This season, the New York Mets will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the 1986 Wild Mets that won the World Series. It will be a great time for the franchise, one that’s looking to go all the way this postseason. However, they’ll be missing one key figure from that team: Dwight “Doc” Gooden, the superstar pitcher who was considered can’t miss by every scout, manager, and player who met him. The right hander, instead, will be somewhere vastly different — jail.
Rather than debating the case as to whether Roger Clemens or Gooden was the best of their generation, we are left to ask what could have been. How long could the Mets have stretched their late ‘80s dominance with Gooden cranking out remarkable seasons? How many strikeouts, wins, and Cy Youngs could Doc have racked up against those helpless batters? Sadly, the answer is we’ll never know.
For the past twenty years, the pitcher has been fighting a major, and seemingly incurable, illness: an addiction to cocaine. Every spring training, it seems, Gooden would fail a drug test — a violation of his probation. There were many people who wanted to help, but nothing and no one could save him. No matter what, despite the efforts of nephew Gary Sheffield or former owner George Steinbrenner to put him on the right track, Gooden would continue the vicious cycle of getting his life back together before tearing it apart once again in a more disturbing fashion every time. The better he got, the harder he fell.
Everything seemed to be going all right this year. The Yankees were offering spring training work, and he was excited about the chance to coach once again. Gooden, however, succumbed once again to the drug that ruined his marriage, his fortune, and, most noticeably, his life. After showing up to a scheduled meeting with his probation officer clearly high, he was given the choice of rehab or prison.
It was a question he had faced so many times before — too many to count. Gooden always chose rehab and tried his best to exorcise his demons. He never won. Doc would always return to cocaine, even after putting up great fights in his rehab clinic. It was an interminable cycle, but one that always ended up in the same place, one too ghastly to even begin to describe.
Earlier this month, Gooden chose prison over another attempt at rehabilitation. One of his former teammates, one who also had to wage the war against the demons of drug addictions, Darryl Strawberry, said that jail was the best place for him to go. There won’t be any temptations. When he was released, Strawberry said that his drug addiction was gone.
For the sake of Dwight Gooden, we can only pray that this is the final time he has to make the decision. Too many times have we heard about Gooden failing a drug test. Too many times have we heard about the never-ending circle that the former pitcher keeps traveling. Too many times we’ve seen him fail. Let’s hope we can turn the clock back to 1986. Gooden was on top of the world then. And he didn’t need drugs to get there.
Daniel is an AtHomePlate blogger; to see his article archive, click here.
