Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (7 page)

Late in the day he phoned his lawyer, Robert Shapiro, and agreed to meet with him the next morning. Shapiro, who two months later would be on national TV representing a fugitive named O.J. Simpson, brought Darryl into his office while Ruby, Charisse and Michael waited outside. Shapiro told Strawberry it was time he admitted he was an alcoholic and a drug user. For years Strawberry had been afraid to make that admission because he was worried, for one thing, about how it would be received by his family, his team and the media.

Shapiro told him he would take care of everything, including how it played out in the press. When the door opened, Shapiro gestured toward the family and asked Strawberry, “Is it O.K. to share it with them?” Strawberry nodded and told them.

“Tears welled up in my eyes, and I had a big lump in my throat,” Ruby says. “It made me realize some of the things that were happening with him. He didn’t care what was going on with the family. He was not in touch with us.

“Now that I look back I can understand a lot of his behavior. I used to wonder why he never made eye contact with me when he talked. I kind of brushed it off. You know, he was always on the go, never had much time. He was always kind of looking over my head, looking for someplace else to go or something.

“I remember one of the first things he did after he left the Betty Ford Center. We were sitting in my home, on opposite sides of a room. I told him, ‘You know, that’s something you never used to do.’ And he said, ‘What’s that? What are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘You can look me in the eyes when you’re talking to me. You never used to do that.’

“From what I understand now, a lot of things were going on before he came back to L.A. That was something we weren’t aware of.”

Marking the point at which a life went wrong is an inexact science. When did the downward spiral begin for Darryl? With that night after his rookie season when he met Lisa Andrews at a Lakers game at the Forum? With that first powerful hit of coke? With his sophomore year at Crenshaw High in South Central L.A., when he was disciplined by his baseball coach for having a bad attitude and quit the team? Or with those childhood nights when his father, Henry, would come home loud and angry after drinking and gambling? Darryl, the middle of five children, remembers being hit by his father “for little things” before Henry left Ruby in 1974, when Darryl was 12.

“It starts with abuse: verbal and physical abuse,” Darryl says. “It leaves scars you carry to adulthood.” Ruby doesn’t remember Henry’s striking Darryl so much, saying, “I’m not that kind of mother. I would not have allowed it with my kids.” But she does concede it’s important if “that’s the way he remembers it.” Teammates and friends always have noticed how Darryl has sought love, often desperately.

“Yes,” Ruby says, “because Darryl didn’t have the father he wanted, or one who acted the way he thought a father was supposed to, it caused him to act out in different ways. Some children need that father figure, especially boys. Darryl needed it, but he didn’t have it and looked for it in other places.”

The Mets selected Strawberry with the first overall pick of the 1980 draft, their decision clinched when Strawberry, then fresh out of Crenshaw High, posted an impressive score on a test that measures aggressiveness, mental toughness and self-confidence. After giving Strawberry a $200,000 signing bonus, New York had scout Roger Jongewaard accompany him to its Kingsport, Tenn., rookie league team. “I went with him as a buffer because of all the attention he was getting,” Jongewaard says. “Darryl did such a great job handling it, he really didn’t need me.”

Less than three years later, in 1983, Strawberry was in the big leagues. He had 26 home runs that season, beginning an unprecedented run of hitting more than 25 home runs in his first nine seasons, all but one of them with the Mets. Only two other players had hit that many homers in more than their first
four
seasons: Frank Robinson (seven) and Joe DiMaggio (six). During that span Strawberry never hit 40 home runs in a season, and he averaged 92 RBIs—a relatively low total for someone with his power. He also missed an average of 21 games a season in those years. And he played just 75 games over the 1992 and ’93 seasons because of a herniated disk that required surgery.

“He should have averaged 100 RBIs and 40 home runs,” Jongewaard says. “He has underachieved. And that’s a hard thing to say because he put up some very good numbers, but that’s how much talent he had.”

Those sort of expectations alternately inflated Strawberry with pride and wore him down. In typical Straw-speak, one day he would promise “a monster season” and the next he would complain about having to carry too big a load. His quotes were often outrageous and hollow. He continually drifted, as if pulled by the current, and if he ever sought mooring during his years with the Mets, he did not find it at home or in the clubhouse.

