Gooden faces charges including endangering the welfare of a child, driving under the influence of drugs, DWI with a child passenger, leaving the scene of a motor vehicle accident and reckless driving, the statement said. He was released on his own recognizance.*
Some guys never learn. The DWI is bad enough, but DWI with a child in the car is inexcusable. I think it ought to be a felony offense.
From the linked article.
It’s not just Gooden who doesn’t learn.
Well, he has been charged, not convicted at this point, right?
Right. But back in 2005 Gooden drove away from a traffic stop and turned himself in after three days. In 2006 he showed up high to a meeting with his probation officer. He doesn’t do “own recognizance” well.
That’s my take on it, too. Guy needs more supervision, not less.
Wow. He has to be one of the biggest fallen sports star stories in history. DG was THE Fuckin MAN when I was younger. What a huge waste of talent.
You know, even after all these years, every time I see one of these stories, I get a little sad. Doc, Darryl Strawberry, and Keith Hernandez are the three main reasons that baseball is my favorite sport. Take away those guys, and I’d still be watching baseball, but I’d probably be more into football. I was eight years old in 1985; I’d just started playing Little League and learning how to score a game on a scorecard. People now don’t really remember this, but it wasn’t just that Doc was the man - a lot of us believed, by about August of '85, that we were watching the origin story of literally the greatest pitcher who ever lived. His ERA was 1.53 in 275+ innings - and he was twenty years old. It seemed inconceivable that we were headed for anything other than 300 wins and probably about six no-hitters. Doc was going to the Hall of Fame; the only real question was whether they would name the fucking place after him when he retired.
Being a Mets fan then was really, really fun. There was Doc and there was Darryl, who was never quite as epic as Doc, but seemed like a mortal lock for 500 home runs and who was only 23. And Hernandez, one of the great sneaky assets - an on-base machine, a guy who played A+ defense at a position where nobody played A+ defense. In 1986 they won the World Series, and I still have the scorecard where I recorded the “E-3” while my dad shouted incoherently from couch.
I guess it was like being a Yankees fan right around when Jeter and Mariano starting hitting on all cylinders - except, meaning no disrespect to those guys, we thought Doc and Darryl would be way better players than Jeter and Rivera.
Then Doc and Darryl washed up playing fifth fiddle to Jeter and Rivera, and Doc didn’t even make it to 200 wins and Darryl didn’t even make it to 400 home runs and then Omar Minaya came along.
Gah.
If it makes you feel any better (and it probably won’t…) Darryl is on this year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” and at least in the first episode I watched he seemed to be in pretty good shape. He may have gotten himself turned around.
Gooden is one of the reasons I never let myself get too excited over the Strasburgs of the world when they’re this young. Amazing talent alone isn’t always good enough. Injuries, personal issues and sometimes just bad luck are too common.
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug.” - Rick James
A few years back, Tom Verducci wrote a piece about the 1986 Mets, in which he says that management traded away Kevin Mitchell, thinking HE was a bad influence on young guys like Strawberry and Gooden.
Verducci’s take? Mitchell WAS a genuinely, scarily bad guy in a lot of ways, but HE wasn’t the bad influence the Mets had to worry about. Keith Hernandez was. Hernandez was so smart and so suave that people didn’t see what a problem he could be. He was the one who introduced a lot fo the younger players to coke, and he was the one who told them (by word, by deed, and by sarcastic manner) that following the rules was for sissies and suckers.
One of those great what-ifs of baseball - right up there with “How good would the Orioles have been if they had signed Reggie Jackson to a multi-year contract?” - is “How good would the mid-'80s Mets have been if they had wound up with both Gooden and Clemens on the same staff?” For anyone who’s unaware, the Mets picked Clemens in the 1981 draft, but rather than signing he opted to attend the University of Texas for two years and was then drafted by Boston in 1983.