The High Price Of Hard Living

On those days Garland or one of the New York coaches would mention to manager Davey Johnson that Strawberry appeared as if he wanted to sit the game out. "——him," Johnson would snap back.

"That's right," Johnson says now. "I'd get the farthest away from him that I could so that he had no chance of getting the day off. My attitude was, he was going to play—screw him. Maybe he'll understand he has to keep himself ready to play and get his damn rest. Usually he'd be so mad at me, he'd go out and hit two home runs. It happened more than once."

"I don't know about that," Magadan says. "Most of those times Darryl was a nonfactor."

Johnson knew Strawberry was cheating himself on the field and called him into his office on numerous occasions. The speech, Johnson says, was always the same: "You've got to take care of yourself. You've got to get your rest. You can't keep this up." Strawberry would nod and say, "Thanks, skip. I hear you. I'm going to turn things around." And the minute Strawberry walked out the door he would forget what he had heard.

Says Bry, Strawberry's former agent: "Management is so afraid to say anything to players, especially the high-paid ones. They see them on a daily basis. They're scared to death of the players, afraid to confront them if they know something's wrong. That's what happened with Darryl."

On Sept. 18, 1989, in anticipation of a New York loss, Strawberry and Kevin McReynolds began undressing in the clubhouse in the ninth inning of a game at Wrigley Field. The Mets staged a rally, however, forcing the two players to scurry back into their uniforms as their turns in the batting order approached. Johnson fined them $500 each and called a meeting the next day.

"Mac knew he was wrong, but what he really didn't like was being linked with Strawberry," Johnson says. "What really upset me was that during the meeting Darryl was saying, 'What's the big deal?' " Johnson and Strawberry nearly came to blows. Several players, including Darling, prevented a fistfight only by stepping between them. "What most people don't know," Darling says, "is that that kind of confrontation happened on planes and buses and in the clubhouse between Darryl and Davey maybe 20 times. That happened all the time."

Strawberry could be mean and antagonistic, especially from his usual spot in the back of the team bus. He would shout loud enough so that Johnson, sitting in the first row, could hear him. He once ridiculed Johnson so viciously for not giving enough playing time to outfielder Mookie Wilson that Johnson had to fight back an urge to run to the rear of the bus and pummel Strawberry. On another day Mackey Sasser, a Met catcher troubled by an embarrassing hitch in his throwing motion, was not as restrained. He charged Strawberry and came away from the assault with blood gushing from his nose.

"Darryl always thought [ragging on people] was funny," Magadan says. "But a lot of times it was vicious. And he wasn't always drunk. A lot of times it was on the bus right after a game."

Nobody caught more heat from Strawberry than Carter, the veteran catcher who struggled with injuries from 1987 through '89, his last two years with the Mets. "It got to the point of being very malicious," says Carter. "But a lot of it had to do with his drinking. You just let it go. I knew what it was all about. It was about money. He hated it that I was making more money than he was, even though I'd tell him, 'Darryl, you're going to make 10 times as much money in this game as I ever did.' It was the same thing with Keith Hernandez. That's why they had the fight."