No other seven-year-olds I knew could throw curveballs. And I got a little thrill every time I saw one of those babies sail toward home plate then make its little dive at the end.
“See that one?” I’d called out to my dad behind the plate.
“Very nice,” he’d call back. “Very nice.”
I wouldn’t say I was brimming with baseball confidence. Far from it. That would take years to build up, far more slowly than my skills did. At seven, I was still too shy to sign up for Belmont Heights Little League. I was happy just to practice with Dad and play with my neighborhood friends. Then a boy from a team called the Larkin Giants quit and my dad told the coach, Grover Stevens, I might be interested. I played third base and did some pitching and was immediately one of the better players on a very lousy team. After we lost eight or nine games in a row, I was so frustrated, I decided to quit.
“None of these kids are any good,” I said, “except for me and one other guy.” I’m not sure what I was expecting from a team of seven- and eight-year-olds.
Dad tried to talk me out of quitting. “If you’re going to play baseball, you can’t just quit,” he said. “It’s not fair to your team.” But I was adamant, and he didn’t press the point.
I kept playing pickup games with my friends. Dad and I kept going to the park. I knew he wanted me to keep at it. He didn’t push me too hard, which could have driven me away from baseball forever. And when the next season rolled around, I told my father I’d been thinking about giving Little League another try. I think he knew I’d come around, but he wanted to make sure I’d learned a lesson from the experience.
“If you quit again,” he warned me, “you’re done. Forever. You gotta go out and do your best, no matter what the other guys are doing. Maybe they will learn from you.”
I was still a terrible loser. I could get absurdly upset at defeat of any kind. If I was pitching and a player got a hit off me, I’d get furious. If, God forbid, someone hit a home run, I’d start crying on the mound. We could be winning 5–1, and I’d still burst into tears.
When I glanced over at the stands, I could see my father, looking like he wanted to die right there. He did not want to be that boy’s dad. “Knock it off,” he’d hiss in my direction. After the game, he wouldn’t yell. But he’d try to calm me down with a stop at Baskin-Robbins, which took at least a double cone.
I noticed slow improvement on the field, even if my confidence was lagging. All that mat-ball Strike Out I’d been playing with Gary was paying dividends. Dad’s drills in the park really helped. My fastballs and my curveballs were definitely getting me noticed among the seven- and eight-year-olds.
When I was nine, one of the players from my dad’s semipro team was coaching a group of Little League ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. He’d been watching me play with the younger kids and said he thought he could use my arm. I was totally opposed to making the leap into the big-boy division. Those kids looked like giants to me. Playing with adults was one thing. I wasn’t expected to be as good as they were. But older kids—I feared they’d show me up. I begged my dad, my coach, and the league director to keep me with the little ones. But everyone seemed to recognize I was playing far beyond my age. They wanted me to keep pushing myself, and I reluctantly agreed.
No one was more intimidating than Albert Everett, the very first pitcher I faced when I moved up. He was eleven or twelve, but he was built like a sixteen-year-old. Once I saw him hit a kid in the face with a fastball hard enough to break a cheekbone. Someday soon, I figured, he’d probably be drafted by the Reds or the Braves. The coach caught my eye in the dugout at the top of the third inning of that first game and said, “You’re gonna pinch hit.”
What?
“I have a headache,” I told him. Then I wobbled in front of the team bench and gave the coach a pained, bug-eyed look. “It even hurts to put the helmet on.”
“Then find a bigger one,” the coach said.
“I gotta sit down,” I moaned.
The coach shook his head. “Need you in there,” he said. “Go get a hit.” He gave me a spank on the butt and a little shove toward the on-deck circle. The kids on my team began to cheer, and I had no choice but to bat.
My knees were knocking. I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead. I didn’t want any part of this. I kept thinking how this monster’s fastball would feel, slapping me in the face.
All that fear got the better of me. I bailed out of the batter’s box on every pitch. Albert whiffed me on three called strikes.
Ouch!
