The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (143 page)

The 1984 total of two hundred and seventy-six strikeouts led every other pitcher in the majors, and translated out to an astounding 11.39 strikeouts per nine innings pitched. Along the way, Gooden had fifteen ten-strikeout-or-better games, thus giving birth to Shea Stadium’s “K Man” placards. In September of that season, Dwight threw two sixteen-strikeout games in succession.

What was happening, I should say at long last, was that Doc was simply trying to become a better major-league pitcher. Outs, not strikeouts, are what count, and Gooden, who is intelligent, has clearly been persuaded that retiring the side on six or eight pitches, with no strikeouts, is easier on an arm and on a career than taking fifteen or sixteen pitches to fan the side. In spring training this year, I saw Gooden working assiduously at a new pitch—an off-speed, high-to-low breaking ball—to add to his famous fastball and its lethal curveball counterpart. He fell in love with the new delivery, as young pitchers do when they find a beautiful toy, and for a time he had success with it in the regular season. The K’s went down, as we have seen, but his performance and his success ratio were just about as before. In midseason, though, he ran into unexpected difficulties, and there were several games in which I saw him begin to struggle as never before. He would miss—just miss—with a cut fastball or an off-speed breaking ball, and fall behind in the count, and when he then came back to the fastball and its companion he often couldn’t quite find the strike zone. The heater would be up a bit, or wouldn’t seem to have much movement on it even when it was in the black. He began walking batters, sometimes five, or even six, in a game (unheard of, for him), and after May 6th there were no more shutouts. He had some excellent games along the way (a four-hitter and a two-hitter in September), but he wasn’t the same: he was a little less.

In the postseason games (to look ahead a bit), Gooden pitched powerfully in his two starts in the playoffs, and his loss in his only decision was on an unearned run; in the Series, he gave up six runs in five innings in Game Two (he was the loser), and was taken out in the fifth inning of Game Five, by which time he had given up four runs and nine hits. He was deeply troubled by this last outing, and so were his teammates and his manager. But never mind the results for the moment. To me, Dwight Gooden in this game looked like a different pitcher altogether, just as he had in some stretches in midseason. The beautiful flow and freedom of his delivery weren’t there, even when he did throw the fastball for a strike. He didn’t seem to be finishing his motion in quite the same place as he did last year, with his body twisted over to the left and the fingers of his pitching hand almost down by his left shoe. He was straighter away on the mound, somehow.

My guess about Dwight is that he slightly altered his pitching motion (his mechanics, in the parlance) this summer in the course of mastering his new off-speed delivery, and then found he couldn’t always get back the stuff and the great control that were there, game after game after game, last year. He said he was squeezing the ball too hard at times, he said he had problems with his location. Whatever it was, he wasn’t all of a piece out there, which is what great pitchers look like and the way they feel themselves to be when things are going right for them. Bob Boone, the Angels catcher, told me that it had probably taken young Mike Witt an extra season or two to get his pitching act together, because Witt is so tall. (He is six-seven.) “His checkpoints are farther apart,” Boone said, with a smile. Gooden’s checkpoints (this foot, that shoulder, the turn on the rubber, the microsecond when the arm starts forward, and so on) may have drifted apart by a fraction or two this summer, because of the very different motion and rhythm involved in throwing an off-speed delivery. Now he will have to get them together again.

After Gooden’s departure in Game Four, Marty Barrett, the Red Sox second baseman, said, “I feel Dwight’s mechanics are a little off. I went against him in spring training when he had that great year last year, and he was more straight up and over the top then. Now it’s almost like he’s throwing over and moving across his body.” One of the Mets regulars said to me, “If Marty Barrett says anything like that, you can believe it. Anything from Barrett is like a message from Western Union. I think that’s what happened to Doc, and it made it a tough year for him. But we all have tough years. Now he’ll just have to go out there and get it back. Don’t bet against him.”

*
The news about Gooden’s difficulties with cocaine, which came to light in the early spring of 1987, damages this advice, of course, but it is still difficult to say whether Gooden’s addiction (he was a social or occasional user, according to his physicians) affected his work in 1986.

