Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (9 page)

Gooden checked into Smithers in April 1987 immediately after testing positive for cocaine. He felt awkward being there and refused to open up to Lans. I can handle this by myself, he thought. You’re not much of a man if you have to go to someone else with your problems.

The counselors tried to teach him how alcohol acted as his gateway to cocaine, but the lesson didn’t stick. Three weeks after he checked out of Smithers he was drinking again. “If I won, I went out drinking to celebrate,” he says. “And if I lost, I went out drinking to forget about it.”

After Gooden’s four weeks in Smithers, Major League Baseball began testing him for drugs as often as three times per week. As he continued to test clean over the years, baseball officials relaxed their vigilance. First they stopped taking samples on the days that he pitched. Eventually the frequency of the testing shrank to four random tests over each half of the baseball season. And, Gooden says, Lans began cutting back on Gooden’s aftercare, excusing him from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in New York because Gooden was such a celebrity that his appearances there were a distraction.

Meanwhile, Gooden’s drinking problem deepened. With Strawberry gone to Los Angeles, the Mets plummeted to fifth place in 1991 with a 77–84 record. It was the first time Gooden had played on a losing big league team. New York’s deterioration continued, with 90 losses in ’92 and 103 losses and a last-place finish in ’93. Gooden suffered the first two losing seasons of his big league career in those years. He tried finding solace in a bottle of beer or vodka. It was in those years too that his arm started feeling unresponsive.

“I didn’t think it happened before, but in ’92 and ’93 all the drinking started to affect my performance,” he says. “After a while, abusing your body catches up to you.”

In December 1993, after one of his nocturnal sojourns into Tampa, another drug test turned up positive. Inexplicably, according to a high-ranking major league official, baseball’s medical people chose to let it slide without informing the executive council or the players’ union. “They didn’t do him any favors by doing that,” former trainer Garland says. “It does make you wonder if there were any other times they did the same thing.”

But the dirty test last June was not ignored. The Mets told Gooden he was facing probable suspension for violating his aftercare program. Gooden, in deep denial, told friends that it was no big deal, that he simply had missed a test because he’d overslept. He learned of his 60-day ban on June 24, a day he was scheduled to start against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets, paranoid as ever, coaxed him into going ahead with his start. After all, baseball wasn’t ready to announce the suspension, so what would people think if Gooden was scratched from his start? It turned out to be the worst performance of his career. “If I had to do it again,” he says, “there’s no way I’d go out there.”

At first, Gooden says, Millman and Solomon, his counselors in New York, did not recommend that he undergo another inpatient rehabilitation. His aftercare program, including the testing regimen, needed to be stepped up. Gooden, after meeting with the doctors on July 1, went home to St. Petersburg. At an outing over that Fourth of July weekend, he decided, “Well, I’ll just have a couple of beers.”

He continued to slide. “I always knew one or two guys who had the coke,” he says. “It wasn’t like I had to go driving through some bad neighborhood and roll the window down.” Once, on the morning of scheduled drug tests, he called up Lans and said, “I was using last night. Should I still go ahead with the test?” Lans advised him, yes, he should let himself be tested.

Finally, on July 22, he checked into the Betty Ford Center. When he broke the news to his wife, Monica, that he was heading to the clinic, she looked puzzled and asked, “Why?”

“She didn’t know how bad it was,” he says. “She’d always be asleep in bed when I’d be coming home late.”

But three weeks after Gooden left the clinic, his depression returned and his cocaine use resumed. “Looking back on it,” he says, “I should have called Jim [Neader] and told him what I was feeling. It’s almost like you want to isolate yourself from the world. I didn’t want to see anybody, even my family.”

Then on Sept. 15 the Mets confirmed that Gooden had again violated his aftercare program. Baseball deferred any further action, essentially allowing him more time to pull himself together. But more samples came back dirty. On Nov. 4 he was suspended for the 1995 season.

“People ask, ‘How can you use when you know you’re getting tested?’” Gooden says. “It’s not that easy not to. I remember when Otis Nixon tested positive again (in 1991, while with the Braves). I was like, Oh, man, how could a guy do something like that with so much on the line? Now I understand.”

Gooden claims he has remained clean since then and has the test results to prove it. “I want the tests,” he says. “It’s one thing to say it and another to have the proof.”

He has devoted himself to his three-times-a-week Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and his two-times-a-week sessions with a personal counselor in New Port Richey, Fla. One of the members of his AA group is a 70-year-old man who has been attending such meetings for the past 30 years. Gooden was shocked to hear him talk about episodes of still wanting to go back to alcohol. Another AA group member explained he has had nine relapses and is working hard to stave off a 10th.

“I see why,” Gooden says. “You can never have this thing beat. I have to accept that. I still have my days where I get down. The difference is it doesn’t stay with me as long as it did in August and September.”

On Jan. 27 Gooden flew to New York to meet with Millman and Solomon. As the plane descended to LaGuardia Airport, the side on which Gooden sat banked toward Shea Stadium, as if genuflecting. Gooden caught sight of the giant horseshoe with the great expanse of green laid out so invitingly. Overwhelmed, not with sadness but with joy, he nearly cried. At that moment he wanted to be standing on the mound, a fresh baseball in his hand, the possibilities all new again.

