Report: Strawberry Did Cocaine in Motel

Darryl Strawberry told his probation officer he spent the four days he was missing using cocaine with a female friend and armed men who took his jewelry and abandoned him in a motel room.

In a report to the judge who will decide if the former baseball star will go to prison, Florida probation officials said Tuesday that Strawberry tested positive for cocaine use and violated the terms of his house arrest in his four-day absence from a drug rehabilitation center.

The report came as Strawberry remained in a psychiatric ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa, Fla., while doctors evaluated him.

Under arrest for violating his probation, he will be sent to the Hillsborough County Jail and held without bail once doctors declare him mentally stable.

Strawberry told his probation officer that he was picked up at the center by a woman from an Alcoholics Anonymous program named Beverly, who was supposed to take him to the meeting.

”. . . Instead she began smoking crack cocaine and he couldn’t resist the temptation,” probation officer Shelley Tomlinson wrote in her report. “He said she took him to a nearby motel where there were a total of five men who had guns and took his jewelry.”

Strawberry said they continued to use cocaine until Friday, when the unidentified men decided it was time to leave. They rode around town, bought more drugs and drove to a motel in Orlando, the report said.

In addition to his legal troubles, Strawberry also is undergoing an aggressive, experimental treatment for colon cancer.

“He wants to get himself clean, he wants to go on and live a normal life like everyone else,” said Mark Kennedy, who once shared an apartment with Strawberry at the Tampa drug treatment center. “If he’s told me once, he’s told me 50 times: ‘I wish I wasn’t who I am.’ He says he wishes he was a regular guy.”

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The players’ association filed a grievance seeking to overturn the $97,222 fine imposed on outfielder Carl Everett by the Boston Red Sox.

The next step is for lawyers for the union and the commissioner’s office to meet over the grievance. The matter then would be turned over to arbitrator Shaym Das.

The Red Sox fined Everett and suspended him from last Thursday’s spring training game against the Minnesota Twins after he failed to take a team bus to an exhibition game in Tampa, then was sent home by Manager Jimy Williams and skipped practice the next day.

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Greg Maddux, who missed his scheduled start in the Atlanta Braves’ season-opening 10-4 victory over the Cincinnati Reds because of a sore left foot, expects to start Friday against the Florida Marlins. . . . Woody Williams, the San Diego Padres’ top pitcher last season, agreed to a two-year contract extension through 2003.