New York Mets: Darryl Strawberry Goes Public Saving Dwight Gooden

Former New York Mets outfielder Darryl Strawberry has gone public over his friend and teammate Dwight Gooden’s drug addiction.

For any baseball fan that came of age during the 1980s, New York Mets legend Darryl Strawberry’s plea to teammate Dwight Gooden to sober up is a dagger through the heart.

Two major reasons why the team dominated the National League East from the mid-to-late 80s, the pair found themselves, for bad and good reasons, on the back pages of New York’s powerful tabloids. From Gooden’s public cocaine addiction treatment in 1987 to stories of Strawberry’s nightlife, their struggles are as entrenched in the collective Big Apple’s memories as graffiti-laden subway cars and Mayor Ed Koch’s press conferences.

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Both players eventually left the Mets. Strawberry took a disastrous free agent deal to play with his hometown Los Angeles Dodgers. Gooden, who racked up mileage on his arm faster than a cross-country driver, stayed until the 1994 strike, then bounced between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians until 2000. By the 90s, he was a shell of a pitcher.

To read Strawberry’s quotes in the New York Daily News pulls at the emotions of anyone who ever rooted for the Mets. In part:

"“The condition Doc is in, it’s bad, it’s horrible. It’s like cocaine poison. I feel like I’ve got to get it out there because nobody else is doing anything to help him, and it might be the only way to stop him.”"

Strawberry is no altar boy, but at least until he cleaned himself up. Considered arrogant and cocky during his years with the Mets, the years found Strawberry finding an inner peace within. By the time his son D. J. became a star on the University of Maryland basketball team, the father sounded a changed man.

Proud of his son’s accomplishments, he started teaching the error of his ways, helping others become clean and sober.

By Gooden’s third season—the 1986 championship year—his salary topped $1 million. A single man in New York making Monopoly money at 21. All too much for a kid from Tampa to handle.

For Strawberry, the situation was not much different. A couple years older, he made a shade under a million in 1986 and cracked it in 1987. The Mets owned New York then, and those boys owned the Mets. Anything they wanted, they got.

Now, 30 years since their signature accomplishment, Strawberry and Gooden find themselves on the back pages again for all the wrong reasons. If you watched the recent ESPN 30-for-30 documentary on them, you knew something was amiss for Gooden. For Strawberry, who no longer seeks the spotlight as he once did, to be so forceful and specific about his friend speaks volumes where Gooden is at.

Drug addiction is serious. Gooden and Strawberry were not the first New York athletes to enjoy themselves too much, nor will they be the last. For those of us who became of age in that era, watching someone so young and full of life battle his inner demons is sad.

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Although no one can change the past, you can root for Gooden to fight for his future and be grateful for friends such as Strawberry.

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