Dr. K Is King of the Hill

By Tom Callahan

A baseball pitcher whom not even New York City can enlarge or exaggerate stands atop the hill and the heap at 21. Without counting the mound, which is also situated about ten inches above the rest of the field, Dwight Gooden in just two major league seasons has risen like an illusion of a fastball to a height somewhat loftier than 6 ft. 3 in., and a level nearly beyond imagination. When Sandy Koufax says, "I'd trade anyone's past for Gooden's future," that includes Walter Johnson's, Grover Cleveland Alexander's, Bob Feller's and his own. "Who wouldn't?" growls Don Drysdale, winding up for his famous knockdown pitch. "Gooden makes $1.32 million a year."

Since arguing with pitchers is no more sensible than arguing about them, let a hitter take his swing, a slugger with an eternally simple view of life (especially New York living), but a profound knowledge of athletic gifts (and the pleasures they afford). "If I could pick somebody to be," says Mickey Mantle, "that's who I'd be." He knows there is a wonderful ride ahead. "Dwight Gooden."

Being Bret Saberhagen, 21, would not be too terrible either. Saberhagen and his wife both delivered dramatically last October, a bracing baby boy and a bouncing Kansas City championship. (And she's pregnant again.) Or how about Cincinnati's Tom Browning, 25, the first rookie 20-game winner in more than 30 years? Or Orel Hershiser, 27, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in his third season already a millionaire? All of them have realized in a short time things that have eluded good pitchers over long careers, and one of them is more than special. Gooden is not alone among men, or even among Mets, just among pitchers. On their own hooks, All-Stars Darryl Strawberry and Keith Hernandez are entitled to dream of the pennant, as long as Dwight dreams too.

He is from Tampa, a small but fertile baseball city that, like the spring- training teams that invigorate the region every March, seems to specialize in the unlikeliest dreams. "Kids are always chasing rainbows," says Johnny Vander Meer, 71, a local resident, "but baseball is a world where you can catch them." While he had a losing record overall with the Reds, Cubs and Indians, Vander Meer pitched two consecutive no-hitters in 1938. As a craftsman, Gooden puts him in mind of Ewell Blackwell; as a hard thrower, he recalls Van Lingle Mungo. "But no one I ever saw was the thinking pitcher at a young age that this kid is now." Owing to a wisdom that has comforted him for almost 50 years, Vander Meer has no fear for his memories. "Gooden's the guy who could tie my record," he says with a twinkle, "but to break it, don't forget, he'll have to pitch three no-hitters in a row."

Until recently, Tampa's most prominent baseball dreamer has been the San Diego first baseman Steve Garvey, formerly of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose father served as the Brooklyn Dodgers' springtime bus driver in the '50s. Rising from Dodger batboy to star of the team, Garvey prepared Tampa well for its improbable position now as producer of both the most effective pitcher and the most efficient hitter in baseball: the Mets right-hander Gooden and the Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs. One, the National League Cy Young Award winner by acclamation last year (24-4 record, 268 strikeouts, 1.53 earned-run average); the other, the American League batting champion by 33 points (.368).

Like bookends in a trophy case, they are apt to appear opposite each other in their old schools' respective bleachers at the Hillsborough High and H.B. Plant games. At least Boggs, 27, offers a theory as to the source of his powers: he eats little else but chicken and eggs (leaving it to others to ponder which came first). As for Gooden, nobody knows exactly where he got what he has or, for that matter, precisely what it is.

In the black working-class community of Belmont Heights, Gooden explains, "all the adults were your parents," though he was not shortchanged in any respect. Ella Mae and Dan Gooden were as solid as the rocks that--their son acknowledges both uneasily and proudly--he used to hurl at passing cars with resounding accuracy. "I knocked out a lot of windows, got a lot of whippings," Dwight says. "And at night I'd lie in bed throwing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it, throwing it up in the air and catching it, throwing it up in the air and catching it, until I fell asleep."

His baseball heritage is easy to trace. Etha Talbert, Gooden's paternal grandmother, swore it was spiritual. She died this year, convinced that Dwight was "his granddaddy come back alive." The boy never knew Uclesee Gooden but loved to hear his father's energetic accounts of the angular, strong-legged, long-armed Georgia pitcher whose fastball had been consigned by the times to a black sandlot in Albany. " 'Could he bring it, Dad?' Dwight would say to me, and I'd laugh. 'Yeah, he could bring it.' "

A round man on a cane, Dan has lost a hip to arthritis, actually to a childhood of peanut and cotton farming, compounded by adult years operating a belt in a phosphate factory. Still, something visible remains of the athlete, the first baseman who followed Uclesee to the Albany Red Sox and later coached semi-pro teams in Tampa. "My daddy carried me around like I carried Dwight around," says Dan, noting that none of the three sons from his first marriage ever embraced the game. "Oh, but it pleased me when Dwight took it up. 'Baseball, baseball,' his mother liked to tease, 'that's all you two talk about.' But that was my whole dream."

