Doc: A Memoir (8 page)

This was a city in search of a savior. Maybe it was wishful thinking. But coming into the 1984 season, a whole lot of Mets fans thought that savior might be me.

The Mets’ idea was to let me get a taste of major-league life before I actually took the mound, especially in front of the home crowd in New York. Everyone knew what a pressure cooker Shea Stadium could be. Our first nine games that season—fourteen of our first seventeen—were away games. So I had some time to ease in.

We opened at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati on April 2. I’d grown up watching the Reds in spring training at Al Lopez Field. I’d played that one minor-league exhibition game at Shea, but this was my first time in a major-league park as a major-league player. I was totally in awe at how huge and perfect everything seemed. So that’s what 46,000 people looked like? The center-field fence might have been in Cleveland or Chicago, it looked so far away. As I walked onto the turf, one of the first players I saw was Pete Rose. The legendary “Charlie Hustle” was walking from behind the batting cage directly over to me. When I was growing up in Tampa, Pete was like a god. I could still remember my father and his friends, grilling steaks in the backyard and laughing about how Pete terrified pitchers across the National League. Now he was reaching out to shake my hand, welcoming me to the majors.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “You had a heck of a year, didn’t you? Hope it continues. I look forward to facing you out there.”

I told him I came from Tampa and had shaken his hand one day outside Lopez Field. He didn’t remember that, of course. But he couldn’t
have been nicer. And I could hardly believe this wasn’t a dream. I hadn’t even played a game yet, and Pete Rose knew who I was.

“Good luck to you,” Pete said.

“Thanks,” was all I could think of to answer.

Clearly, I was a long way from Tidewater, Lynchburg, and Kingsport. I couldn’t get over how the equipment managers and clubhouse kids made life so easy for us major-leaguers. Carrying our gear and our luggage. Straightening our lockers. Laundering our uniforms. After every game, a spread of chicken, steak, cold cuts, cheese, bread, vegetables, beer, and soda was waiting for us, even when we were the visiting team. If you wanted gum, it was right there. Sunflower seeds, right there. Chewing tobacco, right there.

Rookies had a few special chores to perform, our own little hazing ritual. Before we stepped onto the field, we were expected to fetch coffee for older stars like George Foster and Keith Hernandez. No one cared if I was a first-round pick. The rookie pitchers Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and I were responsible for lugging the balls out for batting practice.

After two games in Cincinnati—we won one, we lost one—we flew to Houston, where we won all three. I made my first major-league start on Saturday, April 7, in the Astrodome, four games into the season. The team flew my mom and dad to Houston to watch me pitch, laying on the full star treatment. The whole experience was exciting—for me and my folks. Someone gave Dad a hat and a satin Mets jacket, which I don’t think he took off until he got back to Tampa—and maybe not even then.

I made it five innings and picked up the win. I pitched—not great but okay. I was nervous the whole time. But I guess I made an impression on the Astros’ Ray Knight, who told reporters after the game: “His fastball explodes just like Nolan Ryan’s.” All in all, it was a fairly gentle initiation to major-league baseball.

“So what did you think?” my dad asked after the game. “Can you make it in the majors?”

“Without a doubt,” I said confidently. “I should win a lot of games.”

My second start, on Friday the thirteenth, was against the Chicago Cubs. Thirty-three thousand fans came out to Wrigley Field, wondering if all my advance billing was even close to true. I didn’t make it past the fourth inning. We got stomped 11–2. This time, when I talked to my dad on the phone, all my old insecurities were back. I told him, “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready yet.”

Chicago certainly didn’t think I was. After the game, I told a local reporter I was a little irritated at the way the fans cheered so loudly as I jogged off the mound when I was yanked. I also said I didn’t like the way the Cubs had run up the score. It was a dumb thing to say. The paper came out, quoting me calling the Cubs “hot dogs.” The next day before the game, their shortstop, Larry Bowa, came over to me.

“Look,” he said. “We weren’t trying to show you up because you’re a rookie or anything. It’s just the way our fans are. They get excited when we start scoring runs.” And he told me I should be more careful what I say to the writers. “Keep it boring and unemotional,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re just giving material to the other team.”

