by Ron Darling
Of course, I could see right away what was up, but I wanted to ask anyway—said, “What are you kids doing?”
“Dad’s paying us for every All-Star ballot we punch out by his name,” one of them said.
And that was Gary Carter for you. That was Gary Carter for us. Kid would do whatever it took to win. He wouldn’t break the rules, but he would work them to his advantage—really, he was one of the smartest teammates I ever played with, one of the shrewdest catchers I ever pitched to. And here he was, gaming the system, unabashedly, putting his kids to work to ensure that he received his due. And it’s not like he didn’t deserve to be named to the National League All-Star team as the starting catcher. He’d been the best catcher in the game for a decade. But Kid wasn’t the type to leave anything to chance.
He had his bases covered.
* * *
Most New York baseball fans remember Rick Cerone as a key member of those strong, headline-making Yankees teams of the early 1980s. He had a career year for them in 1980, finishing seventh in MVP voting, after joining the team in a trade that sent Chris Chambliss and Damaso Garcia to the Blue Jays.
“Puff” signed with the Mets just ahead of spring training in 1991, my final spring with the club. We called him “Puff” because of the perm he used to wear—which, in fairness to Rick, had once been the hairstyle of the day, even if it did look a little like the puffed-up ’dos the Brady boys started wearing in the final season of The Brady Bunch. (Forgive, please, that third Brady Bunch reference in these early goings—that’ll be the last of ’em, I promise.) He signed as the backup to John Gibbons, who was slated to be our #1 catcher. Trouble was, Gibbons went down in one of our last spring training games, in a reckless collision at the plate that pissed off everyone in our dugout.
“Puff” was more pissed than most, and I sidled up to him as we boarded the plane for the trip to New York to start the season—you know, to take his measure, seeing as how he’d now be my primary battery-mate.
I said, “What’s eating you, Puff? Why the long face?”
He said, “I didn’t sign here to play 150 games. I signed to play 50 games. This is bullshit.”
I thought that was one of the greatest lines of all time.
* * *
That flight from Florida to New York to start the season was always a little revealing. It was the first time this particular “band of brothers” would board a plane together and head into battle for the season ahead, and you can learn a lot about your teammates when you travel together. Like the time we traded for David Cone just before the start of the 1987 season. Coney joined the club in time to make one appearance for us before we broke camp, and it was the first chance we’d had to check him out. We didn’t have extensive scouting reports like we do today, so we all figured since we’d traded Ed Hearn to the Royals to get him, he’d be the pitching equivalent of Ed Hearn.
Well, Coney pitched four innings against St. Louis in our last spring training game … and he lit it up. Oh. My. Goodness. His slider was nasty. His fastball was chumming, humming. I think he struck out seven or eight Cardinals over those four innings—he was unhittable.
We looked on and wondered how we’d managed to get this guy for Ed Hearn. It didn’t add up.
When we went to the airport for the flight to New York, it was still the question on everyone’s lips—“How’d we get this guy?”
It was answered soon enough.
As the plane was climbing on takeoff, nose up, Coney started walking to the front of the plane. We all assumed he was going up to the first-class cabin to talk to one of the coaches. In those days, on our chartered flights, the manager and coaching staff always sat up in first-class, reminding us in no uncertain terms that they were the straws that stirred our drinks, and that their drinks were served in proper glasses. Still, we couldn’t imagine what Coney had to talk to the coaches about. He’d only just joined the team, he’d barely had time to talk to any of us, so we were all scratching our heads. Coney stopped at the first-class curtain, reached into the nearest seat-back pocket for one of those big plastic placard sheets the airlines used to circulate to show us where the exits were, slapped it on the floor of the aisle, and started surfing on it to the back of the plane.
I remember looking on and thinking, Oh, that’s how we got him.
* * *
Kevin Elster, the Mets’ smooth-handed shortstop, liked to think of himself as a ladies’ man, and he was. He had those chiseled California golden boy good looks, and it used to gnaw at some of us the way women would flock to him when we were on the road. He was always talking about his exploits, his conquests, in a way that would probably come back to bite him in today’s #MeToo environment.