At home alone, Dwight devised a variety of phantom baseball games, sometimes flipping ordinary playing cards. Nobody else was ever able to make much sense of it, but he could always see a diamond. "I was a daydreamer," he confesses. "When I'd step into the Little League batter's box, I'd think, 'I'm Pete Rose, I'm Al Kaline.' " For hitting two home runs in a forgotten spring-training game 15 years ago at Lakeland, Detroit's Hall of Fame rightfielder is Gooden's ideal still. "I just fell in love with him for the way he played that one game when I was six." Why? "He dominated."

From the age of eight, Gooden and his closest neighborhood friend, Floyd Youmans, filled Tampa's afternoons with pepper. Using a battered aluminum can for a ball, they waged endless rounds of home-run derby or argued themselves angry over a game called Strikeout that featured a hard rubber ball, a red brick wall and a chalk-drawn strike zone. "Just me and him," Youmans whispers conspiratorially. "We weren't supposed to--the coaches all the way down the line told us not to--but we'd sneak out and practice throwing curve balls. When he was twelve, I knew. By twelve he had command. Almost nobody could catch his fastball either: he broke one guy's hand, another guy's wrist." Without irony, Gooden's playmates took to calling him Doctor. Dan Gooden believes his son's nickname came from an infielder's chatter: "C'mon, Dr. Dwight, operate on him!" Youmans says, "It was just always Dr. D, or Doc." It evolved naturally into Dr. K, the initial taken from the scorebook shorthand for a strikeout.

There were other good athletes around the neighborhood. Without Gooden, whose birthday came just a little too late for the 1975 Williamsport World Series, the Belmont Little Leaguers made it all the way to the finals before losing to Taiwan. But Gooden could be so critical of his teammates' mistakes that a visitor to the practice field might have taken him for the only competent player. One day nobody remembered to bring a ball. The team was awkwardly waiting when Gooden suddenly said, "I'm sorry for the way I act sometimes." After that he seemed not to notice any errors but his own. The scouts' word for this tolerance, consideration and grace is poise.

"I never wanted to pitch," Gooden says. "I wanted to be involved. Even now, if I had my choice, I'd rather play every day. Given the chance, I honestly think I could put up some hitting statistics." His preference would be to swing lefthanded, but to safeguard his priceless arm from inside pitches, the Mets require him to bat from the right. Nonetheless, he has cracked three hits in the same game off no less than Los Angeles Rival Fernando Valenzuela. "I'm lucky to have one hit in two years off him," grins Fernando, a grizzled veteran of 25. With quite a different pitch but a similar acclaim, Valenzuela arrived from Mexico on a screwball six years ago.

Other pitchers have been capable hitters, but none ever twirled a bat more eagerly than Gooden. Once, in a six-inning Little League game, he struck out 16 of 18 batters and hit two home runs. But the homers were what kept him awake all night. (He is prone to delight and insomnia.) "Sometimes in school I'd come in from right field or third base to relieve, and maybe even go back again. That was the best." Before Floyd and Dwight could be seniors together at Hillsborough, Youmans moved with his family to California. For Gooden, the mound felt lonelier than ever.

On draft day of 1982, he congregated with a few other hopefuls in the wire room of the Tampa Tribune, where the news was handy. Shawon Dunston, a Brooklyn shortstop with an interstate reputation, was selected first of all by the Cubs. (A rating, incidentally, with which the Mets concurred.) "After four picks, I wasn't even letting myself hope yet," Gooden says, "and when my name came up fifth, I couldn't believe it--the No. 1 draft choice of the New York Mets!" He would sign for $85,000. "First I had to call New York to make sure that I was the right Dwight Gooden. Then I couldn't even drive home, I was so excited." Remember, baseball is a world where you can catch rainbows. In the second round, the Mets drafted Floyd Youmans.

Kingsport, Tenn., rookie ball in the Appalachian League, is a typical first professional depot on the tour to the majors--"a one-mall town," as described by Gooden in the modern tongue. Youmans recalls, "The night I walked in, he was waiting for me. We just hugged and cried." The team's transportation around the mountains was a bus, of course, but for some reason the two friends found it endlessly funny that it was a school bus (no air conditioner). Every day Dwight called home. "Sometimes twice a day," Dan Gooden says. "One month we had a $460 phone bill, and I told my wife, 'I'm going to have that telephone taken out.' Well, he was only 17."

After striking out 66 hitters in 66 innings, attracting thoughtful attention from a "roving instructor" named Davey Johnson, Gooden was summoned to Little Falls, N.Y., for a taste of lower A ball. The following season he was assigned to the higher A team at Lynchburg, Va., managed by Sam Perlozzo.