But I learned. Later that season, the tables were turned, and I had to pitch to Albert for the first time. A kid on my team offered a brief scouting report. “Just throw him curves,” my teammate told me. “He can’t hit ’em.”
I threw two curveballs and jumped out to an 0-and-2 count. Then I got cocky and threw a fastball. Albert whacked it over the right-field fence, and I was sniffling again on the mound. I still had a ways to go, but even I could see I was making progress with my arm and my head. I was getting better every week. At nine, I was becoming one of the stronger pitchers among the ten- to-fourteen-year-olds.
It was that season my dad’s friend Dennis from the Cargill plant started coming out to watch me pitch. He considered himself a good spotter of young talent, and he told my father he saw something in me. He had a unique way of being encouraging. He’d lean on the fence along the third base line and chatter constantly at players on the field. He liked to dream up little nicknames that only he understood.
When I was on the mound, he would wait until I reached 0 and 2 on a batter. Then, he’d start to yell.
“Operate on him, Doc! Time to operate, Doc!”
He told my father I performed like a surgeon out there. Steady and smooth. Getting the job done.
After I struck out the first kid and the next batter stepped up to the plate, Dennis would go at it again: “You got another patient, Doc!”
Pretty soon, everyone was calling me Doc.
Over time, “Doc” would morph into “Doctor D” and eventually “Doctor K.” I didn’t mind. I liked Doc from the beginning. As far as I was concerned, it was cooler than Goody, the other nickname that occasionally popped up, and a million miles cooler than Poodney, my mom’s dumb name for me.
I kept playing Little League and pitching well. When I was ten, our team made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which was very exciting except that as a ten-year-old, I had to sit in the stands and watch. I was too young to play. But I kept at it. Working with my dad in the park, practicing with Gary and the neighborhood kids—but still not as sure of myself as I should have been. I knew I was good. Everyone told me so. But I never really felt like one of the cool kids. I guess you’d say I was socially awkward. I’d spent so much time with my dad and older players, that inevitably meant less time hanging out with kids my own age. My talent was always a step or two ahead of my comfort and my confidence. When I was fourteen, I finally made it to another youth-baseball World Series, in Gary, Indiana. I moved us into the title game by throwing nine strikeouts against the East Coast champions from Auburn, Maine, then scoring the final run by stealing home. What I remember most was having my first plane ride and being away from home for two weeks.
All the while, a little tug-of-war was playing out at home. As Dad was working on my baseball, drilling me, quizzing me, Mom was making sure I got my homework done. “I know you want to do baseball,” she said. “But there’s no guarantees. You’ve gotta be able to do other things. You’ve got to get a job. You have to be accountable.”
By the time I got to Tampa’s Hillsborough High School, some of my slow-growing confidence on the diamond was actually carrying over to the classroom. I loved math and English. History not so much. But with Mom’s nudging, I was getting my work done and earning pretty good grades. And Mom was constantly coming home with job applications for me. Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Busch Gardens, you name it. “Between schoolwork and baseball
,” I complained, “I don’t have any time for this, Mom.”
“Weekends,” she said. “You can make time.”
I handed the applications to my dad, who made them disappear. And even Mom eventually came around. As I kept practicing and kept getting better, she told me one day: “You need money, you ask for it. Don’t steal. But you got no time for a job. You got to play ball.”
Dad bought me a 1974 Plymouth Duster. I put spoke hubcaps on it. My friend tinted the windows—badly, but he tried—and I got an extra-long AM antenna to pull in WTMP 1150, “Today’s R&B and Classic Soul.” Thinking about that clunker makes me cringe today, but that car was my high school idea of an excellent ride.
Even with the car, I didn’t have much luck with girls. My best friend, Troy Davis, and I once picked up two young ladies at a school dance and drove them to a park to make out. When WTMP powered down for the night, I couldn’t pick up any other music on the dial. The Duster got uncomfortably silent. It didn’t take long for the girls to climb out and join the two dudes parked next to us. They had an in-dash eight-track player. How could we compete with that? Troy and I sat there, dumbfounded, then went back to the dance and completely struck out.
