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NMH Magazine : Winter 2005

Damned Yankee

Building Jerusalem Across the River 

by Buster Olney ’82 

 

In the fall of 2001, Darryl Strawberry was in the custody of the state of Florida, his life cycle still seemingly locked into the baseball calendar: his arrests and court appearances often came in early spring, a s the Yankees were breaking camp and opening the regular season, or midway through the fall, when the team was in the playoffs and World Series. On October 21, 2000, the Yankees and Mets began New York’s first Subway Series in 44 years, but Strawberry, who might have been at center stage, was assigned to a drug-treatment clinic in Tampa, with no baseball, no bright lights, no teammates. He was 38 years old, 335 runs in his career, still powerful, and through addictions, incarcerations, and hearings, he had never lost the beautiful buggy-whip swing he’d had when the Mets picked him first in the 1980 draft. But as Game 1 stretched into extra innings, Strawberry walked out of the clinic and met a woman named Christine, with whom he smoked crack and took pills. Thirteen days later, he stood before circuit court judge Florence Foster. “The last couple of weeks of my life have been downhill,” Strawberry told the judge. “I basically wanted to die….Life hasn’t been worth living for me, that’s the honest truth. I am not afraid of death.”

Some of his friends had worried that Strawberry would harm himself once he did not have baseball, which had provided the structure and peer group that forced him into daily accountability. “He’s going to be faced with a lot of time where he’s used to playing and used to coming to the field every day, and it’s a situation where he doesn’t have that,” teammate Derek Jeter said after Strawberry was suspended in the spring of 2000. “He’s got to find something on his own to do as well.”

Strawberry had come to the Yankees in 1995 for the first of his last chances, and for virtually all of his five seasons with the team he arrived early, doing everything he was supposed to do when he was at the ballpark. He was a fallen star by then, an addict who had squandered the $30 million he’d made in his career. He was living his life day to day. Pregame stretch at the same time every day, batting practice, fielding practice, group prayer with Christian teammates, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

He was a model citizen with the Yankees, team manager Joe Torre would say often. When he first managed Strawberry in the summer of 1996, he had given him a clean slate, believing that whatever had happened in the past should not matter; he would judge the player on his conduct with the Yankees. Strawberry was never any trouble, he was reliable, even deeply considerate of teammates. During spring training in 1997, he approached Jeter, whose first season in the majors had been much like Strawberry’s explosive 1983 debut with the Mets—instant fame at the age of 21, in New York. He talked about the wave of enticements that would come at Jeter, who listened and appreciated Strawberry’s concern; Jeter would come to think of him as a big brother.

But Jeter was generously equipped for stardom, having grown up in a strong and stable two-parent home, with a finely calibrated internal compass. Strawberry, by his own admission, was completely unprepared to deal with every thing that came his way when he played with the Mets. His childhood had been troubled and essentially fatherless, and when stardom engulfed him, he had no sense of limits, no inner equilibrium. When he joined the Yankees, Strawberry was nearing the end of his career and tried thinking of himself as a work in progress. If he could be a good father to his children, if he could be a good teammate and a good person, then everything that had occurred earlier in his life would make sense.

Strawberry spent hours sitting in front of his locker in the clubhouse, arriving before most of his teammates and remaining late after games. The Yankees mattered to him; they were his safe house. Time had hardly diminished the scope of his smile, but slight sagging half-moons were forming under his eyes.

He batted .352 in April of 1998, driving in 14 runs in 54 at-bats, running well, stealing bases, playing effectively in left field. It was his best baseball in a decade. His life and addictions seemed in full recovery, but because of the nature of his problems, he would forever be in a precarious state. And this was about the time Strawberry stopped attending his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “He got lazy,” said a friend.

The Yankees would win 114 games that season, breaking the American League record of 111 established by the 1954 Cleveland Indians, and Strawberry, as much as any Yankee, epitomized the team’s dominance. The lineup was so extraor dinary that Strawberry often batted seventh, behind Bernie Williams and Tino Martinez and Chili Davis. He shared time in the outfield with Tim Raines and Chad Curtis. The role players for most teams were veterans who had fizzled as regulars and found spots as part-time players, or young players whose primary value to their team was their low salary. “But you’d look over at the Yankees’ bench,” Kansas City manager Tony Muser said, “and they had Darryl Strawberry sitting there.” To Muser, it was almost absurd that a slugger so dangerous could serve as a part-time player. But the Yankees were that good in ’98, from top to bottom: leadoff batter Chuck Knoblauch would score 117 runs, and No. 9 hitter Scott Brosius drove in 98.

Through his experience, Strawberry knew the strike zone, often taking pitches until he got ahead in the count, cornering the opposing pitcher and forcing him to throw fastballs. At six feet six, his biceps exploded out of his sleeves, the veins on his arms bulged, and he looked almost too big for the bats he held, as if he were swinging toothpicks. Strawberry would hit 24 homers in 295 at-bats in 1998, and though his knees were in bad shape and he had increasing trouble playing consecutive days in the outfield, he remained a respected threat.

