Mets legend Dwight Gooden made every start feel more like an event than a ballgame
All these years later, there is no way to overstate the accomplishments of Dwight Gooden in the mid-1980s. The brilliant numbers Doc put up at age 19 and 20 were unprecedented and now even more eye-popping given today’s era of six-inning starters, yet his legacy was even bigger than that.
He wasn’t so much a pitcher as a phenomenon known as Dr. K.
Simply put, Gooden’s talent mesmerized New York City and made his every start more of an event than a ballgame. Though his career never quite lived up to the Hall of Fame promise of those early years, due in large part to his well-documented drug problems, nothing could ever diminish the magnitude of what he meant to the Mets.
It was his arrival in 1984, after all, which dramatically changed the direction of a franchise that had endured years of hopelessness and, in turn, launched what is still the most celebrated period in Mets history, including the 1986 world championship, thereby creating a permanent special place for Doc in the hearts of Mets fans.
As such, it is fitting that Gooden’s No. 16 will be retired by the ballclub next season, as the Mets announced today, an honor that will not only recognize his impact but reward him with a visible place in team history forever.
It is another in a series of moves by owner Steve Cohen, following last year’s unveiling of the Tom Seaver statue, the retirement of Keith Hernandez’s number, and the return of Old Timers’ Day, that no doubt will be applauded by fans who have long wanted the team to do more to embrace its history.
The ceremony is sure to be emotional for fans and especially Doc himself, in part because of what he has been through in his life, battling an addiction that not only damaged his career but haunted him for years in retirement, even sending him to prison for seven months in 2006.
These days, at age 58, Gooden seems to be in a good place in his life. In an appearance on SNY’s Baseball Night in New York last month he looked to me, someone who has known him since his glory days in the ‘80s, to be more youthful than I’d seen him in years, relaxed and comfortable offering insights about not only baseball matters but his own peace of mind.
It was a long way from the way he looked in 2016 when I sat with him for a long interview ahead of the 30-year reunion of the ’86 Mets at Citi Field, when he admitted there were times, because of repeated relapses into drug use, that he thought he’d never live to see the age of 50.
“Back then I was in a place where I had good days and bad days,” Gooden said on BNNY. “I was still, not so much in denial, but I had doubts about the consequences of my addiction, and where I was with my health, in and out of the hospital for different reasons.
“Today I feel 10 years better than I did 10 years ago if that makes sense. My kids are healthy, and I’m healthy, finally. I feel a world of confidence. I’m trying to help the youth now with addiction problems, and the mess that I made with my life off the field. I’m trying to turn that into a message the best I can.”
Earlier this week Gooden tweeted a smiling, thumbs-up picture of himself with his doctor from St. Francis Hospital and Heart Center on Long Island, thanking the staff there for treatment. A friend of Gooden says Doc is now back at his home on Long Island, feeling good, but has been treated periodically for a heart issue for several months.
In the big picture, however, Gooden’s optimistic report about his health and state of mind is surely great news to the many friends, former teammates, and family members who have worried about him over the years, ever fearful that he could slip back into his old ways.
During that 2016 interview, in fact, Gooden was candid in discussing his daily fight to stay sober, admitting he never knew on any given day when the urge would come to use drugs.
“I still have to fight that urge,” he said. “Even when things are going great in my life, I can be very vulnerable. It’s just the way the disease works. The temptation is always there.”
His words sounded ominous at the time, and it was only a few months later when Darryl Strawberry, whose number is also being retired, publicly called Gooden out for using drugs again, saying he considered it a last-ditch attempt to save his former teammate from harm.
Now, seven years later, the word from people who know Gooden well is that they are far less fearful of a relapse these days.
“Look, you never know for sure, but he’s in a much more positive frame of mind now,” said one person close to him. “He’s more content; he has a more balanced life, making it a priority to be a good father to his kids. He’ll be the first to tell you that as an addict it’s a day-to-day-existence, and I always worry about Doc, but the sense I get when I see him or talk to him, I don’t worry about him quite as much as I once did.’’
If Doc is indeed in a good place, the announcement of the number retirement ceremonies should only make it better. During his BNNY appearance, he was asked if he thought he deserved such an honor, should it ever come his way.
“I think I deserve it as far as what I did on the field,” he said. “If you look at off the field, it’s kind of hard to say. I don’t know how they look at that, but at the same time, I don’t think I deserve a life sentence for the things I did off the field.
“Either way, I’m just honored to be in the Mets Hall of Fame. But if that was to happen, I’d be very honored.”
In conversations I’ve had with Gooden over the years, meanwhile, he has said he believes fans would be in favor of having his number retired.
“The support I’ve received from Mets fans has always been unbelievable,” he once said. “They’ve always been there for me, even with everything that happened. They always tell me I gave them some of their greatest memories as fans and how much that means to them.”
That likely is not hyperbole, considering the impact Gooden had from the beginning, winning the NL Rookie of the Year award in 1984, leading the league with 276 strikeouts and at age 19 becoming the youngest-ever All-Star, putting on a show by striking out the side in the one inning he pitched.
That turned out to be merely an appetizer, of course, to one of the very best seasons in baseball history in 1985, when Gooden won the NL Cy Young Award, pitching to an astonishing 1.53 ERA while throwing a whopping total of 276.2 innings that included 16 complete games, numbers that pitchers likely will never approach again in the modern game.
Throw in the ’86 championship season and Gooden threw 744.2 innings over his first three years in the big leagues, while racking up an almost identical number of 744 strikeouts — even more impressive than it looks compared to today’s high-strikeout totals, considering it was a time when hitters prioritized making contact over hitting home runs.
Yet none of the numbers define the Dr. K phenomenon. There was nobody like him at the time, overpowering hitters with his deadly combination of high fastballs and knee-buckling curveballs, doing it with an artistry that prompted a group of fans to start the K Korner, hanging homemade K signs at Shea Stadium to mark his strikeouts in a manner that would eventually be copied all around the majors and is still in vogue in various forms, as current Mets fans hang pictures of ghosts in honor of Kodai Senga’s ghost fork pitch.
“I was around a lot of great pitchers and a lot of great teams,” the late Mel Stottlemyre once told me, referring to his stints as pitching coach for those ‘80s Mets teams and then the Joe Torre Yankee teams, “but I never saw anything that came close to the feeling of being in the ballpark when Doc was pitching those first few years of his career. There was an electricity that you really had to experience to understand. And even as his pitching coach, I’ll never forget having goosebumps sitting there in the dugout watching him.”
In the end, more than anything else, that’s really why Gooden has long deserved to have his number retired. Simply put, in terms of the phenomenon he created, there will never be another Dr. K.
