The High Price Of Hard Living

In spring training of 1989, while lining up for a team picture, Strawberry suddenly took a punch at Hernandez, the Met first baseman, shouting, "I've been tired of you for years!"

"That was where it really started to unravel for Darryl," Darling says. "He lost a lot of respect, and I think he was embarrassed. Keith and Gary were at the ends of their careers, and the team was passing to Darryl and Dwight. And they were never able to lead the team in the same way. They were never able to take the team from Keith and Gary and take it another step."

As the pressure grew and as the Mets failed again and again to make it back to the World Series, Strawberry began to see himself more and more as a victim. "Other guys would have a bad year and people would make excuses for them," he says, "but if we didn't win it was my fault. My own teammates would say things about me. I could never figure that out.

"Listen, I hold myself accountable for all that's happened. I take full responsibility for what I did. But me and Doc were two young stars, black players, who came to New York, and the expectations were extremely high. I don't think any other two players in any sport came to New York at that age with expectations so high. The pressure, it was so great. That's why I want to help kids now. I didn't have anyone say, 'Let me help you.' If I had had someone like that around, maybe I'd have had a different way of dealing with it."

When Strawberry, at 21, and Gooden, at 19, joined the Mets, they became part of a team that played hard and lived harder. That group evolved into a ball club fueled by an intense desire to be the best but very often driven also by alcohol, amphetamines, gambling and drugs. Young, impressionable and unsophisticated, Strawberry and Gooden were driftwood in the current.

"When Doc came out of Smithers in 1987," Garland says, "he talked to me about how prevalent the drug use was on the team. He started calling off names. He rattled off more than 10—more than half the team. Probably around 14 or 15. And I thought the '84, '85 and '86 teams were wilder."

Gooden recalls the time on a team charter in 1986 when the door to one of the bathrooms popped open, revealing a teammate inside using cocaine. "A lot of us saw it," Gooden says. "We just looked at each other and said, 'Nobody saw nothing.' "

Between 1986 and '91, of the 22 Met players who appeared in the 1986 World Series, eight were arrested following incidents that were alcohol- and/or battery-related (Strawberry, Gooden, Darling, Rick Aguilera, Lenny Dykstra, Kevin Mitchell, Bob Ojeda and Tim Teufel) and a ninth was disciplined by baseball for cocaine use (Hernandez). The charges against Aguilera, Mitchell and Ojeda were eventually dropped.

Johnson, the New York manager from 1984 through part of the '90 season, has admitted he drank too much in those years. He kept a refrigerator stocked with beer in his Shea Stadium office. A former Met player even remembers one of the coaches smoking pot on a beach in Florida during one spring training.

Moreover, Johnson says he knew "a couple of the New York veterans, not including Strawberry, were using amphetamines." Says Garland, "The guys who used amphetamines, maybe the numbers weren't great, but those who did use them used them almost every day. They depended on them so much they felt like they couldn't play without them."