Caution around the media wasn’t a lesson I ever learned very well. Over the years, the reporters would get plenty of mileage out of me. But the experience in Chicago did make me want to shut down the Cubs every time I ever faced them again. I’m proud to say I almost did. My career record against the Cubs was 28–4. That was no accident.

When we finally got back to New York, I moved into the Marriott hotel across from LaGuardia Airport. Now planes were overheard during home games—and while I was trying to sleep. But not for long. A veteran pitcher, Ed Lynch, showed me around and helped me find a place to live. I landed in a quiet basement apartment in a small building in Port Washington, Long Island. It was about a twenty-minute drive to Shea Stadium, and lots of other players lived and partied
nearby. Darryl Strawberry and his wife, Lisa, were a couple of blocks away.

On April 25 in Montreal, my fourth start of my rookie season, I felt I hit my stride. I was on the mound for seven innings against the Expos in a 2–1 pitching duel. My fastballs were smoking. My curveballs were dancing around. My control was solid. I got ten strikeouts and lots of bewildered looks. The game was tight and went extra innings. We didn’t put the Expos away until Keith Hernandez doubled in the eleventh and sent in the winning run. But I really felt like a major-league pitcher that day.

In the locker room after the game, Davey Johnson and my teammates said over-the-top nice things about me. “He is way ahead of his years,” I heard Davey telling the reporters. “He could have lost his composure today, but he didn’t let adversity bother him.”

“Once or twice in a lifetime, a pitcher comes along like Gooden,” Keith said after the game. “Today was the best I’ve seen him throw. As the game progressed, he got better and better.”

Wow! Some of this praise seemed a little overblown to me. But it definitely helped to build my confidence. We came back to New York, and I got my revenge on the hot-dogging Cubs, an 8–1 blowout. It was only May 1. I’d been in the majors just a month, and I already felt like I had found my groove. The fans just went crazy, and the sportswriters seemed to agree. That night, United Press International called me a “crowd-pleasing hero,” comparing me with the Mets great Tom Seaver, who’d recently been scooped up by the White Sox: “While Seaver is still searching for his first victory with his new club, Gooden is rapidly growing into one of the top pitchers in the National League… Showing a 93-miles-per-hour fastball and a sharp-breaking curve, Gooden allowed only four hits over seven innings and struck out 10 for the second straight game.”

Damn!

My only disappointment was that I didn’t stay on the mound for all
nine innings. After 120 pitches, Davey pulled me out. “I have to keep a close eye on your pitch count,” he told me. “The same number of pitches here will take more of a toll than they did in the minors.” Not all managers, I later learned, had Davey’s understanding of that.

I just loved being out there. I’m not ashamed to admit that. The mound at Shea was starting to feel like a stage to me, a stage I was learning to command. As my rookie season revved up, the crowds grew larger, and I knew that a lot of people were coming out to see me. “Doc! Doc! Doc!” they would chant when I took the mound. And as my strikeout count rose, my old nickname morphed as well. Playing off the box score strikeout symbol, people started calling me “Dr. K.” I thought it was funny when I heard that the first time. I had no idea it would stick. In late May or early June, I noticed a small group of fans had created a living scorecard in the front row of the upper deck in left field, right at the foul line. Whenever I pitched a strikeout, they would hang a big red “K” from the upper-deck railing where everyone could see it. “The K Korner,” they called themselves, and the fans got a real kick out of that. It was the first place the TV cameras went when I struck out a batter.

My eyes went there too. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but as the ball was being thrown around the infield after a strikeout, I often turned to left field, sneaking a peek and doing a quick tally of the Ks.

Strikeouts became almost an addiction for me—and for the fans. Once I’d get two strikes on a batter, the people would rise to their feet and begin clapping. The K Korner would start waving the next K in the air, taunting the batter and pulling me along. I figured the whole thing worked only to my advantage. It put extra pressure on the hitters. What self-respecting hitter would want to have his failure memorialized with yet another Shea Stadium K? If the pitch was even close and the hitter didn’t swing, the umpire might be slightly more inclined to call a strike. A lot of times, unless I had two or three balls in a count, I
would intentionally aim a hair out of the strike zone to make the hitter chase a pitch he was unlikely to reach.