“I was at their wedding,” a friend says of Darryl and Lisa’s marriage, “and they were at each other’s throats from Day One. It was like they hated each other from the start. And his mother didn’t like her at all. That put a drain on Darryl. And it was no secret how they went through money. It was almost like a contest to see which one could outspend the other.”

Darryl married Lisa in January 1985, two months before signing a six-year contract worth $7.2 million. The Strawberrys would separate and reconcile routinely over the next seven years. Once, at dinner with another couple, Darryl and Lisa shouted obscenities at each other so loudly in a restaurant that “we were embarrassed,” says one of the other diners. “I said to Lisa, ‘Why don’t you try being nice to him?’ And she said, ‘If you only knew what he puts me through.’”

One of Lisa’s attempts at reconciliation occurred in Houston during the 1986 National League Championship Series. Darryl says he spent one night drinking with friends at the hotel bar, and when he returned to their room he found Lisa had chained the door. He banged on it furiously as they screamed at each other. When she finally opened the door, Darryl uncorked a punch to her nose that sent her to a hospital. “It was scary,” he says. “I did some of the same things in my marriage that I felt my father did to me and our family. It’s unfortunate it had to happen like that, but I was turning into him. That’s what I found out later from the people at Betty Ford.”

Lisa filed for legal separation and an order of protection on Jan. 29, 1987. She and Darryl reconciled eight months later. On June 2, 1989, Lisa began divorce proceedings. The Strawberrys reconciled again later that year. At 3:45 in the morning of Jan. 26, 1990, during a fierce argument in which Lisa whacked Darryl in the ribs with an iron rod, he pulled out a .25 caliber pistol and pointed it at her. He was arrested and jailed briefly on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, but no charges were filed.

Recalling that night in his 1992 autobiography,
Darryl
, he wrote, “Just be glad, I remember saying to myself as I tried to find something positive in this whole mess, that you aren’t involved with drugs.” That, of course, was a lie. Eight days after the fight, at the Mets’ recommendation, Strawberry checked into Smithers for alcohol abuse. As it turned out, this was a convenient move to avoid prosecution. That was another one of Darryl’s lies. “Going to Smithers was my cover-up,” he admits now. “I never even bothered telling them about the drugs.”

Strawberry continued to drift. On Nov. 8, 1990, he signed as a free agent with the Dodgers. “My first choice was to be back home,” he said at the ensuing press conference, only to turn around moments later and say, “The Mets were the only organization I wanted to play for.”

He tried religion, claiming in January 1991 that he was born again. He was free of drugs and alcohol, he said, while rationalizing, “I can have a glass of wine or beer if I choose. I choose not to.” An L.A. teammate said that was a lie and that Strawberry still was sucking down beers. Born-again teammates on the Dodgers, Brett Butler and Gary Carter, would invite him to breakfast, but Strawberry wouldn’t show.

“It wasn’t a farce,” his mother says. “I think he was genuinely trying to get his life together. But at the same time he did not want to admit to anyone how much trouble he was in.”

Darryl and Lisa split again in January 1991, and she resumed divorce proceedings on May 28, 1992. The divorce was finalized on Oct. 15, 1993. Lisa was awarded the couple’s house in Encino, a 1991 BMW 750i, a 1989 Porsche 928, a 1991 Mercedes SL, $300,000 in cash, $40,000 in attorney’s fees (in addition to the $55,000 Darryl had already paid for her attorneys and accountants) and $50,000 a month in spousal support. Darryl was ordered to pay another $30,000 a month in child support.

“His marriage was a bad one from the beginning,” Ruby said in 1991. “Darryl wasn’t that kind of person until he got involved with Lisa.”

Lisa Strawberry did not respond to SI’s attempts to reach her through her attorney.

On Dec. 3, 1993, less than two months after his divorce was finalized, Strawberry married Charisse Simon. The wedding occurred three months after Strawberry was arrested on a battery charge for allegedly striking her. Simon did not press charges. The couple has an 11-month-old son, Jordan, and is expecting another child in June, the fifth for Strawberry by three women. (In 1990 Strawberry was found by means of a blood test to be the father of a child by Lisa Clayton, of Clayton, Mo., who had filed a paternity suit against him.)