“C’MON, LET’S get inside and talk,” Gooden says, gesturing toward his Mercedes as the rain begins to fall. The wheels are equipped with brilliant rims that gleam even in the late-morning gloom. Gooden selected the rims and ordered another set for Monica’s Mercedes convertible. To keep himself occupied, he has turned his love for customizing cars into a serious hobby. At the moment he is tinkering with a 1974 Porsche and a 1969 Chevy. Renovation. It is what he’s doing with his life.

Slipping behind the steering wheel, Gooden is still perspiring slightly from one of his typically grueling workouts with his personal trainer. He appears to be in terrific shape, and when he throws the baseball, he says, it feels like it is flying out of his hand again. “Not having alcohol in your system,” he says, “it seems like it makes you meaner, quicker.”

Wearing blue Mets shorts and a blue nylon Mets training jacket, he looks and talks as if he were still the Mets ace. In fact, he has no employer, which would seem to be a daunting proposition for someone who supports an extended family. Beginning in 1987, with a $320,000 house for his parents and a $530,000 house for himself and Monica, Gooden has purchased five of the seven homes on his block, a waterfront cul-de-sac. One of the houses is the home of his nephew, Marlins outfielder Gary Sheffield. Gooden wants to buy the remaining two houses and then erect a security gate at the entrance to the street, though he says, “It’s Gary’s turn to buy.”

Gooden, who last year finished a three-year contract originally worth $15.45 million and has earned about $25 million during his major league career, says he is financially secure. What he wants is simply to pitch in the major leagues again—even before his suspension is scheduled to end in November. He says he has been told by baseball officials that he could be reinstated by midsummer if he shows he has put his life in order, a claim Major League Baseball does not confirm. He has a standing offer from the Mets to start talking about a new contract as soon as he is reinstated to the game. He wants nothing other than that.

“It just feels like New York is my home,” he says. “I belong to New York. It seems like I did all my growing up in New York.

“Obviously, I’d like to apologize to the fans for my actions, but I can honestly say I’m on the right track. I’m getting myself in the best possible shape physically so when that chance comes I’ll be ready. It may be time to quit feeling like it can be 1985 again. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t want to win 20 games again.

“I keep having these daydreams about coming back. If they let me come back in June or July, I can picture winning Comeback Player of the Year and going to a dinner to get the award and giving a speech. I go over that speech all the time.”

The rain has let up and the faintest bit of sunshine appears. He has to be on his way now. He has an appointment with his counselor this afternoon and an AA meeting in the evening.

Before he goes, he is asked about being paired in infamy with Strawberry. The two of them started out as stars and were going to be the dominant players of their era, sure as sunrise. Now here they are, on the outside looking in, with messy lives to clean up and careers as uncertain as they were once assured. Doc and Straw. Teammates once again.

“It’s sad,” Gooden says. “The stories are kind of similar. Except Darryl was more vocal and I wasn’t. Maybe if I was more vocal and if he wasn’t, maybe it would have turned out better for both of us. Maybe.”

Postscript: I began my professional career covering the major leagues at the same time and in the same city as Strawberry and Gooden, and I saw goodness in each of them, which makes their stories all the more tragic. I also knew this piece, one of the longest to run in
SI
in the past 20 years, was not the end of the ballad of Darryl and Doc. New chapters of their troubled tale never stop coming. In the fall of 2005 Strawberry admitted to filing a false police report and his wife filed for divorce. Gooden, with his son in jail on a probation violation, was sentenced to three years probation for fleeing a traffic stop.

MARCH 31, 1997

In this era of muscular hitters and minuscule strike zones, pitchers get
hammered all the time. A few, however, don’t just survive, they thrive.
Here are their secrets

L
ISTEN VERY CAREFULLY. IF YOU STAND CLOSE ENOUGH
to the plate, you can hear the best weapon a pitcher can wield in his bid to survive in one of baseball’s greatest offensive eras. A good fastball announces itself in flight with an angry whisper. “It goes
sssssssss
,” says Braves righthander Greg Maddux, softly blowing air through his teeth in what sounds like the preamble to a steaming teakettle’s whistle. “You can
hear
the good ones.”

When a baseball spins fast enough, it creates a hiss as it cuts through the air. The faster the spin, the louder the hiss, which explains why the sinking 93-mph fastball thrown by Marlins righthander Kevin Brown sounds like air rushing out of a punctured tire. “I stood and watched Kevin Brown throw on the side at the All-Star Game last year,” Maddux says. “His ball didn’t go
sssssssss
. It went
SSSSSSSSS!
It was the loudest ball I’ve ever heard. You can see why his stuff is so nasty.”

Says Marlins backup catcher Greg Zaun, “His sinker hurts your hands when you don’t hit it on the good part of the bat. And just catching it isn’t easy. You can’t get too cute with it or else you’ll hurt your thumb. You don’t worry about framing it or anything like that. You just try to catch it.”

Brown had a 1.89 ERA last season—2.32 better than the National League average (one of the biggest such differentials in the game’s history)—and held batters to the lowest slugging percentage (.289) in the majors. While more taters flew out of ballparks than ever last season, Brown permitted just eight home runs over his 233 innings. He faced 906 batters and walked only 31 unintentionally. “With the kind of movement he has on the ball,” says Florida pitching coach Larry Rothschild, “that’s the most amazing statistic from last season.”