Gooden Banned for Next Season : Baseball: Already suspended once this year, free agent pitcher is penalized for repeated drug violations.

If there is a 1995 baseball season, pitcher Dwight Gooden doesn’t figure to be a part of it.

Gooden, whose problems with cocaine surfaced seven years ago, was banned Friday for the entire season by major league baseball for repeated drug violations.

Gooden, who will turn 30 in two weeks, already had been suspended once this year after testing positive for drugs. He was treated at the Betty Ford Center last summer, but then tested positive again.

“Dwight Gooden needs to get his life in order,” said Joe McIlvaine, general manager of the New York Mets, Gooden’s team before he became a free agent last month. “Dwight needs to realize the problem and come to grips with it.

“He has been offered the best assistance baseball and the New York Mets have to give for his problem and he has not taken advantage of this guidance and help. All of us who love this man urge him to get the help he needs, put God into his life and exhibit the same tenacity he showed on the mound, especially in the early years of his career, when a lead in the seventh inning meant a victory in the ninth.”

Gooden was with the Mets for all of his 11-year career before becoming a free agent on Oct. 24. By the time he was 21, he had been National League rookie of the year and a Cy Young Award winner. But six months after leading the Mets to a World Series title in 1986, he admitted to a cocaine problem and voluntarily entered a treatment center.

Since then, he has been tested by baseball as many as three times a week.

This year, however, he failed four drug tests. He was suspended from baseball for 60 days on June 28 for failing two tests and then, in September, he tested positive twice more. Because of the still unresolved player strike, Gooden had 15 days remaining of the 60-day suspension.

Gooden’s agent, Jim Neader, met with the pitcher for about an hour Friday at Gooden’s home in St. Petersburg, Fla. Gooden chose not to speak publicly, but probably will make a statement next week, Neader said.

“He’s determined to beat it and get back to 100% health,” Neader told the Associated Press. “And when that is achieved, then we’ll think about baseball.”

The Major League Players Assn. has the right to challenge the suspension through its grievance procedure, which would be heard by arbitrator George Nicolau. The union had no comment Friday.

Gooden has been a larger-than-life figure in New York. A multistory portrait of him on the mound is painted on the side of a building in mid-town Manhattan, visible to all exiting the Lincoln Tunnel.

After helping lead the Mets past the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, Gooden won 15 or more games in four of the next five seasons. He was 13-7 in 1991, and hasn’t been back to .500 since. He is the last Met from the 1986 championship team.

McIlvaine, who has spoken with Neader about re-signing the right-hander, had only one message Friday: Get help.

“Dwight needs to demonstrate that same degree of competitiveness to defeat a far more insidious enemy that is sucking the life out of him, both personally and professionally,” McIlvaine said.

The last player to serve a one-year suspension was New York Yankee pitcher Pascual Perez in 1992. In 1988, Seattle Mariner John Rabb was suspended indefinitely for not complying with baseball’s drug-testing program. In 1983, Dodger pitcher Steve Howe and the Kansas City’s Willie Aikens also served one-year suspensions.