The whole thing fed on itself. The more strikeouts I threw, the more the fans expected—and the more I expected from myself. Just as Davey predicted, my pitch counts tended high. But I didn’t feel any soreness or discomfort in my arm. I only started icing it after games when I saw other pitchers doing that. I figured if the older guys were doing it, maybe a nineteen-year-old rookie should too. But the ice wasn’t reducing any swelling or pain because, in my case, there wasn’t any. Not yet.

As summer arrived, I was starting to feel almost like a rookie rock star, and the energy from the spectators only spurred me on. As I got to know the hitters better, I could tell when I had someone in the palm of my hand. Especially if I threw inside high and tight or knocked someone down early in the game, I could really see it in the hitters’ eyes. Sometimes I’d notice a batter move his front foot out of the box just as I was releasing the ball. Once I saw a batter do that, I knew I could open up the outside part of the plate. I wanted the whole lineup to feel jumpy. Every few at bats, I’d throw something inside and hard. Even when the pitch was a mistake, I wouldn’t let the batter know it. I didn’t want anyone getting comfortable when they were trying to hit me.

It was exciting playing in front of the home crowds. But it was out on the road, spending time together, where I really got to know the other Mets players. The road is where we genuinely grew into a team. The closer we got, the more distinct the individual personalities became. Mookie Wilson, our switch-hitting center fielder, was always cheery and up for action. Left fielder George Foster, who’d been a hard-hitting part of the “Big Red Machine” in mid-1970s Cincinnati, brought a real slugger’s swagger to our crew.

Second baseman Wally Backman would storm through the visiting
team locker room like a growling dog, yelling that the guys we were playing were “horseshit” or “fucking pussies” who didn’t have a chance against studs like us. Sometimes, he’d look at me and just shake his head.

“You know these fuckers are scared of you, don’t ya?” he’d say about opposing batters. “Your fastball comes in at their belt and ends up near their face. Half the time they’re swinging in self-defense. Use that to your advantage, Doc. Don’t back down from anyone.”

Ever since spring training, Darryl Strawberry had been working on my attitude. Two years older than I was, with way more life experience, Darryl specialized in attitude. “You’re a professional now,” he told me. “So carry yourself like one. Act like you belong here. Walk with your head held high.”

Darryl and I often got compared with each other. But we were very different people. I was Tampa. He was LA. I’d grown up with a doting father. He’d barely known his. What I took as nice and friendly, he saw as naive and vulnerable. He could be a kind mentor one moment and a loose cannon the next, spewing random venom from the corner of the locker room or the back of the plane. Darryl had no problem communicating exactly what was on his mind, even if he wasn’t always 100 percent certain what that might be. Frequently, he’d rip guys apart to reporters, then turn around the next day and quietly apologize. It took me a while to realize that if he was trash-talking other guys behind their backs, he might be doing the same to me.

Darryl and I had a lot in common. But I also had the sense that I might be complicating things for him as I staked out my own place on the team. A year before I’d shown up, he’d been the Mets’ bright, shiny object of 1983, winning Rookie of the Year and crushing National League pitchers with twenty-six home runs. After I turned up, a lot of the talk wasn’t just “Darryl” anymore. It was “Darryl and Doc.” Once in a while it was even “Doc and Darryl” who were going to save the Mets. I don’t think he really liked that.

Some of the older players could see that my confidence still didn’t quite match up to my talent. They made genuine and generous efforts to help. During Mets at bats, first baseman Keith Hernandez would stand at the top of the dugout swearing at the opposing pitcher for some perceived injustice. Then when we were on the field, he was constantly advising me about what pitches to throw. Most of that season, I was throwing to a young catcher, Mike Fitzgerald, who didn’t know the hitters much better than I did. Keith was a computer with a glove. He knew all the National League batters. He didn’t need Ralph Kiner’s TV stats. He had all the hitters’ quirks obsessively cataloged in his head.

“Throw him fastballs down and away,” Keith muttered into his glove as he strolled to the mound the first time I faced the Braves’ six-foot-six power hitter Dale Murphy. “He gets caught chasing that shit. You make a mistake with that, he’s only gonna hit a grounder anyway, if he even makes contact. Then throw him bad curveballs. Make him chase them.”