Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  Lynchburg won the A-ball division with a record of 96–43, and we were headed to the playoffs. After my shaky start, I finished the 1983 season with a kick-butt record of 19–4. I had 300 strikeouts in 191 innings and 10 complete games. This was the pitcher the Mets believed in enough to draft me in round one. These numbers definitely got me noticed in New York. To celebrate, we had a team party at a pizza shop. Sam approached me again that night.

  “You’re going to—” he started to say. I cut him off.

  “I know, Coach,” I said. “I know.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re going to Tidewater, triple-A.” He didn’t have to tell me that Davey Johnson was managing the Mets AAA club in Tidewater, Virginia. “Davey wants you for their playoffs.”

  All of a sudden, an old, familiar feeling swept over me. “I want to stay here,” I said immediately.

  I knew it was an honor, Davey Johnson wanting me to leap entirely over AA ball and help his AAA team. It was flattering too. But I was doing well in Lynchburg. I felt loyal to my teammates there. I was having fun. The Lynchburg team was on its way to winning the Carolina League. Didn’t they need me?

  “That’s not how it works, kid,” Sam said. “You’ll be one step away from the majors. You should be excited.”

  I didn’t feel excited at all. Partly, I guess, it was anxiety about what I might be facing in Tidewater. How well would I play there? And partly, it was—I wouldn’t call it homesickness, but I was well aware that Lynchburg’s season ended a couple weeks earlier than Tidewater’s would, no matter how well we did. Part of me really wanted to go be with my family back in Tampa.

  “When do I have to leave?” I asked Sam.

  “They want you there tomorrow, Doc,” he said.

  I drove to Norfolk, where the AAA Tidewater Tides played at Metropolitan Memorial Park. At Tidewater, I pitched just as well as I did back in Lynchburg. We won the playoffs, then went out to Louisville to play in the AAA World Series, a round-robin event between the winner of the International League (us), the American Association (the Denver Bears), and the Pacific Coast League (Portland Beavers).

  I dominated the final game against Denver, the White Sox farm team, and we won the AAA World Series. I flew back to Tidewater the next day, jumped in my car, and drove home to Tampa.

  Meanwhile in New York, 1983 had been a flop of a season for the big-league Mets. They’d gone through two managers, George Bamberger and Frank Howard. Their 68–94 finish was only enough for sixth place in the National League East. Rumors were flying that Davey Johnson would be moving up to Shea from Norfolk for the 1984 season to manage the team. Throughout the playoffs with Tidewater, he’d been telling me, “If I get to manage the Mets, I’m taking you with me.” He got the nod in November.

  Just a few days later, I was back in the off-season instructional league in St. Petersburg, playing catch on the side of the field, when Davey walked by. “Davey.” I flashed him a smile. “Remember what you said?”

  “Oh yeah,” he assured me as he kept strolling. “You’re in.”

  During spring training, I didn’t stay at the team hotel. Since my parents lived just twenty minutes away in Tampa, I drove home every night. And as the end of spring training approached, my dad started asking me if I thought I would make the team. Spring training was coming to a close, and I still didn’t have an answer for him.

  I woke up extra early the last day, after tossing and turning all night. I was on the road early and got to the ballpark before almost anyone. I was hoping Davey would notice and tell me one way or another right away, before everyone else came in. After the game that day, I knew, the team would be flying out to Cincinnati to begin the regular season. I hated the idea of bringing my luggage with me in the morning and then being told I hadn’t made the team. That would be mortifying.

  I told my dad to put my bags in his trunk before he drove over for the game. If I made the team, someone could run out to the parking lot, grab the bags, and load them onto the bus.

  If I didn’t, no one would have to know they were there.

  During pitching drills and warm-ups, I heard nothing. In the dugout, I saw a chart listing who was pitching that day. My name wasn’t on it. Mel Stottlemyre, the pitching coach, walked by and said, “We might use you today, Doc. I’m just not sure yet.”

  That made me think they were still undecided. Normally when a game started, the other pitchers hung out in the bullpen. But there was no way I was leaving the dugout.

  The innings crawled by. I still had no clue. During spring training, the managers sometimes sat outside the dugout. Midway through the game, I saw the Mets’ general manager, Frank Cashen, approach Davey. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they whispered back and forth. Not long after that, Davey walked over to me. He had his hand out.

  “Congratulations, Doc,” he said, smiling. “Didn’t I tell you? You made the team. Now get out to the bullpen. I’m gonna use you in the seventh.”

  Before I trotted to the bullpen, I asked one of the clubhouse kids to get my stuff out of my dad’s car and put it on the bus to the airport. I went into the game and struck out four of the six batters I faced.

  After the game, I told my dad I made the team.

  He had the same look on his face he did the day I was drafted, like this dream of ours kept coming true. I was on my way to the majors—drafted, signed, and tested—a full-fledged member of the New York Mets. I was heading off to opening day in Cincinnati, ready to face the team my dad and I had watched on television in the family den.

  Truly, everything after that was gravy.

  PART II

  Playing

  5

  Rookie Season

  WHEN I WAS CALLED UP to the big team, I felt like a whole lot of people had been waiting around for me, and I thought I understood why. To the players, the fans, and the sportswriters who’d been following my progress in the minors, I was the bright, shiny hope for a baseball team that desperately needed some.

  These were tough times all around in New York, and not just for the Mets. Crack was exploding. Crime was high. People felt jittery in their own neighborhoods. When the rest of life is difficult, sports can bring important relief. That was true in Georgia in my father’s and grandfather’s days. Maybe it would be true again in New York, a city with two professional baseball teams. But being a sports fan is a whole lot more fun when your team has a shot at winning. Given all the hype about me in the minors, Mets fans were thinking I could help turn some things around for them, maybe bring back some of the fun that had been sadly absent since the Mets’ World Series season of 1969. Of course, I wasn’t going to rescue the struggling franchise alone. That would take a team effort, literally. I was nineteen years old. But I could help. I knew I could. And I was about to learn something else: if I could do that for New York, there was almost nothing New York wouldn’t do for me.

  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, Pet
e 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.