It wasn’t exactly a Porsche 911 with a quadraphonic Blaupunkt, but when the Mets’ hottest prospect reported to his Class-A Carolina League team in 1983, it might as well have been a scene out of “Bull Durham.”
Dwight Gooden, all of 18 years old, pulled up to City Stadium in Lynchburg, Va., in a flashy silver Trans Am.
“I knew he was a first rounder and he had a nice little fancy sports car,” former Mets outfielder Mark Carreon told the Daily News. “We had to check it out.”
By the time “Bull Durham” hit theaters in 1988, Gooden was already one of the more decorated and dominant pitchers in baseball. He’d already won the NL Rookie of the Year Award, the Cy Young Award and a World Series, and been named to four All-Star teams.
But in 1983, when he was assigned to Class-A Lynchburg, Gooden was still just a kid.
Though you wouldn’t have known watching him pitch.
“The pop you could hear from the outfield,” Carreon said, “that pop was like no other.”
Retiring the number of a franchise great is one of the highest honors in sports. When Gooden’s No. 16 is retired at Citi Field Sunday, he’ll be remembered for lightning bolt arm, his strikeouts, the K Korner, the championships and the awards.
They’ll remember Gooden the phenom, which is how they knew him with the Lynchburg Mets.
“Of all the kids that I’ve ever had in the [minors], him at his age was one of the best I’ve ever seen,” said Sam Perlozzo, a former Baltimore Orioles manager who managed Gooden in Lynchburg.
But Gooden will also be remembered for what happened after he became a star, when he became one of the game’s cautionary tales. Substance abuse and addiction cost him games, enshrinement in Cooperstown and, at one point, his freedom (he served time in a Florida prison in 2006 for violating his probation by using cocaine).
“Cocaine didn’t fill my days like a job or a hobby would have. But cocaine was never out of my mind,” Gooden wrote in his 2013 autobiography “Doc: A Memoir.”
Before the cocaine, though, Gooden was one of the most prolific pitchers of a generation — and even before that, he was a teenager in Lynchburg who struck out 300 hitters.
‘GOODEN-ITIS’
Gooden was drafted fifth overall out of Hillsborough High School in 1982, assigned to a rookie level team in Kingsport, Tenn., and was quickly promoted to Low-A Little Falls where Perlozzo was the manager. Gooden was shut down after two games then because of an arm issue, but two games were all the manager needed to see.
Perlozzo lobbied general manager Frank Cashen to promote Gooden to Lynchburg during spring training in 1983.
“It sounded like it was pretty solid that he was going to go to [Class-A] Columbia and at the last minute, they said he was going to Lynchburg,” Perlozzo said. “I was tickled to death.”
Gooden didn’t find instant success in High-A. He was blowing hitters away with his velocity, but he was also trying to survive solely off the fastball. Pitching coach Joe Cumberland helped him understand how and when to deploy his wicked curveball.
He learned quickly.
“There would be a man on third with less than two outs and he knew that if it was a ground ball or a fly ball, the run was going to score,” Perlozzo said. “Without a doubt, he would knock it up to 96 or 97, and then bring it up to about 100. This guy, he was looking for a strikeout and he’d get it almost every time.”
His feel for pitching so innate, so much more mature than many in A-ball, Perlozzo wasn’t sure how to articulate what he was seeing in his postgame reports.
“He threw the ball up out of the zone and wiped them out, and they couldn’t touch the breaking ball that wasn’t even put in the right spot,” Perlozzo said. “I said, ‘How in the heck am I gonna write that out?’”
Gooden wouldn’t just give opposing hitters fits, he would give opposing pitchers fits, too. Perlozzo had a friend coaching another Carolina League team and his ace matched up against Lynchburg’s ace a few times. Gooden always prevailed. The coach told Perlozzo that his pitcher had come down with a case of “Gooden-itis.”
Gooden had tunnel vision on the days he pitched. No one talked to him; they knew better. Even when he was off, he was on, always finding ways to get outs on the rare occasions when control eluded him.
“One game where Doc was pitching, he was getting hit. He didn’t have his best pitches or his location,” Perlozzo said. “But Doc is Doc, so who the heck am I going to bring in that’s better than him? So, my pitching coach asked me, he said, ‘You want me to get somebody else up?’ I looked at him and I said, ‘We got anyone down there better than the guy we already got?’”
Cumberland laughed. The bullpen phone stayed silent.
Gooden used to run foul poles between starts, going pole to pole drenched in sweat, and earning the nickname “Poles”. Older players noticed that, even at 18, he carried himself like a seasoned veteran with the confidence of a big leaguer.
