On April 14th, the New York Mets honored their former pitching star Dwight Gooden by retiring his number 16 in a ceremony at Citi Field. Gooden’s teammate, outfielder Darryl Strawberry, also had his number 18 retired, in a similar ceremony on June 1st. Met fans greet these events with joy, appreciation, and a big sigh.
Gooden and Strawberry experienced similar and simultaneous career trajectories. Both displayed enormous talents that were only partly realized, as their careers were derailed by drugs, alcohol, and brushes with the law. Both made comebacks, including as members of the Yankees, but it was never quite the same.
In effect, they co-starred in the same morality play. They were not just young African-American stars in a sport in which black participation and fan interest has since waned; they were also friends, and teammates on both New York teams. Their athletic stars rose and fell almost in tandem and, outwardly at least, for the same reasons.
Gooden was the ninth player to be so honored in the team’s history, and he amply deserved the distinction. For a few brief years in the 1980s, he was not just the best pitcher in baseball, but among the best ever. Tragically, beginning in 1987 with a stint in drug rehab, Gooden’s career plummeted. As great as he was – above all in 1985, when he had one of the most dominant pitching seasons of modern times – Met fans know his story as one of promise achieved all too briefly.
Doc Gooden’s rookie and sophomore years as a Mets pitcher are not just something I remember fondly; they were the two most exciting single season performances I’ve witnessed in sixty years as a baseball fan: the sudden emergence of a virtually limitless talent, with no hint of the steep dive that was to come.
I can still recall the feeling, in the spring of 1987, when I first heard the news on my car radio that Gooden was entering drug rehab: bitter disappointment, and an almost-Greek sense of tragedy. The Mets, over their first quarter-century, had had only one true homegrown superstar, pitcher Tom Seaver; and in his first two seasons Gooden matched Seaver at his best. He seemed a lock for future greatness.
Following the Mets’ World Series victory in 1986, the twin declines of the two players were the sports story of the decade in New York. Strawberry’s fall was only slightly more gradual and less spectacular; he put up some terrific numbers, but he was never as dominant a hitter as Gooden was a pitcher.
Given the hype surrounding both players, one could even argue that Strawberry was slightly overrated. He was very good, to be sure, extremely graceful, and an eight-time All-Star. But he never had an MVP-caliber season; never hit more than 39 home runs or batted above .284 while with the Mets; and despite an outstanding throwing arm, he was not an otherwise gifted outfielder. (The only time I ever saw him dive for a ball, he injured his wrist and was sidelined for weeks.) Not so Gooden, whose stats as a pitcher in the early years were simply spectacular.
Both men continued to play baseball through the 1990s amid drug suspensions; Gooden threw a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1996. Both were arrested multiple times for substance abuse or possession, violations of probation, and other offenses, including (for Gooden) battery against a police officer, child endangerment while driving, and probation violation; and for Strawberry, failure to pay child support, soliciting sex from a policewoman, and possession of cocaine. Both endured months of incarceration.
If you think this is just a baseball story, think again. It’s about the causal complexities of everyday life: how supremely talented young athletes find themselves overwhelmed by sudden fame, money, pressures on and off the field, and the ability to make very bad personal choices, in both cases involving cocaine and alcohol.
I have always empathized with Doc and Darryl. They were and remain decent, humble, likeable men, whose human flaws happened to play out on a very big stage and deprived them of great things that seemed within their reach. As far as I can tell, their mistakes, even their crimes, were mostly of a victimless nature.
In a pre-game interview on April 14th, Gooden called his past drug problems “a disease, not a weakness.” Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen went further: “Doc Gooden is one of the best people we have ever met, and It just gives you an idea what an insidious, horrible thing addiction is, that he could have been felled so often – but he never stopped being a great person.”
That’s a popular view – one that exculpates our heroes – and it largely framed the story of Gooden’s and Strawberry’s downfalls in the New York media.
Although, unlike Cohen, I have never met the pair, I want to agree with the sentiment; and I can’t say that it’s misplaced. But one can’t tell this story fully and honestly without questioning how to apportion accountability and blame, and without reckoning with that great bugaboo of humanity: the conflicting underlying views of causality that allow us to see the same events, and the same people, as either victims or perpetrators of their fates. It’s a philosophical question; and if you don’t like philosophy, stay away from baseball.
I would argue that neither of those two alternatives is satisfying, and we can’t see the world clearly (if we can see it clearly at all) without adopting bifocal lenses. It’s difficult or impossible to reconcile the existential (free will) view, that we are the ultimate masters of our fates, with the more deterministic one, that we are victims of circumstances. Instead, we must look at life from both ends of the telescope, and grope to reconcile – or simply live with – the opposing perspectives.
Whatever the pressures on Gooden and Strawberry that led them to substance abuse, at least one key link in the causal chain for each of them was a series of very bad personal choices. They were actors thrust onto a big and slippery stage; but they weren’t mere puppets entangled in a causal web. If their addiction was a disease – and no one wants to blame the victims of that condition – it wasn’t a disease they contracted from other people or players. In other words, it wasn’t something that happened to them by chance, without their making choices, or in complete innocence of the possible consequences.
The tendency to focus on free will and personal choices generally reflects a conservative political bent, whereas the opposing tendency to cite causal determinacy aligns with more liberal leanings. This causal axis explains a lot (not all) of our moral and ideological proclivities. But those political valences are not especially helpful in the context of sports (or sports-and-society). And raising questions about Gooden’s and Strawberry’s essential innocence isn’t conservative. It’s rather an apolitical realism: an acceptance of the ultimate conundrum of life, that we can’t ignore either model of causality, but we can seldom combine or reconcile them.
Like most Met fans, I continue to like and admire Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, and to regret their past failures to reach their full potential. I don’t judge them harshly. They let us down – but not because they wanted to. In a sense, I think we have to say, they did their best. Maybe we let them down – we the fans, the media, and the overly commercialized sport. And I welcome them to the world of philosophy, which is where all great baseball questions ultimately belong.