on the doors. I went all out. I drove to Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the high-A Lynchburg Mets of the Carolina League, to start the 1983 season. I didn’t have major-league swagger. I was still a couple of A’s away from the bigs. Bringing home $245 every two weeks, I could barely afford to buy gas. But a young black man cruising around drowsy Lynchburg in a car like that—let’s just say I didn’t go unnoticed. I was beginning—
beginning
—to look the part of a professional athlete.

Too bad I didn’t pitch like one.

The Camaro-driving first-rounder got off to a miserable 0–3 start. I wasn’t getting
anybody
out. Soon enough, there was talk of bouncing me back to the single-A Mets farm team in Little Falls, New York. My career had barely started, and I already seemed to have hit a wall.

Luckily, our pitching coach was John Cumberland, a real gruff talker who’d had a short throwing career with the Yankees and the Giants. He ranted. I threw.

“Blowing your fastball by chumps in high school and rookie ball isn’t working here,” Cumberland announced during our first morning session.

“Okay,” I answered. Cumberland barely took a breath.

“Guys here have faster bats, and your only location is right down the middle. They’re sitting back, drooling, waiting to crush the hell out of the ball.”

“I—”

“You’ve got a shitload of talent that’s gonna go right into the sewer,” Cumberland said. “So you know what you gotta do now, don’t ya, Doc?”

“What?”

“The only thing you
can
do,” he said, looking at me like I was in the back of the slow class. “You gotta put the fear of God into these sons-of-bitches! Christ, kid, you’re throwing in the mid-90s. Scare ’em!”