Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  “I’m proud of you,” she said. My dad still said nothing. He couldn’t even look at me.

  PART III

  Hurting

  10

  Dusting Off

  AS THE METS OPENED THE 1987 season at Shea Stadium against the Pittsburgh Pirates, I was across the East River in Manhattan, pretending to get rehabbed. Smithers was an upscale facility with about one hundred beds. The people who worked there seemed dedicated and well-meaning. I’m sure if I’d been committed to my own recovery, the program could have helped me a lot.

  But I wasn’t, and it didn’t.

  I had no knowledge of addiction—how it got started, what made it so stubborn, how treatment might help me get over it. I was clueless. Drugs and alcohol were sapping my talent. They were complicating my daily existence. They were fraying my personal relationships. But I wasn’t at Smithers to wrestle with any of that. As far as I was concerned, I was there to knock twenty-eight days off the calendar, act like I’d been humbled, then take my throwing arm back to Shea.

  I didn’t drink or use drugs while I was in Smithers. But whatever other rules there were, the good people who ran the place were bending for me—or I was breaking them on my own. Unlike most of the other residents, I had a room to myself. They ate in a cafeteria. I had Chinese food smuggled in. TVs were strictly prohibited. I had a little portable. Newspapers were forbidden too. Most days, I read the News, the Post, and New York Newsday. I was supposed to be focused on getting clean now, not at all concerned with the outside world. But the outside world wasn’t leaking into my room. It was gushing. And that allowed me to remain in complete denial that I had a problem. Take full responsibility for myself? Heck, I didn’t even do my own laundry. I had no idea how to work the machines. Two older female patients volunteered to help me.

  I attended two or three treatment sessions a day. Mostly, the group sessions convinced me that the other patients were far more screwed up than I was. Whatever they were describing, I didn’t think it had much to do with me.

  Some of the counselors knew who I was and were in awe of what I did. Some of them were fans. Some of the patients were too. But the ones who were there to truly change themselves took one look at me and could tell I wasn’t committed to getting better. Generally, they kept their distance from me. No one challenged me, argued with me, or called me out on my bullshit. The counselors had enough experience to recognize an addict in denial. But what could they do? No one can cure an addict who won’t cure himself.

  Sunday was visiting day. Jay Horwitz came pretty much every week. My mom and my sisters visited a couple of times. Monica came once. But I called her constantly, and not just because I was bored. I was trying to convince her to marry me.

  We were both very young. I was twenty-two. She was twenty-one. And I hadn’t shown much interest in settling down for a committed relationship, not with the big-league dating opportunities even shy ballplayers had. But I was lonely. I liked Monica a lot. And I was nervous about how I’d be accepted when I got out of Smithers.

  Many of my teammates were married. From where I was sitting, wedded bliss and major-league baseball didn’t necessarily go hand in hand. But all spring, I’d been hearing from Frank Cashen and other Mets executives that it was time for me to settle down.

  “You sure this is what you want to do?” Monica asked me more than once on the phone. “Are you sure?”

  I called her twice a day. For a week, she put me off. “Let me think about it,” she said.

  After a week, she finally agreed.

  I was elated, but I wasn’t ready to tell my parents. They knew I wasn’t mature enough to get married. I had shown no desire to settle down. Since I’d gotten home from the Series, I could hardly sit in the den with my dad and watch half a football game. What made me think I was ready for a real family of my own? But Monica ended up telling my sister Betty. Without my knowing it, Betty spilled the news to my mom and dad even before I got out of rehab.

  When I returned to Tampa, my mom said how happy she was to see me. Then she folded her hands in her lap and calmly asked, “So is there anything you want to tell us?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m doing great,” I said.

  “Son,” my dad said quietly, “are you getting married?”

  I didn’t know that my sister had told them. I was caught off-guard. I squirmed, but I knew that I’d been busted. “Yes,” I finally blurted out. “Monica and I are getting married.” Then I started to cry.

  “You’re only twenty-two!” my dad thundered, pounding his fist onto the arm of his chair. “You just started dating! What’s the rush?”

  I had no response.

  “Well, whatever you decide, you know we’ll support you,” my mom finally said, the closest thing to a blessing I was going to receive.

  After a few weeks’ warm-up with the Tidewater Tides AAA team, I went back to work on June 5, making my post-rehab debut at Shea against Pittsburgh. It was my opening day. Spending that time without drugs or alcohol was good for my body—for my mind, as well. And to help enforce my new sobriety—to keep me from screwing up so publicly again—I knew I’d be tested regularly for drugs. I’d agreed to the tests in my new contract, hadn’t I?

  Not everyone was thrilled I was coming back. The morning of my return, Dick Young, a writer the fans and the players loved to hate, wrote a rough back-page column for the New York Post. To him, drug addiction was a moral failing. “STAND UP AND BOO,” the headline said. But more than 51,000 Mets fans did just the opposite when I walked out to the mound. They stood up and cheered. God, that made me feel good! They embraced me with a standing ovation. I hadn’t been humbled by Smithers. But I was genuinely humbled by New York’s support.

  We beat the Pirates 5–1 and flew right out to Chicago to play the Cubs. On the plane, I started drinking again and didn’t think twice about it. No one else seemed to. Straw and some of the pitchers even toasted me across the aisle.

  Thanks to Major League Baseball’s drug testing, I stayed away from the coke for a good long time. But from that flight forward, I didn’t see any reason not to drink alcohol.

  I pitched near the top of my game that entire post-Smithers season. Even Dick Young was impressed. Missing the first two months, I nonetheless chalked up fifteen victories and a 3.21 ERA. I could still thrill the fans and please myself. I was just on. My frustrating World Series, I discovered, wasn’t a lifelong curse.

