Dwight Gooden's career has arced strangely parallel to Strawberry's. A year after Straw was named Rookie of the Year, Gooden won the award; like Straw, Gooden endured injuries and then a cocaine problem that prematurely derailed his career in 1995. (He incurred his own 60-day drug suspension in 1994, a year earlier than Strawberry.) In 1996, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner took on Gooden, as he did Straw, as a reclamation project; and Doc, as he's known, threw a redemptive no-hitter that year while winning eleven games. A hernia sidelined him for part of 1997, but neither that nor his 4.91 ERA dissuaded him from acting petulant toward the end of the season. The Yankees let him go, and he bounced to Cleveland, Houston, Tampa Bay, and finally the Yankees again -- the latter three all in 2000 -- before retiring. Like Straw, Gooden still has substance problems; he was arrested for drunk driving in 2002. And like Straw, he enjoys the staunch patronage of George Steinbrenner, the apparent Patron Saint of Wayward Lynchburg Mets. Gooden now works as an 'assistant' at the Yankees' training complex in Tampa, where he was born and raised. Home Again -- although I'm not sure home is the best place for Doc, and neither is he. In 1995 Gooden said, "I was always getting into trouble in Tampa. ... If I go to Tampa during the day, I'm fine. But in Tampa after the sun goes down, it's like I'm a vampire."
After posting that ugly 1-6 record alongside his sparkling 2.70 ERA as a Durham Bull, Marty Clary rose through the minors and pitched three seasons for the Atlanta Braves. In his last, 1990, he went 1-10. (Perhaps my adolescent complaints about his Bulls record weren't groundless after all.) A story dated December 30, 2002 reports on the Global Youth Baseball Federation, whose members travel the world spreading the gospel through baseball. One of the leaders of the GYBF is none other than Marty Clary. This comes as no surprise: John Smoltz, the great Atlanta Braves pitcher, has a web site in which he credits Clary with affirming his Christianity back when Smoltz was an immature pitching prospect in the late 1980s. Clary is passionate about baseball and God, and now he unites them. "Through baseball I came to know the Lord," he has said. "And through baseball, I'm serving him by sharing the Gospel with others," He and his fellow missionaries are a kind of modern update of Billy Sunday, the ex-ballplayer who became America's most celebrated traveling evangelist -- the ur-Jimmy Swaggart -- during the 1910s. "We build relationships through baseball," Clary explains, by "teaching various stations on hitting, fielding, and throwing ... and then from that we get to talk very personal about deeper issues in life besides baseball or besides money or besides, you know, weather conditions, and we leave those results with God when we leave." Clary insists the GYBF doesn't force the Word on the locals with whom they play ball: "If people don't want to talk about religion they can just say, 'Let's talk baseball.' If they say that, they don't hear another word, because I see them as valuable human beings who have a right to say yes, no, or shut up."
