No. 16 and 18 will hang above Citifield later this season. The Mets announced the dates on which they’ll retire the numbers worn by pitcher Dwight “Doc” Gooden and right fielder Darryl Strawberry this season, Gooden’s 16 on April 14 and Strawberry's 18 on June 1.
The pair were integral members of the Mets’ last World Series championship, and seemed destined for Hall of Fame — or at least be in the discussion. Strawberry still owns the franchise home run record with 252, while Gooden is second in wins and strikeouts behind the legend, Tom Seaver, and is third in innings pitched and complete games.
This poem was published by the Good Men Project.
Striking Out
Dwight Gooden’s been arrested
and I’m in a classroom
talking to students
about semi-colons.
There are three uses
for the semi-colon, more
than the number of innings
Doc pitched in his final game.
In his first game, he
struck out five. He didn’t
win again until May,
but, then, he was unhittable.
He was nineteen. I was
twenty-one. I worked
a delivery route.
He worked the strike zone,
won the Cy Young. Nothing
but cocaine could stop him.
I went back to school,
got a degree. He
won a championship,
made millions throwing
curveballs that broke
into the zone
like they fell from a desk.
Independent clauses
can be linked with semi-colons.
Drug stops with a jail sentence.
Fastballs with a slow change.
Use commas in lists,
unless clarity is needed. Use
the fastball to brush the batter
back from the plate,
then make him chase
a curveball in the dirt.
Gooden painted the corners
like a master, rapid-fire
and fierce like Pollack, precise
like Rothko. I use words
to make my point, commas
to bring it home.
There are eight uses
for the comma; there were
eight shutouts pitched by Gooden
in his Cy Young season,
eight chances given
to the phenom pitcher
whose violent, rising fastball
punctuated the rare period
when his Mets ruled the city.
In my classroom,
miss a test and you only get
one chance to make it right.
I wrote this column in 2004, when it was announced Strawberry would appear on the Baseball Hall of Fame ballot. He would receive six votes in his one year on the ballot, or just over 1%, despite having the highest slugging percentage and OPS of anyone on the ballot. Gooden would get 17 votes the next year, his lone year on the ballot.
DISPATCHES: Hall ballot recalls happy days at Shea
Strawberry’s arrival ushered in a change of fortune for the New York Mets.
Darryl Strawberry is on this year’s ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
There was a time in my life when I believed that would mean more than it actually does, when it looked like the 6-foot, 6-inch slugger might earn himself a place in baseball’s version of Valhalla.
Straw’s career never panned out the way it was supposed to, however, and his inclusion on this year’s ballot is more a curiosity than anything else. But that should not take away from what the lefty power-hitter meant for me as a baseball fan and a Mets fan, in particular.
Straw helped define what I’ll call my second act as a baseball fan. The star of the first act was Tom Seaver, who led the pitching-rich Mets of the late-1960s and early-1970s to contention and a couple of World Series performances. The first act ended June 15, 1977, with his trade to the Reds.
Strawberry’s arrival at Shea in 1983 brought the curtain up on Act II. He hit the majors when I was 20 at a time when I was about ready to leave the game behind as a quaint obsession from my childhood days. Straw was full of promise and his emergence re-energized a moribund franchise and my own flagging interest. Suddenly, a team that had lost more games than it had won for the previous six years was worth paying attention to again; suddenly, there was a reason to watch the New York Mets again.
I remember when he was drafted out of Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, the first player taken in baseball’s annual amateur draft. He was billed as the next great hitter, tall and lean with quick hands and surprising power for such a young ballplayer.
Straw never lived up to his advanced billing, though in his eight years with the Mets he slugged 252 homeruns and drove in 733 runs (he is the club’s all-time leader in both categories). Those numbers seem paltry now, when even light-hitting shortstops bang out 15 to 20 dingers, but at the time they were good enough to place him among the league leaders on an annual basis.
Drafting Strawberry was a rare bit of light in an ever-darkening Mets world. It was just three years after the Seaver trade and the four raging mediocrities (I am being generous here) the team received from the Reds in exchange were still making their dubious contributions.
One bright spot was Lee Mazzilli, a fleet-footed local product drafted by the Mets in 1973. He had movie-star looks, but really wasn’t that great of a player—he hit just .280 with 16 home runs that year, best on the team. The rest of the team was about as bad as can be imagined, scoring a total of 611 runs—a ridiculous 3.77 per game—and hitting a league-worst 61 home runs.
For the next couple of years, Mets fans watched the team continue to founder, though there were flickerings of hope on the horizon. Strawberry was in the minors, waiting for his chance; the new Mets brass was showing itself willing to make the big splash, trading for power hitter George Foster before the 1982 season; and it brought Seaver back home in 1983 (for a year, but that’s another column).
The team remained abysmal, however. Then on May 6, 1983, with the team a brutal 6-15, Strawberry was promoted to the majors. He hit 26 home runs and drove in 74 runs the rest of the way, won Rookie of the Year and permanently changed the dynamics of the Mets lineup. Two months later, the Mets acquired first baseman Keith Hernandez and the outlines of the team that would contend for the next seven years were in place.
Strawberry was an all-star for the next seven years with the Mets, was among the league leaders in RBI five times and probably should have won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1988 when he hit 39 home runs and 101 RBI. He put those numbers up in Shea Stadium, one of the better pitching parks in baseball.
And yet, his relationship with fans was decidedly lukewarm. He never was quite as good as he was expected to be and probably could never had lived up to the expectations set by Mets fans and the media. He could be surly and knuckleheaded, and too often looked as if he were playing at half speed.
But there were few sites as thrilling at Shea in those days as Straw connecting with a fastball and sending it high into the night sky.
He left as a free agent in 1991, signing with his hometown Dodgers after a superb 1990 season in which he hit 37 homers and drove in 108 runs, finishing third in the MVP voting.
Neither Strawberry nor the Mets were quite the same afterward. He had a good year with the Dodgers that first year, hitting 28 home runs and driving in 99 runs in an era when those numbers actually meant something. After that, however, injuries, drugs and alcohol derailed his career. He finished with a respectable 335 home runs and 1,000 RBI but a far cry from what could have been.
He finished up with the Yankees—painful for a Mets fan—hitting 24 homeruns in 1998 as the team’s lefty designated hitter. He battled and beat cancer, ended up in jail on drug and assault charges, remained a presence for a time in the nutty culture of the New York sports pages.
And now, oddly, almost surreally, Strawberry is on the ballot distributed by the Baseball Writers Association of America. When I saw the ballot the other day, it took me back, made me realize that the years are passing a little more quickly than I’d like.
But it also reminded me of just how fun it was to be a Mets fan during those halcyon days when Straw was stirring things up at Shea.