I
T CAME ON A
chilly gray afternoon at Shea Stadium, and by the end of the second inning the Mets were in heavy weather of their own making, down by 4–0 to the Astro left-handed starter Bob Knepper. These N.L. playoffs, it will be recalled, had opened at the Astrodome with a dominant, almost suffocating 1–0 shutout performance by the Astros’ big, sleepy-faced right-hander Mike Scott, who had struck out fourteen Mets batters with his darting split-fingered fastball and high heater, thus nullifying a strong effort by Dwight Gooden. The visitors had evened matters the next day, when the Mets, blown away by Nolan Ryan in his first trip down their batting order, jumped on him for five quick runs on their second look, to win 5–1, behind their left-handed off-speed precisionist Bob Ojeda. But here at Shea the sudden four-run Houston lead looked serious, for Knepper, a ten-year veteran with exquisite control, had defeated the Mets three times during the regular season, and we knew that Scott, the best pitcher in the National League this year, would be back for the Astros the very next day. Watching these glum proceedings from my press seat in deep left field (the foul pole actually blocked my view of the mound), I was afflicted by grumpiness and self-pity. The night before, at home by my television set, I had watched the Red Sox drop a 5–3 game to the Angels out in Anaheim, to slip behind in
their
playoffs by two games to one. My dream was already coming apart, and here at my sixth game in five days (two up at Fenway Park and three via television) I felt baseballed out. Ron Darling, the Mets’ starter, had composed himself after two egregious innings (five hits, a base on balls to the No. 8 batter, two stolen bases, a wild pitch, and a two-run homer by second baseman Bill Doran), but the Mets in their dugout—as viewed unsteadily through my binoculars-looked glum and wintry, with their arms crossed and their paws buried in the pockets or the armpits of their shiny blue warmup jackets. In among them I could pick out Wally Backman and Lenny Dykstra, the Mets’ dandy two-cylinder self-starting machine that had figured in so many uprisings this summer, Dykstra bats from the left side and Backman is a switch hitter who does much better against right-handers, and so both were sitting out Knepper. (“I don’t care how fiery you are,” Mets manager Davey Johnson said about Dykstra before the game. “It’s on-base average that counts.”) The Shea multitudes made imploring noises from time to time, but they, too, looked muffled and apprehensive. Nothing doing.

Kevin Mitchell led off the Mets’ sixth with a single over third, and Keith Hernandez followed with a modest fly ball that dropped into short center field for another hit—nothing
much,
except that Craig Reynolds, the Astro shortstop, now booted a grounder by Gary Carter (a double-play ball, in fact), sending Mitchell home, and Darryl Strawberry lofted Knepper’s next pitch into the first deck in right field, to tie the game. I revived instantly, but also briefly, for the Mets now handed back the gift run—a walk (Rick Aguilera was pitching for the home side by now), a throwing error by Ray Knight, and an infield out—and very soon thereafter had to deal with Charlie Kerfeld, the Astros’ lumpy, menacing right-handed rookie flamethrower, who blew out the candle in the eighth on a handful of pitches. Kerfeld is a hotdog—all shades, chaw, belly, and heat out there—and when he somehow reached behind his back to spear Carter’s hard one-hop grounder to the mound, he pointed at Gary as he ran up the line, relishing the moment before he threw him out.

I had improved my seat by a section or two during the afternoon, scrounging the places of no-show reporters closer to the action, but at the end of the eighth I decamped for the interview room, just beyond the Mets clubhouse in the nether corridors of the park—a way to beat the crowds, and a pretty good vantage point from which to watch the last few outs of a game, by means of a giant television monitor. Panting, but certain of my long wisdom in these matters, I attained my goal, to find the room virtually deserted: somebody had forgotten to set up the monitor. And so it happened that I got to see not the longest game-winning home run of my life but certainly the smallest—the sudden two-run, bottom-of-the-ninth smash to right by Lenny Dykstra that I watched, huddling with similarly misplaced media friends, via a palm-size Sony Watchman TV set that one foresighted reporter had brought along to the game. Peering like microbiologists, we watched the mini-replays and filled in the missing details. Backman, pinch-hitting, had dropped a leadoff bunt down the first-base line and made a skidding slide into the bag around an attempted tag by first baseman Glenn Davis; then he had motored along to second on a passed ball. The Houston pitcher was the Astros’ short-relief specialist Dave Smith, who had been wheeled in by manager Hal Lanier to wrap things up, thus expunging Kerfeld. Now a postage-stamp-size Backman, seen in black-and-white slow-motion replay, flung up his arms as he watched Dykstra’s homer sail into the Mets’ bullpen and then began his jumping, backward-running dance toward third, while the rest of the Mets streamed onto the field to celebrate the 6–5 victory and their sudden lead in the playoffs. Dykstra, it should be explained, had come into the game in the seventh, when he fanned against Knepper. Davey Johnson was proud of this maneuver (he likes to have his pair of deuces in there late in a game), and explained that he had guessed—guessed right, it turned out—that Knepper would shortly be done for the day, leaving Dykstra still in there to swing against a right-hander his next licks.

