That Can’t Be Gooden, or Can It?

Once upon a time, the New York Mets had this incredible pitcher. Lean as a 1-iron, supple as a green twig, he was a portrait on the mound. A work of art. The whole story of pitching.

You imagined the great ones looked like this, the Christy Mathewsons, Walter Johnsons, Cy Young himself.

He could bust the ball in on you. It went by like a train going through a small town on a dark night. The curveball you could drive mules with.

He didn’t mess with the hitters much. Just stood there chewing gum and looking at them with an expression of mixed pity and amusement. Then, he let go of the ball, and everybody felt sorry to have to look. He didn’t fool around. Just flung the ball with a “Here, hit this!” attitude. He could hardly wait to get the ball back from the catcher before firing it back at the batter.

He didn’t mess with off-speed junk pitches, teasers, changeups, slow curves. Those he left to guys with arms that couldn’t whip a ball 98 m.p.h. with a hop on it. He left it to other fellows to out-think a hitter, guess with him, toy with him. He just blew them out of there.

It seemed a shame to make him wait to go to Cooperstown. He didn’t have a career, he had a parade. Every pitcher who could pitch like this ended up a statue in the park.

Every league he was in, he stood on its head.

Dwight Eugene Gooden was a legend before his time. He won the Cy Young Award before he was legally a man. Baseball fell all over itself to give him the honor unanimously. He was Rookie of the Year his first season and then lit up Broadway his second. He was Frank Merriwell, Elmer the Great, The Big Train and a young Satchel Paige all rolled into one.

Best of all, he did it in New York. He made the cover of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated the same week, he was on television, in the papers and on billboards more than any politician in the state.

The things he did bordered on disbelief. He struck out more batters than any rookie who ever pitched. He became one of only two pitchers (the other was Herb Score) ever to strike out 200 or more batters his first two seasons. And he was only a teen-ager.

He became the youngest pitcher ever to win 20 games. He set a major league record, striking out 43 batters in 3 games. He struck out guys so fast he turned games into silent movies. Bleacher fans took to hanging banners with “K’s” on them whenever he pitched. Like all the great ones, he got a nickname, “Dr. K.”

He seemed to have the game of baseball surrounded. On the run. There was no telling what he might do when he grew up.

But that was before he disappeared. . . .

Just like that, Dwight Gooden went over the wall some place. The Mets have never admitted it but that Dwight Gooden is as long gone as Judge Crater. One day, there he was blazing his way into the Hall of Fame. The next, he was just a memory. A missing person. He should have been on milk cartons.

The Mets fielded a guy wearing No. 16 and looking in dim light enough like the real thing. He was 6-foot-3, brown-eyed, curly-haired, had this high kick and habit of looking away just as he released the pitch.

It was close enough. Until he pitched. It was the pitches that gave him away, that signaled this was a clever forgery. The real Dwight Gooden wouldn’t have been caught dead throwing these kinds of lollipops to the plate.

You know, when a player is young and his arm resilient and his back strong, he frequently fires the ball past the batter so swiftly it glows. The wise veterans nod sagely and observe that he’s a “thrower” not a pitcher. A pitcher is like a guy on a riverboat with his own deck of cards. He deals you what he wants--and usually what you don’t expect. Certainly what you don’t hope for.

What if this is the real Dwight Gooden? Has he suddenly aged? Has he had to go to an assortment of pitches that a guy whose arm is a limp rag from seasons of hidden hemorrhages has to resort to?

If so, Dwight Gooden must have grown up in some hidden monastery in Tibet, where you wrinkle up as soon as you come out in the real world. Because, he’s only 21. By our calendar.

This Dwight Gooden comes out on a mound, as he did in Game 5 of the 1986 World Series Thursday night, and he starts throwing pitches that come up to the plate like consumptives, coughing and spitting. Sleight-of-hand pitching. Gone is that beautiful guided missile that struck out 544 batters his first two years in the big leagues, and threw 11 shutouts and posted an earned-run average barely in the visible range (1.53) in his second year.

That Dwight Gooden would never be cuffed around by the Boston Red Sox, of all people, as this masquerader was Thursday night. That Dwight Gooden would never give up 2 triples, 7 singles, 4 runs and 2 walks in only 4-plus innings. That Dwight Gooden would never have an ERA in double digits in this World Series.

This Dwight Gooden, this impostor, is a guy who pitches not like Walter Johnson or Bob Feller or the great fireballers. This one pitches like a Stu Miller, an Ed Lopat. His ball comes up there like junk mail, and as broadcaster Vin Scully has it, they die of exhaustion at home plate--or on the right-field fence, whichever they hit first.

Can it be that Dwight Gooden has taken seriously the distinction between a pitcher and a thrower and hankers to be known as a dealer out there and not an enforcer? Can a guy get old between the ages of 19 and 21 and have to resort to deliveries a Grover Cleveland Alexander didn’t need till he had bifocals and could tell when it was going to rain by his knees.

It was shocking to see this apparently healthy young man who used to send the best hitters in the National League back muttering to the dugout now trying slow curves, dying soap bubbles and pitching subterfuges.

You feel like yelling, “Throw the damn ball, son, you got 20 years yet before you need that stuff!”

On the other hand, maybe the Mets should launch a house-to-house search for the real Dwight Gooden before this guy ruins his reputation forever.

Also, they better hurry. The Dwight Gooden they got just can’t get major league hitters like the Red Sox with those junk pitches. The Mets are in a fair way to lose this World Series because they lost that Dwight Gooden. On the other hand, if this is the real Dwight Gooden, you have to wonder how they got into it in the first place.

The Dwight Gooden who joined Sandy Koufax, Walter Johnson, Grover Alexander, Dazzy Vance and Lefty Grove (all in the Hall of Fame) as the only other pitcher who ever led the major leagues in wins, strikeouts and ERA in the same season, would not be giving up 9 hits for 13 bases in 4-plus innings to the likes of the Red Sox, would he?

Naw. It must be some guy made up to look like him. Either that or he’s got the art of pitching all screwed up in his mind. If so, he doesn’t need a catcher he needs an analyst.