Understand, I’m not looking to excuse or justify Elster’s behavior here, or that of any of the other Don Juans I played with or against. I’m not about to explain anything away by saying it was a different time. We were, almost to a man, a bunch of arrogant shit-heels when it came to women. No excuse, no justification … just context, and it was in this context that this Kevin Elster story unfolded.
Kevin had this thing where he would travel with an assortment of white cotton panties, which he liked to have his visitors wear when they came to his hotel room. He and I were great friends—after Eddie Lynch was traded early on in ’86, he was probably my closest friend on the team—but even I started thinking Kevin was a bit much when he started going on and on about his escapades. Hearing about his personal stash of white panties was just about the final straw. After a while, a group of us decided to take him down a couple notches one night in Philadelphia. We arranged for a cop in the local sheriff’s office to arrest him, on the grounds that the girl he was with was underage—here again, not the most politically correct or gentlemanly behavior on our part, but in our sheepish defense we thought it would be funny as hell. And it was. The cop really got into his role, slapping the cuffs on Kevin and giving him the scare of his young, charmed, golden boy life—probably the worst ten minutes Kevin had spent on this earth, until we all started laughing and gave ourselves away.
* * *
First time I met John Franco he was in the opposing dugout for an NCAA playoff game. I was on the mound for Yale, pitching the game of my life—a game I would eventually lose 1–0 on a double steal in the top of the 12th inning—and he was in the bullpen for St. John’s. We later became roommates in the Cape Cod League, playing for the Cotuit Kettleers. John was struggling with an arm injury, trying to correct his mechanics and pitch his way back into form.
We had a blast that summer, spent most of our free time at a local bar called Rascals that proudly featured “disco rock” as its musical bill of fare, and what I remember most about that time and place in our lives was that John was the only guy in the bar who was short enough to stand on the tables and dance without getting hit in the head by the ceiling fan.
* * *
What is there left to say about Dwight Gooden? I’ve addressed his career at length, on the air and in print, and every time I do I keep coming back to thoughts of what might have been. At his tantalizing pinnacle, during his remarkable rookie year of 1984 and his dazzling sophomore season of 1985, when he was all of nineteen and twenty years old, “Doc” was the best there ever was. Hands down. Case closed. Shut the door. Really, there was no one better. No disrespect to Clayton Kershaw, perhaps the most dominant pitcher in today’s game, or to Sandy Koufax, the most dominant pitcher of my formative, coming-to-baseball-awareness years. Tom Seaver? Not even close—not if you’re taking any two seasons off the back of Tom’s baseball card and comparing it to these two seasons for Doc.
(And not if you’re stopping to consider that Doc, at nineteen and twenty years old, was just a kid—a teenager dominating a league full of adults.)
Bob Gibson’s landmark 1968 season was probably the closest we’ve ever seen in my baseball lifetime—the closest we’re likely to see—but even Gibson’s numbers fall short when you look at them through the collective lenses of context
and history.
Here, take a look:
Statistically, 1968 Gibson matched up pretty well with 1985 Gooden, but let us consider the variables. First of all, Gibson was thirty-three years old, in his 10th big league season; Gooden was twenty, in his second year. Also, and perhaps even more significantly, that 1968 season was famously known as “The Year of the Pitcher.” Gibson wasn’t the only one throwing blanks. Don Drysdale somehow managed to pitch six consecutive scoreless games, while the American League ERA title went to Luis Tiant, then of the Indians, with an equally minuscule 1.60. Run production was at an all-time low, in both leagues. Tigers ace Denny McClain won 31 games in the regular season, while his teammate Mickey Lolich managed to pitch three complete games in the World Series, against Gibson’s Cardinals. (Three complete games!) And one of my favorite players, Carl Yastrzemski, won the American League batting title with just a .301 average, the lowest mark ever for a batting champ. The pitchers were at a tremendous advantage—not least because the commissioner’s office determined that umpires would be asked to enforce the larger strike zone that had been established a couple years earlier and widely ignored. Following the season, Baseball’s Rules Committee voted to lower the mound from 15 inches to 10 inches, and to abandon the larger strike zone experiment, and the balance between pitcher-batter performance was restored to historical averages by the 1969 season.
