Gooden, Others Say He’s Ready to Return to Top Form for Mets

He had just put the finishing touch on his signature season. Dwight Gooden returned to Florida and reported to Dad.

The baseball world still was buzzing about the 24-4 record, 268 strikeouts and 1.53 earned run average he had produced in 1985, his second major-league season, and so was Dan Gooden. He and his celebrity son talked and son told father: “I can do it again. It wasn’t that hard. I can win 20 games a lot more times.”

Dan Gooden counseled his son. “He told me not to put that kind of pressure on myself,” the Mets pitcher said.

Two years later, after another October trip from his baseball home to his family’s home in Tampa, Gooden reported to Mom. The intervening seasons had been neither so easy nor so kind as Ella Gooden’s son had anticipated. They’d been nothing like the two glorious seasons that made him Dr. K. And Gooden confided to his mom, “Maybe I can’t do it again.”

Then, at age 22, Dwight Gooden was scolded. Ella Gooden knew nothing about fastballs and which 2-and-1 pitch to throw Jack Clark. But she knew her son had lost direction and some confidence. “If you did it,” she told him, “that means it can be done. And if it can be done, you can do it.”

Today, at age 25 and approaching the midpoint of his seventh season, Gooden finds himself somewhere between the blind and perhaps naive confidence of 1985 and the self-doubt that has followed and, he concedes, increased slightly with each subsequent season. His pedestrian 5-5 record and unseemly 4.65 ERA this season suggest he is closer to doubt than to confidence. His words and those of the people around him refute that.

The Doctor says he has absolute confidence he can reclaim the distinction he held in 1985: baseball’s premier starting pitcher. “I have to think that,” he said. “If I didn’t think I could, I’d just quit.” He doesn’t care that Roger Clemens is 11-and-whatever, that Neal Heaton is winning at an unprecedented rate or that Ramon Martinez struck out 18. “I can still have a great year,” he said. “I think I will ... I can do it again.”

Gooden spoke those words Tuesday, two days after an impressive, though not awesome, performance against the Pirates in Pittsburgh. His confidence and that of his pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre were buoyed by his work in a pressurized game played in tropical conditions. And Stottlemyre is convinced Gooden is on the verge of something special. “He’s gearing up,” Stottlemyre said. “I see a lot of very positive indications. I have to say I’m pretty excited. I’m just waiting for him to come to me and say, ‘I’m ready to go on a roll.’ I think he’s close to that now.

“He used to bury batters, give them nothing they could do anything with. He hasn’t done it as often as he used to ...” Stottlemyre said. “One alarming thing is the number of hits (93 in 91 innings) ... But Sunday, even though he gave up a lot of hits (nine in seven innings), he buried some people.

“I know he caught the Pirates’ attention with some of the pitches he threw. You could see it in their faces. He smoked a couple of guys when he needed to and they went back to the dugout talking to themselves.

“Then (Tuesday), he did some real good throwing on the side. I can see it coming together. I’m looking forward to his next start.”

Gooden’s next start, his 15th of the season, is to come Saturday night at Shea Stadium against the Phillies. He probably has 20 starts remaining. Stottlemyre projects a 13-2 record for those 20 starts. “That would be the kind of roll I’m thinking about,” he said. “I think a good starter ought to win half the games he starts. With Doc throwing the way I think we will, he can win two or three more than half. What’s that come out to for the year, about 18-7 or so? That’d be okay with me.”

And with Gooden, too. An extended roll is what he needs to catapult his name back to the top. He has, in his own words, “missed being great” since 1985. And in this season of uneven performance and an even record, he has heard and read descriptions that offend him: “ordinary” and “just good” and even the dreaded “mediocre.”

“When I hear things like that I just figure someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Gooden said. “Maybe it’s just some fan who reads the paper once a week. Ordinary? No. That’s not me. I haven’t been great. I don’t like being at .500 either, but that doesn’t make me mediocre.”

Few batters who have faced him this year consider him ordinary. The Pirates were impressed with what they saw Sunday. And when Gooden opposed the Phillies June 2, they were impressed, too. “I tell you what,” Lenny Dykstra said. “There’s nothing wrong with his arm. He gassed us. But his curveball wasn’t consistent.”

Phillies coach John Vukovich thought Gooden was “an adjustment away from being great.”

And an American League scout in Pittsburgh drooled when he watched Gooden put down the Pirates. “If the Mets want to deal him now because someone thinks he’s ordinary, I know 14 teams that’ll take him. He looks pretty darn good. He’s not fooling people, he’s dominating them.”

Gooden doesn’t think he’s fooling himself, either. “I’m not denying anything,” he said. “I’m not lying to myself. A lot of things have happened in the last year that hurt me.

“I think people forget that I didn’t pitch the second half last year (because of a partially torn shoulder muscle). Then the lockout. If I had surgery to fix the shoulder, I probably wouldn’t be back this far.”

And don’t forget the toe injury that Gooden suffered May 19 when Mackey Sasser inadvertently placed a chair on Gooden’s left foot. The injury followed a solid start against the Giants May 16. Gooden shut out the Giants on three hits for seven innings, walking three and striking out eight. But he tired in the eighth and gave up a two-run home run to Will Clark. “Until Clark got me, that was my best game,” he said. “Now I think the Pirates game is. I’m back to where I was when I got hurt.”

“That (toe injury) definitely set us back,” Stottlemyre said. “He’s probably just getting back to where he was before it happened. We were really emphasizing using his legs more. And he had really started to believe in it because the results were there. Once the toe thing came up, we had to back off. I didn’t want to put extra stress on his legs when he was pitching with what probably was a broken bone. I might mess up his arm.

“He didn’t think the toe affected him, but we saw that he started to swing his lead leg on his delivery, and that affected his pitches, especially to left-handed hitters. Now he’s stepping forward and not rotating the hips so much. His pitches aren’t so flat now. His breaking ball is better. And when he has that, he freezes people.”

One thing Gooden still has is determination. “I went to him before he made that start in L.A. (May 21). I got him in the trainer’s room and started to tell him, ‘If you feel thing, we’ll take you out.’ And he just cut me off right there,” Stottlemyre said. “He said we need a good game from him--and we did. But he was pretty emphatic. He said, ‘I don’t care what you say or Davey or Frank or Joe McIlvaine or Al Harazin, I’m pitching.’ He went over my head in a hurry.

“We had that team meeting that night. We needed something positive to build on. He wanted to be the one to provide it. He knows how important he is to these guys.”

No question. Only a hitting tear by Darryl Strawberry can lift the Mets in the same way an extended stretch of good Doctoring can. “It isn’t the same when someone else pitches a great game,” Stottlemyre said. “When he does it, it’s special in the clubhouse afterwards. And if he has a tough day, you can feel that, too. There’s surprise. I think that tells you that everybody still believes in Doc and that we all see him turning it around.”