Gooden Back, but Fastball Is a No-Show

His teammates called him Doc. It was short for Dr. K. For Dwight Strikeout.

Watching him pitch was like watching an eagle fly, a shark swim. There didn’t seem to be any effort connected to what he did.

He was only a teen-ager when he first came up to the big leagues, but he had the style and poise of a veteran. He began to break records set by Grover Cleveland Alexander, no less.

You almost felt sorry for the hitters. He struck out 32 of them in two consecutive games. He struck them out at the rate of 12 a game. He struck out 43 in three games.

He was Rookie of the Year his first year and won the Cy Young Award his second. He was widely regarded as the nearest thing to unhittable this side of a shadow. His earned-run average was as invisible as his fastball.

It seemed that Dwight Eugene Gooden would be in the Hall of Fame before he even had to shave every day. A pop fly was a moral victory against him. If you got a run, they looked around for Arnold Rothstein.

They put up a capital K, the strikeout symbol, in the right-field pavilion whenever he overpowered a batter. Sometimes, they put it up before the batter stepped in.

He wouldn’t have a career, he’d have a parade. It seemed a shame to make him go through the normal process to get to Cooperstown. The numbers were just a formality. By the time he was 30, he would make the base hit obsolete.

Then, you began to hear the clink of glasses and the rattle of ice cubes in the background. There were incidents in airports. There was a girlfriend with a positive penchant for drawing unfavorable attention to herself--and the pitcher--in public places.

Then, there was a well bruited arrest in Tampa in the off-season. The rest of the country nodded its head wisely. It had seen this scenario before--usually starring Rod Steiger.

This was the script for the old Southern sheriff and uppity wise guy from the North. Images of a replay of an age-old prejudice brought civil liberties lawyers running from all parts of the country.

But after the initial outburst, there was a strange silence from this, so to speak, pitcher’s mound.

In real life, you use a thermometer, spinal tap or even an eye chart to detect when something is wrong with a person. In baseball, you just check the fine print in the Sporting News. His temperature might be normal, his blood-pressure acceptable, but Dwight Gooden’s other vital signs--strikeouts, shutouts, earned runs allowed--indicated a possible major infection.

A lot of people remembered the Dwight Gooden of the bullet-throwing years as the kid with the fastball who dispensed customers like a busy barber with “Next!” after each third strike. They were shocked in last year’s World Series to see this same young man serving up slow curves on 3-and-1 counts to banjo hitters.

He was pitching to guys he would have blown away the year before as if they were a combination of Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. The word went out that Gooden had lost the fast one, the No. 1. He had to rely on the deuce, the curveball. The arm was sore.

But, it wasn’t the arm. It was far more serious than that. It was the head.

You can soak your arm in ice. You can remove calcium from an elbow. Getting cocaine out of the head is more delicate surgery.

Dwight Gooden had become just another victim of the white plague. He thought cocaine was just another .220 hitter with a flaw in its swing. But it turned out to be the cleanup hitter. It did something no other batting order could do. It knocked him out of the box.

So the New York Mets did what you have to do with a pitcher who comes up against a side he can’t get out. They took him out of the rotation. They sent him to a rehab center, then to the minor leagues.

They brought Dwight Gooden back to the big time last Friday night. They felt they had finally figured out what happened to his fastball. They had, you might say, found the flaw in his delivery and removed it. Or so they hoped.

It was more than just a mid-summer’s game against the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates. It was a happening. It had elements of a Broadway opening, a bar mitzvah and a society debut all rolled into one. You had to be there if you were anyone. It was like getting a good table.

There were 51,402 people in the stands and a few hundred of the nation’s sporting press, half of them there to cover that weekend’s Belmont Stakes.

Dick Young, the respected but pugnacious New York Post columnist, was one of those not in a charitable mood. In a story headlined, “Stand Up and Boo,” Dick gave the whole affair the back of his hand and canceled the love-in aspects of the celebration with a few bared-teeth reflections. He frothed at the notion that Americans, in a frenzy of forgiveness, would give a standing ovation to the prodigal pitcher’s return.

“What has Dwight Gooden done exactly since the last game he won for the Mets?” Young demanded.

He answered: “He has sniffed coke. He has been stopped by the Tampa police for playing chicken on Dale Mabry Highway. . . . He has brawled with police. He was tested drunk at the hospital. He has gone through . . . a New York drug rehab institute in the record time of 27 days.”

Snapped Young: “All this, I suppose, adds up to his being a typical American hero, and so we will stand and pay homage to Dwight Gooden, I suppose.”

Young recommended instead that 50,000 people stand and boo the young pitcher, “to let him know how society feels about the wrong he has done, the damage he has committed to millions of kids who worshiped him.”

Dick Young didn’t get his wish. Shea Stadium, to a person, rose in salute in a paroxysm of forgiveness for their young pitcher.

Gooden was back, but the fastball wasn’t. He struck out 5 in a 6-inning tour. This reporter counted 11 bona fide fastballs, many of them not for strikes and maybe not intended for strikes.

After the game, in a press conference in which it was stipulated that the “incident” would not be brought up, only the athletic significance of the evening, Dwight Gooden proved himself to be a polite, respectful, somewhat chastened young man it was hard not to like.

But Dr. K was more like Dr. Linedrive this night, saved by Darryl Strawberry’s magnificent right-field throw and catcher Gary Carter’s plate-block from a big inning. If he can find that fastball in the debris of the last two years of his life, he can still make the world forget Walter Johnson--or even Nolan Ryan.

It is not uncommon for a pitcher to have to rely on curves and control in the waning years of his career on the mound. But Dr. K is only 22 years old. That’s too early to have to start throwing ground-ball outs.

Of course, it’s just the right age to learn one of life’s hard lessons. All baseball hopes he has. The fastball and the doctorate that come with it can come later.