The Yankees were 18–6 on May 2, 1998, and had begun to gather momentum when they played on a cold night in Kansas City. The wind was gusting from right field to left field and most fly balls were getting knocked down like badminton birdies. Strawberry was not in the lineup, but with the Yankees leading 8–6 in the ninth inning, Torre inserted him as a pinch-hitter for Joe Girardi. Strawberry launched a home run through the wind—as if he’d hit a golf ball, David Cone noted afterward—to straightaway center field, halfway up the grass embankment beyond the fence. Strawberry circled the bases with his head down, a slight smile on his face. His money and his youth were gone, his knees were almost shot, he could no longer play the outfield every day, and his sobriety would always be in jeopardy. But he could still crush a baseball. When it seemed impossible, Strawberry had blasted a 435-foot exclamation point.

The Yankees steamrollered most of their opponents that season, outscoring them by an average of two runs per game. Strawberry consistently produced runs, including a grand slam against Oakland that helped the Yankees land a 10–5 victory.

Strawberry was respected again, liked by his teammates, part of something special. He would never make it all the way back to what he had been, but he was making the best of what he was.

There was something troubling him, however. He had begun having wrenching abdominal pains.

Strawberry didn’t tell anyone about his increasing discomfort for almost two months because he just wanted to get through the season and the playoffs and World Series. He f inally pulled aside team doctor Stuart Hershon on the eve of the playoffs. Initial blood tests showed nothing unusual, but a thought nagged at Hershon: Strawberry had been a boyhood friend of Eric Davis, who had already been treated for colon cancer; the doctor hoped there was not some unknown common denomina tor involved. Hershon had Strawberry go through a CAT scan, which revealed a tumor, and after a biopsy, Hershon told him he had colon cancer. Torre informed the players in a team meeting in Texas, and many of his teammates wept. They would call and visit Strawberry in the hospital during the postseason, after doctors removed 16 inches of his colon and 36 lymph nodes.

Steinbrenner gave him $2.5 million for the next season, an act perceived as virtual charity by other executives in the organization, in a deal structured so that he would be paid even if he was unable to play. Strawberry was going through chemotherapy, and no one had any idea if he would be able to play baseball again. But he returned for spring training, determined to be a part of the team at the beginning of the season. His chemo treatments hampered his workout program, and from day to day the Yankees were never sure of his availability. The team wasn’t counting on him, and Strawberry felt hurt and betrayed. He began griping about being left out by the coaching staff, at a time when Torre was away from the team for his prostate cancer treatment. For the first time, Strawberry was a problem.

When the Yankees flew to the West Coast to begin their season, Strawberry was left behind in Tampa to continue his workouts, and two weeks later, he was arrested for cocaine possession and solicitation of prostitution. Commissioner Bud Selig suspended him for 120 days, but George Steinbrenner— who had once warned Strawberry that if he relapsed, the owner would become his worst enemy—kept him in the organization. Baseball, it seemed, was his lifeline, and the Yankees were probably the only major league team that would give him a chance. Strawberry had four children from two marriages, debts, and responsibilities, a friend noted, but the daily fix of playing for the Yankees was the one thing that kept him from being consumed by his addictions.

Strawberry rejoined the Yankees for the last month of the 1999 season, and although he had not played in a major league game in almost a year, his swing was perhaps even more impressive than it had been in 1998.

He batted .327 in 24 games and slugged a three-run homer in the first round of the playoffs. Chad Curtis suggested that in deference to Strawberry, champagne sprayed by the players should be nonalcoholic, a practice the Yankees would maintain for the rest of the playoffs. When Boston fans taunted him during the American League Championship Series by chanting, “JUST SAY NO,” Strawberry answered with a home run, the first run in a 9–2 victory in Game 4, which all but finished the Red Sox. In 13 months, Strawberry had had colon cancer surgery, been arrested, suspended, reinstated, and rejuvenated.

Three months later, in the off-season, Strawberry failed a drug test and admitted to using cocaine. As Commissioner Selig considered a penalty, Strawberry showed up at the Yankees’ camp for the first full-squad workout as if nothing had happened. “I came here today because this is where I felt I want to be,” he said, his lower lip quivering.

He worked out and jogged with teammates, but just before he was supposed to take his first round of batting practice, Brian Cashman called him off the field; Selig had sent a directive telling him to stay away from the team until a decision was made. Those were Darryl Strawberry’s last moments as a major league ballplayer. Within months, he was in a Florida drug treatment center, having violated the terms of his probation.

In the same weekend that the Yankees broke camp in 2001, Strawberry went on a drug spree, slipping away to a motel in Orlando to smoke crack after telling his probation officer he was going to attend an AA meeting. Most of what his former teammates knew of him was from the images they saw on television, time and again—Strawberry dressed in an orange jumpsuit again and standing in front of a judge. Maybe it was for the best, said a close friend. Maybe he had to be forced to find something other than baseball. His teammates, the game, maybe they were all just Strawberry’s enablers.

Charlie Nobles, a Florida-based sportswriter for the New York Times , had covered many of his games during spring training and the regular seasons. As Strawberry’s sobriety disintegrated, Nobles was assigned to cover his many court appearances. On the day Strawberry was finally sentenced to prison, he looked over and made eye contact with Nobles, who had known him before as a great player and who had seen him in those days of fame and glory. Strawberry smiled slightly, lifted his hand, and waved.

 

Buster Olney covered the Yankees for the New York Times for four seasons and is currently a senior writer for ESPN. From The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney. Copyright 2004 by Buster Olney. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.