The High Price Of Hard Living

After the 1986 season the Mets traded Mitchell, who had grown up around gangs in San Diego, because he scared the suits in the front office. They worried he was corrupting Strawberry and Gooden. "It was a mistake," Johnson says. "Mitch would have one or two drinks, but that's it. He was a good influence on them. He played hard. He had the street smarts they lacked. He could spot trouble and tell people to get lost. They needed that."

Says Gooden, "Davey's right. They should have never traded him."

The most influential player on those Met teams of the mid- to late-1980s was Hernandez, the smarmy first baseman who, during 1985 drug trials in Pittsburgh involving 23 baseball players, admitted using cocaine while he was with St. Louis in the early '80s. Hernandez advised Strawberry on how to break out of a batting slump: Go out and get totally smashed. Strawberry remembers the time Hernandez told him he'd found the perfect drink, of which he needed only five or six in a night: "Dry martini," Strawberry says, laughing.

The other veteran pillar of the team, Carter, was ignored or, worse, ridiculed. His crime? He was a conservative family man. "There was a lack of respect for Gary Carter," Garland says. "He was clearly in an overwhelming minority—or I should say an underwhelming minority."

The game was changing in those years, what with salaries and the memorabilia business beginning to boom; with the social status of players shifting, as revered icons became disposable celebrities; and with cocaine, as it was in the rest of American society, readily available.

Says Darling, "Darryl and, to a lesser extent, Dwight were the first athletes I'd ever seen who surrounded themselves with an inner circle of about eight to 10 associates. I felt like I never really knew either one of them. These people will tell the big star whatever he wants to hear. Their whole existence is contingent on one thing: making the man happy. It was not a real world."

The vortex of these changes—the money, the empty adulation, the cocaine—spun more quickly for a team from New York. The Mets became such a sexy, star-studded team that they were chased by fans carrying video cameras, the newest high-tech assault weapon of an increasingly aggressive audience. Just getting out of a hotel became an exercise in subterfuge.

The Mets were a portable party. Who among them would dare to be the grinch who turned down the music? What stick-in-the-mud would confront a teammate about drinking too much? The dynamics of the baseball clubhouse, especially the New York clubhouse, would not allow that. "All ballplayers like then beer," says a Met insider. "The difference with this team was they liked all the stuff harder than beer."

And so any talk about overindulging was done with a winking eye and a chuckle. Strawberry would see Gooden with liquor and say, "Man, you drinking again?" And Gooden would catch Strawberry doing likewise and remark, "Man, you're an alcoholic." Just something else to laugh about, that's all it was.

When Gooden got out of Smithers in 1987, his counselor there, Allan Lans, was given added responsibility as the Mets' psychiatrist. But Lans was distrusted by many players, who figured he was a spy for management. Gooden would joke to Strawberry, "Doctor Lans says you're a time bomb waiting to go off," and later Doc would simply say, "Tick, tick, tick...." as he walked by Darryl.