I had no idea how to act around the opposite sex. One night, I took a girl to eat at Burger King. While we were standing in line, I started talking with another girl, the one working behind the counter. Her name was Carlene Pearson. As she was taking our order, I asked her what time she got off. That was my idea of smooth at the time.
Hillsborough High, a big public school on North Central Avenue in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood, had a powerhouse baseball team. The coach, Billy Reed, was considered one of the best in Florida, one of two supercompetitive black baseball coaches in the Tampa area. The school’s baseball stadium is now called Billy Reed Field. Go Terriers! But I didn’t go out for the team until my junior year. Again, I was dragging my feet on my way up, and I kept resisting my dad’s idea that I should pitch. I liked pitching. But I also enjoyed getting my uniform dirty, diving for balls in the infield. I liked first base, shortstop—even the outfield. Sometimes, I’d tell Coach Reed that my pitching arm was sore so he’d put me in a different position. He seemed okay with that. We had a lot of talent on the mound. At the start of the season, I was his number five pitcher. When major-league scouts came to check out the Terriers, they weren’t coming to see me.
But Coach Reed started to notice that every time he’d put me in to pitch, no one seemed to hit the ball. And one afternoon, the coach pulled me aside. “You may have something, kid,” he said.
That made me feel pretty good.
It was a lucky break that I got noticed at all. Early in my first season, several scouts came to see my friend Vance Lovelace, who was a senior and had also been on a nice pitching run. But Vance had a couple of rocky innings that day, and Coach Reed pulled him out.
“Get in there,” the coach said to me.
As the pro scouts were walking out of the stadium, they must have heard my heat popping in the catcher’s mitt. My dad might have mentioned something too. Whatever first got me noticed, they started paying attention to me. I was winning games, and the local media caught on. By the middle of my junior year season, reporters were writing me up in the papers. Scouts were showing up regularly at my starts. They were even standing behind home plate with radar guns and video cameras. Pretty soon, scouts were calling my house and stopping by the high school, taking me out of class to have me work out for them.
“Let me see you run a sixty-yard dash,” they’d say.
“Throw one as hard as you can.”
“Give me a curve.”
I felt like I was back in Robles Park, doing sprints and board balances with my dad. And frankly, these scouts didn’t seem to know any more than he did.
The whole idea of going pro became more real to me when Vance got picked up by the Chicago Cubs in the first round of the 1981 draft. That left me and my pal Floyd Youmans as the star pitchers on the Hillsborough team. But not for long. Coach Reed caught Floyd playing pickup basketball when he was supposed to be at baseball practice and kicked him off the team. Floyd moved to California to live with his dad for senior year and played ball out there.
That left me. Senior year, I was our best weapon on the mound—pretty much our only weapon. I’d outlasted everyone else. Many weeks, I took the mound three days. One solid start for sure. If we got a lead in that game, I’d stay in at least seven innings. Often, I’d do some mop-up work in the second game of the week. If we were playing another tough team that week, Coach would often have me start a third game, going six or seven innings if I could. That was a crazy lot of pitching for a high school kid, and it wouldn’t be allowed today. But it got me in front of a lot of pro scouts. Our team did well that year. We made it to the state tournament. And I was becoming a high school baseball star. I was big man on campus. I got a lot of attention, and I was finally enjoying it. I got my gold tooth that year. And my pitching kept getting better. The University of Miami offered me a baseball scholarship and a free apartment if I wanted to go there after graduation. Mom thought that sounded like a fine idea. I felt like I was on a roll now, and my pitching was getting me there.
Late on a Monday afternoon, June 7, 1982, my dad tossed me his car keys. Dad drove a 1974 Plymouth Duster, just like I did. But his Duster wasn’t all tricked out like mine. “Go have fun,” he said with a smile. The major-league baseball draft was finally here. My friend Eddie Ganzi and I were heading downtown to the offices of the Tampa Tribune to watch my future unfold in real time.