“How does somebody go into big leagues with that kind of confidence?” Carreon said. “Gary Carter [told] me it took him three years before he felt like he belonged and it took me about the same…
“But not Doc.”
Eight players from the 1983 Lynchburg team would eventually reach the majors, and there was considerable excitement in the Flushing front office about the group as the season progressed. There was even more excitement in Lynchburg where it seemed like all they did was win.
As the strikeouts piled up, Cashen began calling Perlozzo to ask if Gooden was ready for The Show.
“Absolutely,” Perlozzo told him.
REACHING 300 Ks
Late in the season, the Mets promoted Gooden to Triple-A Tidewater for the playoffs. Just as Perlozzo lobbied for him out of spring training, Davey Johnson was lobbying for him in Tidewater.
Perlozzo broke the news to the team at a pizza place after a game. Obviously, Gooden was ready for the next level, but the team was on its way to a 96-win season and he was close to 300 strikeouts. The manager fought for him to stay in Lynchburg for one more game.
“Finally, they said, ‘Just let him go,’” Perlozzo said. “In the last outing he got strikeout No. 300. And straight after the game, Doc went up to Triple-A.”
The next year, he was a big leaguer on the Opening Day roster.
When he became the youngest All-Star in history, Carreon and Lenny Dykstra went to a bar in Jackson, Miss., to watch the game, marveling that they had been playing with him only a year before.
Gooden had already started drinking in Lynchburg, but everyone else was too. It wasn’t a problem yet. Postgame beers were simply a regularity.
BECOMING DR. K
In 1984, Gooden became the teenage toast of the town. His quick ascent and his ensuing brilliance became a national storyline and his starts were appointment viewing.
“There was no place like [Shea] when Dwight was pitching,” Carreon said. “The earth would shake and the grass beneath me would rumble. It was just amazing.”
Gooden’s rise coincided with the Mets’ rise as well. They became a force in the National League — and a force in the Manhattan party scene. When Carreon reached the big leagues in 1987, the Mets were being feted like The Rolling Stones and Gooden was their Mick Jagger.
“I ran into him a couple of times at the bar having a few drinks after a game,” Carreon said. “There were a lot of people who wanted a piece of him…He couldn’t go anywhere without fans coming up and wanting to talk to him. ‘Hey Doc, good job, blah, blah, blah.’ There was just no privacy.”
No privacy and a ton of pressure. It’s a tough combination in any city, but especially in New York.
Rumors of substance abuse were persistent. So much so that Jean Stottlemyre, wife of late pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, told her husband what she’d been hearing.
Mel didn’t want to believe it.
“Mel was very nice about that,” Jean said. “But then he realized, yeah, things weren’t great.”
Winning was a convenient cover for the drugs and the booze. Plus, this was known as a hard-partying group during in era of baseball when stimulants were prevalent and “greenies” readily available in clubhouses.
Jan. 18, 2024: ‘We needed help’
New York Daily News Back page for Jan. 18, 2024: Doc and Darryl admit they were “mentally crazy” when they were young Met stars. Dwight Gooden (L) and Darryl Strawberry, who will have their numbers retired by the Mets during the upcoming season, open up about “not taking care of ourselves” during their time as young stars in the Big Apple.
Keith Hernandez was called to testify in the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials. Ron Darling, Bob Ojeda, Tim Teufel and Rick Aguilera were arrested outside of a Houston nightclub during the 1986 season. The Mets destroyed a charter plane after clinching the NL pennant that year. Debauchery was expected, almost as if it was part of the team’s charm.
But then Gooden was arrested in December 1986. He failed a drug test during spring training in 1987 and entered rehab for the first time. It had become a problem Gooden couldn’t pitch his way out of.
Gooden leaned heavily on the Stottlemyres for support.
“There was something special about Dwight and Mel,” Jean said. “He almost felt like Dwight was one of his sons.”
The two eventually reunited on the Yankees, with Mel coaching him through his 1996 no-hitter.
“That was the most excited I’ve ever seen Mel as far as his coaching days go,” Jean said.
A LIFETIME LEGACY
Maybe it wasn’t drugs and alcohol that undid Gooden. Maybe his arm wore out by throwing 120 pitches every fifth day as a teenager. Maybe it was the thousands of innings he pitched in his early 20s.
Still, you can’t tell Gooden’s story without including addictions and arrests. In 1983, no one could have imagined that the fun-loving kid with overpowering stuff would become an addict.
What they imagined at the time is exactly what will happen Sunday at Citi Field: His number being retired, forever commemorating his historic Mets career, honoring not just the player he became, but the person as well.
“He did it with poise and he did it with class,” Carreon said. “And he was just relentless.”