Dykstra is a pistol. In this, his first full season, he not only had won the job in center field (moving Mookie Wilson to left, on most days, and permitting the club to drop the increasingly ineffective George Foster) but had quickly emplaced his engaging and brattish mannerisms in our mass Shea consciousness—his odd preliminary forward lean in the batter’s box, with bat held upright, as if to conk a burglar; the facial twitches, winces, and squinchings as he prepares for the pitch, and, before that, the peculiar, delicate twiddling of a gloved fingertip along his brow; the joyful little double jump and hand pop as he comes to a dusty stop beyond first with another base hit; and, contrariwise, his disbelieving, Rumpelstiltskin stamp of rage when a pitcher has caught a corner against him for strike three. Here in the interview room, Lenny was all cool and charisma—a guest on some late-night talk show. He said that the only other time he had hit a winning home run in the bottom of the ninth was in Strat-O-Matic (a board game), against his kid brother, Kevin.

In the clubhouses, I heard more talk about Strawberry’s home run than about Dykstra’s. Strawberry had suffered through a ghastly midsummer batting slump (he was booed horrendously by the upper-deck critics at Shea, where he went 0 for August), and had looked particularly helpless against left-handed pitching. The three-run homer struck off Knepper meant something, then—something beyond this game. Keith Hernandez said, “Baseball is a constant learning experience. Nothing happens very quickly for most hitters, and you have to remind yourself that Darryl is still only twenty-four years old. He’s played four years in the majors, but he’s still a baby. It isn’t often that a Gehrig or a Mattingly comes along, who can do it all at the plate right away. When I first came up, the Matlacks and Koosmans and Carltons of this league—all those left-handers—gave me fits. Jim Rooker just killed me at the plate. You have to be patient and try to learn to adjust, and Darryl is still learning.”

What happened on this afternoon (and again in the fifth game of the playoff, when Straw whacked another telling homer against the Astros) did not quite turn Strawberry’s year around, for he batted only .208 in the World Series, with six strikeouts and a lone, superfluous home run and run batted in on his very last at-bat. He is an enigma and a challenge, perhaps to himself as much as to us and to his club, and his style (those thick, long young arms; the looping, easeful swing; the long-loping catch in right-center field that ends with a casual heavenward reach to suck in the ball, with the gesture of somebody taking down a hat from a top shelf) is always so effortless that it looks magical when it succeeds and indolent when it fails. Each year, we wait for the performance that will lift his numbers (.259 this year, with twenty-seven homers and ninety-three runs batted in) to the next level, which is superstardom; each year, that once-certain goal seems a little farmer away.

Here in the clubhouse, Strawberry said that Knepper had been throwing him breaking balls all afternoon (he’d nubbed one down the third-base line in the fifth, for a thirty-foot single), and he had guessed fastball the next time up—guessed right, that is. The batting and first-base coach Bill Robinson said, “When Darryl got on base after that little hit, I said ‘That’s the way to beat on that ball!’ and he told me maybe that at-bat would make him stay in the next time up. And that’s what he did do—he kept his right side in on that swing and didn’t pull off the ball. I tell them all,
‘Guess fastball.
’ You can adjust to a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change off the fastball, but it’s tough to guess a curveball, a knuckleball, a slider, or a change and men hit the fastball. I believe most pitchers will throw the fastball six out of ten times. So six out of ten times I’m sitting on dead red and knowing I still have a chance on the others. If Knepper throws me a good slider or something outside that’s nasty, I’m not going to hit it anyway. You can count me good breaking-ball hitters in this league on the fingers of one hand—well, the fingers of
two
hands. We’re all fastball hitters in the end.”