Yes, I was big news at Hillsborough High School. But this was professional baseball across the whole United States and beyond. Weren’t there guys like me everywhere? My dad didn’t seem worried. “You’ve figured it out so far,” he said. “Just trust all the pieces to fall in place. And tell ol’ Tom I said hello.”
Tom McEwen was a legendary sportswriter. He knew famous athletes and coaches everywhere. But he was also a true booster for local sports. His column, The Morning After, ran in the Trib six days a week. When people didn’t think that was enough, he added a Sunday version, Hey, Tom, where he gave snappy responses to reader mail. No one did more than Tom McEwen to build Tampa into a first-rate sports town. He was one of the few white guys who dared to venture into the ’hood for games—even Little League games. “Bring your sleeping bags,” he’d write, making a pint-size playoff game sound like the World Series.
This time, he invited me and a couple of prospects from Tampa Catholic—Richard Monteleone and Lance McCullers—to the newspaper office to watch the major-league draft. Back then, we didn’t have wall-to-wall coverage on ESPN. The Trib was the one place in town that had a live feed of the draft. In the middle of the newsroom was a TV screen that looked like it might be announcing arrivals and departures at the airport. They laid out some donuts and oranges for us to eat.
There were rumors about my prospects.
Coach Reed had been gathering intelligence from his scout friends. “You might go as early as the fifth round,” Coach said.
Others were making what sounded like crazy predictions. Scouts for the Reds and the Cubs had even called my house, saying if they picked a high schooler in the first round, it might be me. And the Cubs had the first pick overall.
As Eddie and I stared up at the screen, the first pick of the draft came and went. The Cubs picked a high schooler all right—but it wasn’t me. They chose Shawon Dunston, a shortstop from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn.
McEwen was sitting next to me, and I leaned over and told him about the phone call from the Cubs scout. “Shake it off,” he said with a laugh. “Everything changes on the fly, Doc. It’s gonna be a long night, but good things are gonna happen.”
As the next couple of picks went by without any mention of Dwight Gooden, Coach Reed’s theory was starting to sound about right. I wouldn’t get drafted early, but I was formulating a plan. I’d work hard and show everyone what a
later-round steal I was.
Now it was the Mets’ turn. They had the fifth pick of the first round. But I was daydreaming, busy convincing myself that ultimately the draft order didn’t mean much.
Then I glanced at the board and saw something strange:
5TH PICK. NY METS. DWIGHT GOODEN. HILLSBOROUGH HIGH. TAMPA, FL.
Eddie’s eyes popped open, but nothing came out of his mouth. Frantically, he was pointing at the board.
“Doc!” McEwen shouted. “You just went to the Mets!”
Monteleone and McCullers, both forecast to go well ahead of me, looked as shocked as I was.
“I don’t think that’s right, Mr. McEwen,” I said, shaking my head.
“Whaddaya mean?” he asked me.
“I can’t be the fifth pick,” I told him. “Coach Reed didn’t expect me to go until the fifth round. He talked to a lot of scouts.”
“Things change,” McEwen said. “I doubt there’s any mistake.”
“Well, why don’t you call them?”
“Call the Mets?” McEwen asked. Clearly he thought I was crazy. But he picked up the phone.
“No mistake,” he said when he hung up. “Dwight Gooden. First Round. New York Mets.”
He shot me a huge smile.
“Great job, Doc,” the dean of Tampa sportswriting said, shaking my hand.
I couldn’t believe it. I knew I had ability. I didn’t feel like I was undeserving. But there were some very talented players who were drafted after me that year: Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, Will Clark, David Wells, Roger McDowell, Jimmy Key, Bo Jackson, Mitch Williams, Terry Pendleton, Rafael Palmeiro, Todd Worrell, Barry Larkin, and my high school teammate, Floyd Youmans. The list went on and on.
I was too excited to drive the Duster home. I gave Eddie the keys. I couldn’t wait to see the look on my dad’s face.
“We did it!” I yelled as Eddie parked the car and we ran up the sidewalk, as my dad was stepping onto the porch. “Fifth pick! First round. I was the Mets’ first player.”
Doc: A Memoir Page 4