  The Mets championship lineup was really beginning to change, for better and for worse. Ray Knight had been the first player to leave our World Series team. We got the spectacular David Cone from Kansas City. We also traded Kevins, Mitchell for McReynolds. But there was still enough of the old camaraderie that after my short rehab, I slid comfortably back onto the team. I stayed clean. My old friends didn’t seem to hate me. I was piling up wins.

  Pitchers Bob Ojeda and Rick Aguilera both got injured. With that and my absence for rehab, we had a rough first half of the season, falling as much as ten and a half games behind the first-place Cardinals. But after the All-Star Break, we’d closed the gap to one and a half games by the time the Cardinals came to Shea for an early September series. Some of us on the defending champion team began to believe the old magic might be coming back. But injury struck our pitching staff again. The Cards pulled away from us before losing in the World Series to the Minnesota Twins.

  Monica and I got married on November 21 at her family’s church in Tampa in front of six hundred guests. My brother-in-law Harold and my childhood friend Troy were my co–best men. Gary Carter, Dave Magadan, and several other Mets attended. We all danced to the sounds of Monica’s cousin’s R & B band. Once we returned from our Hawaiian honeymoon, we lived a relatively quiet existence at my parents’ house until it was time to return to New York for the 1988 season. Frank Cashen must have been smiling. Married life was settling me down.

  And I jumped into this new life with both feet. Four days after Monica and I got married, my lawyer filed custo
dy papers for my son, Dwight Junior. His mother, Debra Hamilton, wasn’t impressed with my status as a new husband. She fired back, citing my “problems with alcohol and drug abuse” and my arrest after the police beating in Tampa. She got to keep custody.

  I went into salary arbitration in early 1988. After I missed two months of the previous season, the Mets weren’t too thrilled with the $150,000 bump my agent Jim was asking for, lifting me to $1.65 million. But given my 15–7 record and a 3.21 ERA, the ninth best in baseball, we thought we deserved it. On the other side, the Mets were asking for a 10 percent cut in salary and were refusing to sign a multiyear deal. As soon as Jim Neader and I sat down with Mets assistant general manager Al Harazin and the arbitrator, Al pulled out a news article where I’d told a reporter that if I’d been around the whole 1987 season, we’d have won it all. That was an instant death blow for my case. I was lucky to get out of there with a $100,000 cut in pay.

  The erosion of the 1986 bad guys continued into 1988, though that season was still our last, best chance to get back to the World Series. You can’t say we didn’t have talent, especially on the mound. Ron Darling had seventeen wins. I had eighteen. David Cone went 20–3. But we lost the National League Championship Series to the Dodgers, including a heartbreaking game four loss that I pitched. Mike Scioscia’s ninth-inning home run is still one of my most painful baseball memories. Kirk Gibson won the game in the twelfth with a home run off of Roger McDowell, but the win happened only because of the one Scioscia hit off me. Mets fans were right when they called it “the season that got away from us.”

  11

  Burning Out

  NO TEAM LASTS FOREVER.

  By 1989, the tension that had once translated magically into on-field electricity was turning into poison off the field. March 3 was team picture day. But instead of happy smiles, the big crowd of media got a barroom brawl, transported to our spring training field in Port St. Lucie. Things got off to a testy start when manager Bud Harrelson began calling out the seating order for the first row. “Johnson, Carter, Hernandez, Strawberry…”

  Instead of taking his place in the row, Darryl said to Bud: “I only want to sit next to my real friends.” Everyone knew exactly who Darryl meant to exclude from that club.

  Things had been brewing for a couple of weeks.

  Darryl had been complaining to reporters about how unfairly he was being paid. To show his displeasure, I guess, he’d shown up fifteen minutes late for practice one day. Keith, our team captain, had warned him: “Let your agent handle that stuff. You can’t pull this crap on these guys. Don’t let it happen again!”

  Now at picture day, the simmering dispute was suddenly boiling over. Darryl started moving down the line to sit between Gary Carter and Sid Fernandez. Glaring back at Keith, he asked, “Why you got to be saying those things about me?”

  “Grow up, you crybaby,” Keith shot back.

  That was it. Darryl turned around and took a swing at Keith. Gary Carter and Randy Myers jumped up to restrain Keith. Bob Ojeda and I grabbed Darryl.

  “Let him go!” Darryl yelled at Gary before turning his attention back to Keith. “I’ve been sick of you for years,” he said.

  Ron Darling tried to make light of the brawl. But you could hear his frustration when he said, “Another day in Barnum and Bailey and the Great Traveling Show.” Darryl didn’t stick around after pictures. He just complained to the reporters again about his contract and stormed off the field.

  Yes, we were all supposedly grown adults—playing for the same team, no less. Sitting by my locker at the end of practice, I was thinking just how tense things had become. Big, tough athletes, ready to explode at each other. Gary said he felt like he was walking on eggshells.

  By May, both Keith and Gary were out for a huge chunk of the season with injuries. By July, I was also learning how it felt to be hurt. In the early years I was a Met, Mel, Davey, and lots of people always said I had the perfect pitching mechanics. I had the ability to throw forever, they said. I didn’t seem to wear myself out. I’d been hearing that since high school. “Doc has the perfect mechanics.” So I threw and I threw and I threw. When I started, Davey would pull me out, saying he wanted to rest my arm. But as time went on, my pitch counts got high and stayed there. One hundred pitches—that’s considered a high number to throw in a game. I was often 130, 140, even 150.

  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 strike
outs. 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.