For all you old-school Mets fans, a Daily News interview with ’80s skipper Davey Johnson. (Thanks to The Hardball Times for the link; check out their weekly dartboard to see how your team is stacking up so far this season.) The piece covers all sorts of topics, but the most interesting section for me is where Johnson talks about Dwight Gooden:

I blame it on the drugs, and I also blame it on the delivery change they had him make. I don’t even know where the orders came from, but they didn’t come from me or Mel Stottlemyre. They wanted him to shorten his delivery, lower that big high leg kick and not turn as much. Sure, he could be run on, but they could run on [Greg] Maddux, too; did they change his delivery? To this day I regret even going along with it.

I didn’t lie up nights mulling it or anything, but that has actually bothered me for 20 years — the received wisdom that Gooden’s drug problem(s) ruined his pitching. They ruined his pitching career, I guess you could say, and it’s possible that the tinkering with his motion Johnson mentions is something people knew about and discussed before now, but I never heard it. Here’s what I’ve always heard: that Gooden got mixed up with cocaine and had a few scuffles with law enforcement, and when he was healthy and clean, he was a good pitcher, but not like he was — and that those two things were correlated.

But if you watched him back then, you knew there was something else. Gooden had a glorious fastball, no doubt, but this is veteran major-league hitting he’s facing; these guys get paid to adjust to gas, shorten up their strokes and make contact, whatever it takes. Even if he hadn’t lost a few miles per hour on the fastball, eventually everyone in the league would have seen him a few times, and the decent hitters would have done the necessary tuning. But Gooden also had that beautiful olde-tyme 12-to-6 curve — that thing came with its own Foley design, a little fat man who would play a slide whistle or generate a “doooiiiieeeeng” sound by flicking his cheek, and Gooden could throw it so slow, it was hard to see how it stayed in the air as long as it did.

In ’86, he didn’t have the same stuff, quite; the hitters started to catch up to the heat, he didn’t show up for the ticker-tape parade, he looked grey around the gills sometimes…the trip to Smithers didn’t exactly shock anyone. Something was obviously off. But it has always bugged me that, you know, he goes to rehab and when he comes back, his…curveball is flattened out? Is that one of the steps? But people just kind of paired the two things — he got into drugs, and he didn’t pitch the same. So it’s a relief to have it confirmed at last that, while those two things did happen, the latter is because someone told him to change his delivery so he wouldn’t get run on.

Seems short-sighted now. Back then, when the Mets fought the Cardinals for division honors every year and the Cards had one of the legendary small-ball teams of the latter half of the century, this is advice that would have made sense, and I think a guy who is both as young as Gooden was when he came up, and who has as much trouble as Gooden seems to have had putting the influence of others into the proper perspective, is going to take a tip like that and try to incorporate it, instead of saying instead, “I see what you’re saying, but if I can strike a prospective base-runner out with Uncle Charlie as he is right now, problem solved.”

It’s not as though Gooden sucked. He still had good stuff, and he learned how to pitch instead of just throw; he had a decent career. It’s not a Dalkowski-style heartbreaker. But whenever a baseball conversation turns to squandered potential, the Gooden subject makes me sigh a little louder than the rest, because that guy hit the monster home run that got me into baseball. (Looking at that box score now…damn. Rhoden got his ass beat. And hey, it’s that one time Rafael Santana went 3 for 4! Hee.)

Share!