The High Price Of Hard Living

Strawberry often left the clubhouse after games with cans of beer in a paper bag. On travel days, he and Gooden would pack large bottles of Stolichnaya vodka in their carry bags to take aboard the team charter planes.

"If we wouldn't have partied so much, we would have won more," Strawberry says. "We had a team full of drunks. We'd go into a town and couldn't wait to go out drinking and partying, always asking each other, 'Hey, where you going tonight?' If we had 24 guys on the learn in those days, at least half of them were hard drinkers or drug users. That was a hard-living team."

"What I remember," Gooden says, "is we'd be on the road and we'd come back into the clubhouse after batting practice and we'd be saying, 'Yeah, let's kick some ass and then go out and show everyone we own this town.' Whether it was Montreal or St. Louis or whatever, we wanted people to know it, like we were taking over the place."

Several players were so heavily involved with poker playing that Johnson or one of his coaches occasionally sat in for a few hands in the clubhouse. "My fear," Johnson says, "was that the stakes were getting out of control, and one player would be into another player for a dangerous amount of money. That bothered me more than anything. I didn't want to see guys get hurt financially. Then there'd be animosity."

Johnson was fired during the 1990 season, in great part because Met management saw the players getting away from him. He disputes Strawberry's assessment that the team drank itself out of more titles. "I enjoyed those teams, and we were in contention every year," he says.

But Magadan, sometimes one of Strawberry's harsher critics, says, "I would agree with Darryl on that. We just lost perspective. I think a lot of guys lost sight of what our goals were. We'd go on a six-game road trip, say to Chicago and St. Louis. And instead of thinking, Let's win five out of six or six out of six, guys would be thinking, In Chicago I can go out to this restaurant and this bar, and in St. Louis I can go here and there. It was almost as if the games were getting in the way for some guys. They'd rather skip them and just go out."

Last August, on one of his first nights back home in St. Petersburg after his stay at the Betty Ford Center and his counseling sessions in New York, Gooden grabbed a cold beer from his refrigerator and jumped into his black Mercedes. One for the road. He headed north on I-275 to Tampa for a night out with friends. Already under a 60-day suspension from major league baseball, he was risking an even harsher sentence. So what? He was feeling worthless and alone. Everyone seemed to be giving up on him.

The beer started his familiar chain reaction: a few more beers that led to hard liquor that led to cocaine. "If I don't drink, I have no desire to use coke," Gooden says. "You could put a bag of coke in front of me right now and I'd have no desire for it at all. Once I drink, especially when I get drunk, the desire is there. The hard stuff leads to coke. It was the same thing over and over.

"My problems have never been here in St. Pete. I was always getting into trouble in Tampa. It's strange. I have a son in Tampa, and I go there all the time to see him. If I go to Tampa during the day, I'm fine. But in Tampa after the sun goes down, it's like I'm a vampire. I change. Get a beer for the ride, meet my friends, go to a club, and I'm in trouble.

"Why did it happen? That's one of the things I'm trying to work out with my counselor. It's tough trying to pinpoint it. It's not any one thing. It's not that simple. Why go out and get——faced to the max? I still can't pinpoint it."