Strawberry Is Peaches and Cream

I like to watch Darryl Strawberry bat for the same reasons I like to watch ocean sunsets, Rocky Mountain waterfalls, a Vatican ceiling, a summer shower, Gene Kelly on a staircase, Gielgud playing a butler.

It’s aesthetically pleasing, somehow contenting. Fitting. A thing as it should be. He dominates the landscape. Like the Eiffel Tower over Paris.

You watch Strawberry as he steps into the box. He is graceful, fluid. It is impossible for Darryl Strawberry to do anything clumsily. He never lunges at the ball. He never seems to be hitting off the wrong foot. He stands upright with perfect balance. He looks like a one-iron with a hat on. There’s not an ounce of fat on him. When he turns sideways, he disappears. He’s as perfectly suited for a baseball uniform as a leopard is for spots.

He doesn’t crouch, duck or pivot. He is 6-feet-6, an imposing figure, and he gives the pitcher the full strike zone. He holds the bat up behind his left ear, lightly waggled. When the pitch comes in, he lifts his front foot and the bat comes around in a 360-degree arc. Only a few hitters can maintain bat speed with a swing circumference like that.

He hits the most towering home runs since Ralph Kiner. He hit the roof in Olympic Stadium in Montreal. If he hadn’t, eyewitnesses said, the ball might still be going up.

He hit the back wall in the Astrodome in a homer contest at the 1987 All-Star game. He almost never hits a home run that curls around the foul pole or just goes over an outstretched glove. Strawberry’s homers orbit.

He was chosen National League rookie of the year in 1983 and last year was runner-up to Kirk Gibson for league MVP. Gibson beat him out by 36 points, 272-236. An informal poll of baseball insiders at the winter meeting as to which non-pitcher most of them would pick to start up a franchise showed most of them opting for Darryl Strawberry.

He is, without question, the most dangerous .226 hitter in the game today, maybe ever.

So, what is a picture-hitter, one of the most flawless hitting machines, doing batting down with the banjo hitters, the guys who choke up on the bat and make desperate swipes to slap the ball somewhere?

No pitcher alive wants to believe the .226. It is no measure of the menace Darryl Strawberry poses with a bat in his hands. He is like a terrorist. He may not strike often but when he does, the devastation is awesome.

Darryl led the National League in home runs last season with 39. And in runs batted in with 101. It was the second consecutive year he had hit 39 home runs and driven in more than 100 runs. His home runs, laid end to end, would cross Rhode Island. Some guys’ wouldn’t even make it over Flushing Bay.

He has not only driven in 100 or more runs two years in a row, he has scored 100 or more. That meant that Darryl Strawberry was two-sevenths of the New York Mets’ offense in 1988, with responsibility for 202 of their 703 runs.

In 1927, in probably the greatest year any batter ever had, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, batted .356, scored 158 runs and drove in 164 of the Yankees’ 975.

At 6-6, Strawberry has a strike zone the size of Texas. A few inches more and he would be all strike zone. So, you get a measure of the kind of pitches he’s looking at when you note that he walked 97 times in 1987 and 85 last year.

Darryl has had to make a career out of trying to hit Ball 3--or Ball 4. For a pitch to be a ball to a guy 6-6, it has to be the next thing to a wild pitch. Strawberry doesn’t get many lollipops at the plate.

“It’s the baseball code,” he says. “It’s a don’t-get-beat-by-Darryl Strawberry attitude, ‘Don’t let him, of all people, beat you. Put him on if you have to but don’t give him nothing good to hit.’ ”

Baseball is a little like golf. The picture swinger does not always win the tournament. But it’s the way to bet. The guys with the loops, the leaps, the chops at the ball scramble to victory all the time in both sports but purists agree that the classic swing is one that will not desert you in a crisis.

Darryl Strawberry, to date, has 213 home runs. This puts him on a ladder with some of the all-time great homer run hitters. Henry Aaron, for instance, had 219 at the same age, 27.

“I’m focusing on 500 home runs as a goal,” Strawberry admits. “But it’s all dependent on staying healthy. Right now, my key is to win a pennant and to bring my average up.”

There is a notion abroad that Strawberry, an All-City basketball player at Crenshaw High, would rather he’d opted for the basketball scholarships offered him. Strawberry shakes his head.

“I always loved baseball,” he says. “It was my first love and it still is. I love to play baseball.”

Stylists ennoble a sport. They are like fighters who go by Gentleman Jim. They would never be called Rocky. On a basketball court, their nickname would be Slick; in football, Ace.

The awkward, the pressing, the over-aggressive sometimes get the job done. But the Darryl Strawberrys do it the way it should be done, the way everyone would like to be able to do it--with the aloof disdain and nonchalant perfection of the artist.

As a New York Mets fan said to the writer one day in a vestibule outside the visitors’ dugout, “I love to watch Strawberry play. He looks like a three-run homer just standing there. I’d rather watch him go oh-for-four than watch some of those guys hit for the cycle.”

The way Strawberry plays it, it’s the difference between prose and poetry, a square dance or “Swan Lake.” Not even a .226 average can detract from the fact you are watching an artist, born to play the performance the way it should be played.