By almost every measure, Gooden’s season was superior, eclipsing Gibson’s when stacked against the league norms and accounting for the changes in the way the game was played, such as lower pitch counts and a greater emphasis on rest for starting pitchers, and the emergence of advance scouting reports and video technology to help batters learn a pitcher’s tendencies. And yet for Doc, these two glorious seasons in the sun now stand as indicators of a career that lay in wait, a career that was effectively derailed before it ever really left the station. Gibson’s outstanding season was one on a long string of many—his best, by a wide margin, but he was no less dominant in the half-dozen or so seasons leading up to it, relative to his peers, or in the half-dozen or so seasons that followed.
Perhaps the best example of Doc’s brilliance during those two seasons came in a game in Los Angeles. It was early in the 1985 season, and we’d gotten off to a good start. We were atop the NL East, leading the Cubs by a game and telling ourselves that this was our time and that every game was important. The game was tied 1–1 going into the bottom of the eighth. We just couldn’t get anything going against Fernando Valenzuela, but the feeling on our bench was that he was tiring and that if we could keep the score where it was we’d get to him in the top of the ninth.
That was always the feeling with this team. We were never out of it. Each game was ours to win.
Trouble was, the Dodgers had some confidence of their own—and a little bit of hometown luck. They somehow loaded the bases to start the eighth, without really getting to Doc. Back-to-back singles by Steve Sax and Ken Landreaux to start the inning, and then an intentional walk to Pedro Guerrero to load the bases. Any other pitcher, in any other season, playing under any other manager might have gotten the hook at this point, but Davey Johnson had faith in Gooden. Plus, there was nobody in our bullpen who could do a better job pitching his way out of this jam—nobody in all of baseball, really—so of course Doc stayed in the game.
Faith paid off: next batter was Dodgers first baseman Greg Brock, and Doc struck him out. Then he got Mike Scioscia to pop up feebly to Gary Carter in foul territory. Then he struck out Terry Whitfield to end the inning. All on just ten pitches.
It was the kind of showing that left all of us on the bench thinking, You have got to be shitting me. Really, it was an astonishing thing to see, and what was most astonishing was that we all expected Doc to dispatch these three Dodgers in just this way. It was a given. That didn’t make it any less masterful, but if the inning fell another way I think it would have been even more surprising.
That’s how it was, watching Dwight Gooden pitch during his first two seasons in the league. It doesn’t happen too, too often, but every once in a while you catch yourself playing major league baseball and you see someone dominate the way Doc was dominating and you start to think, Well, I’m a major league player, so what does that make him? Or, the demoralizing inverse: Well, that’s a major league player, so what does that make me?
For the most part, big league ballplayers are all playing at something close to the same level … that is, until you’re gifted with a next-level talent that leaves you wondering what the hell you’re doing out there. In the history of the game, the difference between Hall of Fame–type players and solid everyday players is consistency, constancy. We all have our Hall of Fame-ish moments. I had some great games over the course of my career. I pitched 13 shutouts, a couple near no-hitters. I had games where I struck out 12 batters, didn’t walk anybody—you know, games that Hall of Famers have. Hitters have games where they go 4–4, hit a couple home runs. That’s a Hall of Fame game. We can all dominate, from time to time. But the truly great players dominate a lot—more often than not. Over time. And in 1984 and 1985, Doc Gooden dominated … a lot.
