The High Price Of Hard Living

Gooden has maintained his home in St. Petersburg since moving there in 1987 from his birthplace, Tampa. Within a week after leaving the Betty Ford Center last summer—and three days after attending a counseling session in New York with Robert Millman, a psychiatrist who represents Major League Baseball, and Joel Solomon, a psychiatrist who represents the players' union—Gooden was drinking and using cocaine again with friends in Tampa. And five months after that, Strawberry tested positive for cocaine.

"It just goes to show you," Gooden says now, "it doesn't matter where you are. Drugs, alcohol...it's everywhere. What's more important is that you can never let your guard down."

Another intersection: Today neither Strawberry nor Gooden has a team to call his own. They are suspended from baseball. They are the eighty-sixed Mets.

And yet they are so different. Strawberry is a complex puzzle. None of the Mets was better around children when making charitable appearances. Even now he is pouring a healthy portion of what's left of his money—he's estimated to have earned about $25 million as a baseball player—into the Strawberry Patch Youth Project, a San Francisco Bay Area drug and alcohol prevention program that he founded with Ron Jones, one of his closest friends and a former drug dealer. Strawberry is, even as he approaches his 33rd birthday, as naively eager for love and acceptance as a puppy in a pet-shop window. He has a natural capacity to charm people. He can turn any room into a happy place merely by strolling in with that cool, smooth, long-legged glide, and he can energize any ballpark, hit or miss, with that beautiful, looping swing.

Sadly, he can just as easily transform himself into something rotten. His transgressions contradict—even obliterate, for many people—that core of goodness. Alcoholic, drug abuser, batterer and now convicted tax cheat. His career has been a long screech of tires during which all you could do was wait for the crash. The chronic tardiness, the enormous mood swings, the erratic behavior offered a cacophonous prelude to disaster for all to hear. "A walking stick of TNT," says Strawberry's former Met teammate Ron Darling, who's now a pitcher for the Oakland A's.

Contrasted against Strawberry's dark streak was the apparent benevolent light of Gooden: accommodating, consistent, industrious, quiet. Indeed, after 1985 the tight friendship between the two ballplayers loosened to a comfortable acquaintance. They were not as close as the public thought. Or, as Strawberry says, "I never partied with Doc."

"The few times Dwight was late for anything," Darling says, "everyone would ask, 'Is the cab stuck in traffic? Was he in an accident?' When Darryl was late, you thought right away, Darryl screwed up again. Doc was Teflon and could do no wrong. Darryl was a ticking time bomb."

The way Strawberry remembers it, his first experience with cocaine occurred in 1983, soon after he was promoted to the major leagues. He liked to drink beer and he had smoked pot sometimes, but now two of his veteran teammates were asking him to try something new. "There's a couple of lines in the bathroom for you, kid," he remembers them saying. "This is the big leagues. This is what you do in the big leagues. Go ahead. It's good for you."

Strawberry tried the cocaine. Damn, he thought, that's good.

So began a career whose trademark has been its volatility. He did not create a new controversy every day; it only seemed that way. In a seven-day span in June 1987, Strawberry overslept twice, each time needing a teammate to roust him from his hotel bed with a phone call from the ballpark; was fined $250 and benched for two games for those latenesses; charged the mound after almost being hit by a pitch; and blasted a 450-foot home run. So often did he drop bombs that when asked about his weird week, he replied in all earnestness, "Weird? Why? Just because I was late twice, got benched, was fined and had a fight? It's part of the game."