Strawberry’s domestic problems affected him on the field. He admitted during spring training in 1987 that there were periods of “several days, even weeks where I didn’t concentrate at all.” Then his deportment grew worse. That year he reported late to work at least four times (once remarking, “It’s tough getting up for day games”), walked out of training camp once and begged out of a critical game against the first-place Cardinals with a virus after spending the afternoon recording a rap song. After that, Mets teammate Wally Backman remarked, “Nobody I know gets sick 25 times a year.” To which Strawberry responded, “I’ll bust that little redneck in the face.” And all of that happened in a year when he had career highs in batting average (.284) and home runs (39).

“When a guy gets to the ballpark at five-thirty, six o’clock at night and he’s sending somebody out for a burger or chicken and it’s his first meal of the day, that’s a sign of trouble,” says Steve Garland, a former Mets trainer. “And that happened a lot.”

“You could always tell the days Darryl didn’t want to play,” says former Met Dave Magadan. “He’d show up looking as if he was knocking on death’s door. You knew he wasn’t going to play or you’d get nothing out of him.”

On those days Garland or one of the New York coaches would mention to manager Davey Johnson that Strawberry appeared as if he wanted to sit the game out. “F--- him,” Johnson would snap back.

“That’s right,” Johnson says now. “I’d get the farthest away from him that I could so that he had no chance of getting the day off. My attitude was, he was going to play—screw him. Maybe he’ll understand he has to keep himself ready to play and get his damn rest. Usually he’d be so mad at me, he’d go out and hit two home runs. It happened more than once.”

“I don’t know about that,” Magadan says. “Most of those times Darryl was a nonfactor.”

Johnson knew Strawberry was cheating himself on the field and called him into his office on numerous occasions. The speech, Johnson says, was always the same: “You’ve got to take care of yourself. You’ve got to get your rest. You can’t keep this up.” Strawberry would nod and say, “Thanks, skip. I hear you. I’m going to turn things around.” And the minute Strawberry walked out the door he would forget what he had heard.

Says Bry, Strawberry’s former agent: “Management is so afraid to say anything to players, especially the high-paid ones. They see them on a daily basis. They’re scared to death of the players, afraid to confront them if they know something’s wrong. That’s what happened with Darryl.”

On Sept. 18, 1989, in anticipation of a New York loss, Strawberry and Kevin McReynolds began undressing in the clubhouse in the ninth inning of a game at Wrigley Field. The Mets staged a rally, however, forcing the two players to scurry back into their uniforms as their turns in the batting order approached. Johnson fined them $500 each and called a meeting the next day.

“Mac knew he was wrong, but what he really didn’t like was being linked with Strawberry,” Johnson says. “What really upset me was that during the meeting Darryl was saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’” Johnson and Strawberry nearly came to blows. Several players, including Darling, prevented a fistfight only by stepping between them. “What most people don’t know,” Darling says, “is that that kind of confrontation happened on planes and buses and in the clubhouse between Darryl and Davey maybe 20 times.”

Strawberry could be mean and antagonistic, especially from his usual spot in the back of the team bus. He would shout loud enough so that Johnson, sitting in the first row, could hear him. He once ridiculed Johnson so viciously for not giving enough playing time to outfielder Mookie Wilson that Johnson had to fight back an urge to run to the rear of the bus and pummel Strawberry. On another day Mackey Sasser, a Met catcher troubled by an embarrassing hitch in his throwing motion, was not as restrained. He charged Strawberry and came away from the assault with blood gushing from his nose.

“Darryl always thought [ragging on people] was funny,” Magadan says. “But a lot of times it was vicious. And he wasn’t always drunk. A lot of times it was on the bus right after a game.”

Nobody caught more heat from Strawberry than Carter, the veteran catcher who struggled with injuries from 1987 through ’89, his last three seasons with the Mets. “It got to the point of being very malicious,” says Carter. “But a lot of it had to do with his drinking. You just let it go. I knew what it was all about. It was about money. He hated it that I was making more money than he was, even though I’d tell him, ‘Darryl, you’re going to make 10 times as much money in this game as I ever did.’ It was the same thing with Keith Hernandez. That’s why they had the fight.”