Saturday Sounds: Darryl Strawberry — The Long Way Home

Saturday Sounds No. 4 · From the SPORTSTALKNY archive · September 2017 · 38 minutes · Listen below

The first two stops on this little tour were 1969 — Ron Swoboda and Cleon Jones, the Miracle. Last week Lenny Dykstra started telling the other championship story, the 1986 one, the way only Nails can tell it. This week we get the other half of that story — and fair warning, it's the harder half.

Because Darryl Strawberry did not come to SPORTSTALKNY in September of 2017 to talk about curtain calls. He came to talk about the book he'd just written, Don't Give Up on Me, and about the childhood that nearly swallowed the most talented ballplayer the Mets ever produced. There is plenty of baseball in here — a personal top-five countdown of his wildest games, a defense of Bill Buckner you have never heard from a Met, and the single best description of the '86 Mets ever offered. But the baseball is the frame. The picture is a man who had everything, lost it all in public, and clawed his way back to a life he now spends helping other people find theirs.

A quick word on what you're hearing. Same as every week: the interview is preceded by a brand-new introduction recorded for this series, and the conversation itself is as it aired on SPORTSTALKNY in September 2017 — we've retired the old show open and snipped one brief news-of-the-day detour that had nothing to do with Darryl. One honest note: parts of this one are heavy. He talks about his father, about addiction, about hitting bottom. That's not a reason to skip it. It's the reason it might be the most important tape in the whole vault.

Start with the introduction I gave him that night, because it doubles as the man's résumé: a 17-year major league career; one of the most feared sluggers in the sport, known for mammoth home runs and an intimidating presence in the batter's box; a World Series championship with the 1986 Mets and three more with the Yankees in 1996, 1998 and 1999; voted to the All-Star Game eight straight times, 1984 through 1991; and — my favorite stat of the night — 293 home runs hit while wearing a New York uniform, the Mets' and the Yankees' both. Two hundred fifty-two of those came for the Mets, where he remains the franchise's all-time home run king.

Then we went back to the beginning, and the beginning is rough. Darryl grew up in Los Angeles, the son of an alcoholic father who told his boys they'd never amount to anything. He was 13 the night his father came home in a drunken rage with a shotgun and said he was going to kill the whole family; his brother Ronnie grabbed a butcher knife, Darryl grabbed the barrel, and their mother got them out of the house. "Most people just saw me play baseball," he says. "They don't know the brokenness was already there — and the pain I was in would eventually lead me to my greatness, which would lead me to my destructive behavior."

There is a smaller story inside that one that I have not been able to shake since. His father never hugged him. Never saw him play — not until high school, not until the newspapers made him impossible to ignore. And even then: "He would come to the game and stand up on the hill and watch me from the hill. He never came down to say anything." Kicked out of four junior high schools, drinking and smoking at 14 and 15, Darryl Strawberry arrived at Crenshaw High School as the most gifted kid in the city — and, as he points out, not even the best player on his own team. That was third baseman Chris Brown. The 1979 Crenshaw team is still talked about as one of the greatest high school teams ever; they lost the city championship at Dodger Stadium to Granada Hills, in a game where the relief pitcher who beat them was a kid named John Elway. And then there's Carl Jones, Crenshaw's catcher, who some thought had the most ability of them all — and who, as we discussed that night, was lost to California's three-strikes law. Darryl has thought about that fork in the road plenty: "I could have easily been in those circumstances, just like Carl."

The Mets took him first overall in the 1980 draft — the same draft in which the Dodgers took his older brother Michael in the 31st round — and the road still nearly ended a year later at Lynchburg. Nineteen years old, hearing racial abuse from the stands of his own home ballpark, he went home one night, started smoking weed and decided he was done: "I just don't want to play anymore." His manager talked him through it, and Darryl still gives the man the credit: "I really credit my manager. He did a great, great job with me to keep me focused, even in the midst of struggle." Three years later he was the National League Rookie of the Year — .257, 26 home runs, 74 RBIs — and the foundation of the '86 Mets was pouring.

Midway through the show I ran my personal top five of his games past him, and that's where the tape catches fire. The July 4th, 1985 marathon in Atlanta — 19 innings, ending near four in the morning — survives in his memory mostly as the night he got ejected around 2 a.m. arguing a called strike: the umpire's ruling, as Darryl tells it, was "that's a strike at this time in the morning." The July 22nd, 1986 brawl game in Cincinnati started when Eric Davis — his best friend, a kid he grew up with — collided with Ray Knight at third; Darryl hated that it was Eric, "but at the same time, I represent New York, and our team comes first." His summary of that club should be carved over the door at Citi Field: "We weren't cocky. We were confident… It's going to be tough to beat us in the game. It's going to be tough to beat us in the fight."

On Game 6 of the 1986 NLCS — down 3–0 in the ninth in Houston, with Mike Scott waiting in a Game 7 nobody wanted — he mostly remembers the team refusing to fold, and then the most famous plane ride in Mets history. Verdict, for the record: "The celebration was real. The whole plane was just completely trashed — and we deserved it." And on Game 6 of the World Series, he does something you will not hear from many Mets of that era: he defends Bill Buckner. "Everybody blames Buckner for the play. But Bob Stanley didn't get nobody out, and Calvin Schiraldi didn't get anyone out. Buckner was a great player and a great fielder throughout his career. It was just that one play, that one moment — and he just missed the ball. It was a miracle."

The man he holds up as the standard isn't from the wild side of that clubhouse at all. "I put on the uniform — that just made me a baseball player. That didn't make me a man. Gary Carter was the prime example of what a man is, and I admired him for that. That's what I wanted. I just wasn't capable of having it at that point in my career." He chose his first big-league at-bat — in May of 1983, against Mario Soto — as the most important of his life, over his last one, against John Smoltz in the 1999 World Series, because the first one meant you have arrived. And he remains grateful to Frank Cashen for not rushing him and Doc Gooden to New York: "He knew we could play at that level. But it was New York City, and we'd get caught up in the atmosphere. And he was right. I got caught up in the atmosphere."

Which brings us to the part of the 2017 conversation that reads differently today. That week, Darryl had made headlines saying he'd never go back to the Mets — and if you listen, you'll hear the wound underneath it: a falling-out with the old ownership that he declines, pointedly, to detail. "Listen — I am a Met," he says. "Fans, don't ever forget that. I love the Mets fans. I will always be a Met. I'm a homegrown player." And of George Steinbrenner, who took him in when his career and his life were in pieces: "He treated you like you were a person, and not a piece of meat. He became a father figure to the hopeless." The father Darryl never had, found at age 33 in the Bronx. You can't write this stuff.

The last part of the interview is the book's message, delivered plain: "Nobody signed up to be an alcoholic. Nobody signed up to be a drug addict." The people who never gave up on him — above all his wife, Tracy, who, in his words, "led me back to faith and pulled me out of drug houses" — are why there's a ministry now, and treatment centers, and a life spent on the road telling rooms full of strangers the thing he most needed to hear: "We don't give up on anybody."

And here's the coda 2017 couldn't have known. The man who said he'd never go back went back. On June 1, 2024 — three months after a heart attack nearly kept him from the day — the Mets retired Darryl Strawberry's No. 18 at Citi Field. They cut the number into the center field grass, they turned the Home Run Apple into a strawberry, and Darryl stood on that grass and told the fans: "From the bottom of my heart, I'm so sorry for ever leaving you guys." He was always a Met. It just took the long way home to prove it.

Press play — and when you're done, come tell us your Darryl Strawberry memories over in Talkin' Mets on the Korner. More from the vault next Saturday.

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