COMMENTARY : Strawberry’s Now a Suspect, Not a Prospect

Darryl Strawberry was the top prospect in all of baseball once. He returns to baseball now and returns to New York as a suspect. For three years he has behaved like nothing more than a has-been with a drug problem. Now he is part of a cheap publicity stunt filled with three sad, desperate people. One of them is an owner who is a has-been himself, the other an agent. The third is Strawberry.

Ironically, considering his record with drugs, Strawberry is the cleanest of the three. It is not just that he needs the money, which he does, and needs a job. At the age of 33, Darryl Strawberry finally needs a life. It is why he is the only one here worth rooting for, even though the odds are that he will betray the Yankees the way he has betrayed everybody else who has ever trusted him. You do not throw him away just because he has been such a terrible disappointment.

Strawberry has been every bit of that. He cheated the Mets, the Dodgers, the Giants. He cheated the IRS. He went around preaching Christianity when he was openly cheating on his wife. It figures that Strawberry is in with two hustlers like George Steinbrenner and Bill Goodstein, his agent. There have been so many times when Strawberry was nothing more than a cheap hustler himself. He spent too much of his baseball career acting lazy and stupid about his talent. It does not mean he gives up the right to use that talent again, if someone like Steinbrenner wants to take a chance on him, whatever Steinbrenner’s angle.

Strawberry has blown everything away except his rights. If Steinbrenner has the right to still own the Yankees after everything he has done, Strawberry has the right to play for him.

And while Strawberry may be a tax cheat, he has not been convicted of rape, the way Mike Tyson has, even if he was once accused of marital battery by his first wife. He has not been convicted of forcing a teen-age girl to have oral sex with him on a high school stairwell, the way a New York City basketball player named Richie Parker has. Strawberry had his first violation of baseball’s drug policy in April 1994, and went to Betty Ford. In the time since, through hundreds of random drug tests, Strawberry tested positive once, in January 1995. He went on a 60-day suspension from baseball, now ending.

People always have liked Dwight Gooden better than Strawberry. Gooden makes people sad, Strawberry makes them mad. Gooden has had so many more positive drug tests than Strawberry it is a joke. Gooden may never make it back. Strawberry has at least made it this far.

There will come a day when baseball decides Strawberry’s talent is gone. Then baseball will throw him away, the way baseball has thrown away lesser players with drug problems. If Strawberry throws away whatever talent he has left, not a single person will be surprised, or show him pity. He still gets to have this job, whether you think he deserves it or not. Strawberry and Steinbrenner have both been kicked out of baseball twice. Jump ball.

“You don’t punish someone more than the law says you should punish him just because he’s made a career of letting people down,” Gene Orza of the Players Association said. “People have a perfect right to be mad at Darryl. I’ve been mad at Darryl more than they ever will. But he hasn’t done anything that denies him the right to earn a living as a baseball player.”

Strawberry says he is changed this time, and that he hit bottom this time, and it is all tired material I have heard from him before, and put in the newspaper before, because I have known Strawberry since he was a rookie, and feel as if I have written about him a hundred times, and fought with him plenty, and defended him even more. Maybe this is the time that sobriety sticks with him. But Strawberry has to understand that he is guilty until proven innocent from now on.

I believe he is washed up as a big player in baseball. The idea that Strawberry is an exciting and colorful personality is as old as Steinbrenner. But there is no reason to root against him any more than there was a reason to root against Mickey Mantle when he finally got sober last year.

Steinbrenner talks about doing this to save Strawberry’s life. Sure he is. If you believe that, ask him when he last talked to Pascual Perez. Goodstein runs around telling anybody in the media who doesn’t hang up on him that he spends 10 to 12 hours a day sometimes talking to the counselors and therapists working with Strawberry and Gooden, another new client. It is just part of Goodstein’s hustle, the ridiculous picture of him on the telephone from nine in the morning to seven or eight or nine o’clock at night.

Goodstein, grasping to be somebody, must have a phone bill as big as the check Strawberry had to write to the government, covering the back taxes he owed.

“I’m just doing it because I care about this kid!” Goodstein the grasper shouts.

Strawberry is no kid. In addition to everything else, he is a convicted felon and the only reason he is not in jail is because he found a judge in White Plains, N.Y., named Barrington Parker who believed that jail time for him would serve no purpose. Strawberry wrote a check and walked.

When he tested positive last April and the Dodgers wanted to release him, Strawberry drew a $4.5-million settlement with the Dodgers when the Players Association said the Dodgers had released him unfairly. The Players Association could have beaten the Dodgers out of more money, but Strawberry wanted to move on.

Sometimes the baseball law is like a big rock, and when you turn it over, you don’t know who or what will come crawling out.

The Giants signed Strawberry for $109,000, but that was all right, because Strawberry already had all that money from the Dodgers. This year the Giants tried to cut Strawberry after tendering an arbitration offer to him. The Players Association would have beaten the Giants on that one. With Strawberry, everybody seems to pay. It is just Darryl who never seems to pay enough.

Now if he stays clean and hits the ball over the fence, he can make nearly a million dollars this season. Strawberry is now the first to tell you what a great country this is.

“I realize how good I had it,” he told Pete Rose the other night during a radio interview for Rose’s program.

Maybe he does. Maybe Strawberry has learned to tell the truth. If he hasn’t, he has no shot here. Even if he is telling the truth, he has a lot to prove, and for a long time. Guilty until proven innocent. Greatest prospect in baseball once, now its No. 1 suspect.