When you grow up in New York rooting for the right team—not the we haven't won a championship in six years and that's supposed to be upsetting and our first baseman was juicing and he cried and apologized so it's OK when he hits home runs now\ Yankees, you learn something real fast: Don't get your hopes up.
Going to Mets games, there wasn't much to get excited about anyway. With studs like Kevin Elster, Vince Coleman, Bobby Bonilla, Joe Orsulak and company, not much could be expected from the Orange and Blue. But as I matured in the confines of the charmingly hideous Shea Stadium, I was able to watch the epitome of fallen dreams.
If only for a few years, Dwight Eugene Gooden was the king of the Big Apple. After almost winning the Cy Young Award after his rookie season, Doc hoisted the trophy in his sophomore stint at the age of 20, still the youngest ever to win the award. He led the league in wins, earned run average, innings, strikeouts and complete games.
He would eventually lead the Mets to their first world championship in 17 years the following year (a World Series that even fans like myself, who were barely alive, talk as if they were right there when Bill Buckner and Bob Stanley blew Game Six).
But, like I said, don't get your hopes up. The pitcher who looked as if he could challenge Nolan Ryan's strikeout mark, and maybe even pick up 400 wins tested positive for cocaine in spring of 1987, checking himself into Smither Addiction Treatment Center in order to avoid suspension. Gooden wouldn't start the season until early June, still managing to pick up 15 wins. The following year, Doc won 18 games, but his hits allowed were way up giving up 242 in essentially the same amount of innings.
There were signs of Gooden having legal troubles when he was arrested less than two months after the World Series for battery, but Mets fans chose to ignore them, choosing instead to bask in the glory of being champions.
Shoulder surgery in 1989, followed up with more health problems two years later, led to the sharp fall off in Gooden's career. The man who temporarily gave Met fans hope that a dynasty was on the horizon was also charged with rape (the charges were later dropped) and he tested positive for cocaine twice more before 1995.
Suspended twice, the second for the entire season, he hit rock-bottom. Gooden, whose curve ball made hitters weak, had become just that. A day after the suspension, Gooden's wife Monica found him in their bedroom, holding a gun to his own head.
Though he briefly found success in pinstripes, throwing a no-hitter with the Yankees, Gooden never would recover his once dazzling form. He would play with three teams from 1998 to 2001, being cut twice and never winning more than nine games in a season.
So here we are again. Gooden, retired for five years now, and already on probation for drunken driving, admitted to doing cocaine. The state is pursuing jail time. How long of a sentence is yet to be seen.
Surprised? Not this Mets fan. Saddened? Very much so. I learned at a young age not to get my hopes up. Just once, for Doc's sake, I wanted to be wrong.
Sam Pepper is a junior majoring in political science. Think he's optimistic in thinking the Mets are the National League favorite? E-mail him at sepepper@wisc.edu.\