I should know, because I was pitching behind him. This meant I got to chart most of his games. This was a privilege and a burden, both. It was a privilege because Doc was playing the game like it had never been played, pitching like nobody had ever pitched, and I got to absorb it in this up-close-and-personal way. I was with him, on each pitch. But I couldn’t take what he was doing and attach it to what I would do the next day. I couldn’t grow my game on the back of his, because I wasn’t the same kind of pitcher. Our styles were different. Forget that our skill sets were different—we came at the game from different places, and all throughout those historic seasons I had to fight the impulse to try and match what Doc had done the night before. I couldn’t blow the ball past these hitters, like Doc could blow the ball past these hitters, and if I caught myself trying … well, then I’d be headed down a dangerous road. I had to chart his game, and learn from it, and then wash it all away, because a lot of what Doc was able to do on the mound just didn’t apply to me. It was apples and oranges. A successful outing for me meant something different from a successful outing for Doc. It’s not that I didn’t want to strike out a bunch of hitters, and leave these other guys on their heels, but there are a thousand different ways to get it done, and Doc’s way wasn’t necessarily my way.
There are a lot of people who can play the cello well enough to fill the seats in our finest orchestras, but there’s only one Yo-Yo Ma.
Looking back, I believe the front-row seat I had at the front end of Doc’s career probably hurt me as a pitcher in the short run. And it probably helped me in the long run. There was a part of me that wanted to keep up with the lead dog, you know, and at that stage in my career I thought keeping up meant striking people out. And I was able to push myself to that place, on any given night. I’d have these incredible strikeout games, where all of my stuff was working … but I wasn’t really that kind of pitcher. I’d have to get people out in all kinds of ways, and it was only later on in my career that I was able to step to the mound and not even think about striking people out. There was also this unspoken pressure to keep the ball rolling—meaning, that whatever momentum push we’d gotten from the latest Doc outing, I took it on myself to keep that momentum going. You don’t want to be the guy who kicks it.
In the end, Doc was the one who kicked it. I’ve been hard on Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry in my career as an analyst. I’ve spoken critically about the opportunities they let slip away. I tend to paint them with the same brush, because they both shone so bright, so briefly against the New York skyline. They were each blessed with all-time talent. And they each squandered their many gifts before they had a chance to realize their full potential. Their nemesis? Addiction. It’s something that needs to be addressed, and considered—not just in professional sports, but across all of society. We’ve gotten to the point where we all have peop
le in our lives who struggle with some type of addiction, whether it’s gambling or alcohol or drugs, and we need to keep shining a light on these folks, so that we might help them back to a place of purpose. To their great credit, Doc and Darryl have each done a tremendous job, in recovery, speaking openly about their addictions—specifically, about the price of their addictions. And that price, in the end, was legend. Their demons, their weaknesses, their struggles … they cost them a shot at all-time greatness. It was theirs for the taking. The two of them should have put up Griffey- and Ryan-type numbers. Darryl should have hit 600 home runs; Doc should have notched 300 wins, maybe 4,500 strikeouts.
They could have stood as role models for generations of young fans, but instead they stand as cautionary tales—reminders, time and again, of what might have been. We need only look at Doc’s masterful escape artistry on that night in Los Angeles to see what these young men could do … if they’d only given themselves the chance.
3
Coming Up
I wish I’d had some sort of template to prepare me for the life of a big leaguer—a movie like, say, Bull Durham, which didn’t come out until 1988, long past the time when it could have done me any good … or a book like, say, Ball Four, first published more than a decade before I signed my first professional contract, although I wasn’t smart enough to read it until much, much later.
I’d never expected to make my living as a professional baseball player, and now that I was out to do just that it would have been nice to know what to expect.
What was notable to me as I embarked on my first full summer in organized ball, pitching for the Tidewater Tides, the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate, was the collection of lives that had been assembled and placed in these same-seeming circumstances, in these same-seeming uniforms that gave off the false sense that we were all coming at the game from the same place, all of us headed in the same direction, with the same goal in mind. This was not the case, of course—and this one basic fact of baseball life took some getting used to. You see, every team I’d played on to this point in my career had been made up of like-minded souls. When Vince Lombardi uttered that immortal line about how winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—a line he probably pinched from UCLA football coach Red Sanders—he wasn’t thinking in minor league baseball terms. Here at the Triple-A level, winning wasn’t the endgame so much as the means to an end.