"Some guys throw hard," Perlozzo says, "but they look it. Dwight was so smooth, effortless. Almost the only time you could sense the energy was when, say, there was a man on third with one out and he didn't want a ground ball to score a run. That's when he started pumping up his velocity, pulling out something extra. You could see it." A base runner juked Gooden into balking once. "That rattled him," Perlozzo remembers with a smile: a valuable lesson learned. But when he cooled out, Gooden strung together 15 victories that included a 46-inning stretch without an earned run.

Come the season's final day, after only 184 innings, he stood just 14 strikeouts from 300. During doubleheaders, minor league games are shortened to seven innings. "No way possible," Gooden thought, "can I get 14 strikeouts in seven innings." But the fervor of his teammates stirred him. "Each time I came back into the dugout, our players would count them up. It was the only game I ever played where I tried to strike out every man I faced." The Hagerstown Suns were the opponents, but Gooden remembers none of the hitters. He saw only the bats. "Every pitch, I rared back, and after a while I didn't even look at the target." He won, 1-0, "believe it or not." The strikeout that ended the game was his 14th.

Though he appeared briefly in the 1983 International League Playoffs and Triple A World Series, Gooden's minor league career was essentially over. Blissfully, he did not know it yet. Davey Johnson was about to be named the new Mets manager, and Johnson had a notion about this young pitcher. "I wasn't really in a hurry," Gooden says. As a matter of fact, those few days at the end of the season made him wary enough of Triple A, let alone the National League. "I could see the hitters were much more patient, stronger too. Not only didn't they go for some of the outside hooks, they fought off a lot of the inside stuff. 'Go league by league,' Dad had said. 'By 1986 you'll get a trial.' I started to realize I was one step from the big leagues and from having to pitch to Mike Schmidt."

A calculator, a math major, Johnson had played a tidy second base for Earl Weaver's best teams in Baltimore. During the '60s, before computers were cool, Johnson wrote a program designed, as he put it, to "optimize" the Oriole lineup. Weaver never got around to installing it, but he loved to hear his second baseman talk. To Johnson there are no "hitting streaks" or "hot hands." There are "favorable chance deviations." The Mets' general manager, Frank Cashen, also came from Baltimore. He is considered conservative, though ( a better word would be careful. While Cashen tilts especially toward caution in the development of 19-year-old arms, Johnson persuaded him to keep an open mind on Gooden.

The precise opening was created by an unfavorable chance deviation. Neglecting to protect Tom Seaver, or to imagine anyone would be gauche enough to claim their venerable pitcher, the Mets lost him to the Chicago White Sox in the 1984 player-compensation pool. "Until then I wasn't even going to the big camp," Gooden says. "I came in as a non-roster player, and right up to the fourth inning of the last spring game, I was sure that I was headed to Tidewater. All of a sudden Davey walked over to where I was sitting in the dugout and just put out his hand. 'Congratulations,' he said. 'You made the team.' 'I did?' " Then Johnson sent him into the game. "Oh, man. Every pitch I threw felt five miles an hour faster than the last." When Dwight hurried to his father afterward with the news, Dan just said, "Do your best."

Johnson and Cashen handpicked the stage for Gooden's first start, the Houston Astrodome--"before they brought the fences in," Dwight points out gratefully. "I couldn't sleep the night before, and I couldn't stand to wait for 5 o'clock to take the team bus. About 2:30 I left the hotel and walked by myself to the stadium, about a mile and a half. Everything was moving in slow motion; I was sweating pretty good." Despite forgetting all he knew about pitching the instant the game began ("It was like I'd never been on a mound before"), Gooden struck out Dickie Thon to end the first inning, and 275 others before the season was through (not including the side he struck out in his first All-Star inning). Philadelphia's Grover Cleveland Alexander (227) and Cleveland's Herb Score (245) had lost their longstanding places as the breeziest rookies in the history of the National and major leagues.

Including that first one, Gooden won 17 games and the Rookie of the Year award. He also lost Youmans again, shipped with a small gang of minor and major leaguers to Montreal, but at least he was compensated this time with the eminent backstop Gary Carter. "We're all just fortunate to be part of Dwight's world," Carter likes to say. Last year this pleasure included eight shutouts and strings of 14 victories, 31 scoreless innings and 49 innings without a run earned. Gooden and the St. Louis Cardinals' ace John Tudor stared each other into stupors, but even Tudor picked himself second for the Cy Young. "Just one time," Tudor said, "I'd like to throw a ball like that." Leaving only the archaic record holders in peace, Gooden forced Herb Score to share another modern mark: two 200-strikeout seasons right off the bat.

"What makes somebody throw hard? I don't know," Score says. "How many big guys who look like they should be able to throw a baseball through a wall actually can't break an egg? How many little guys like the Yankees' Ron Guidry can really fire it?" Most baseball people are of the opinion that if you cannot throw or hit a fastball on the day you are born, there is nobody who can teach you. "But just like with Koufax and all the great fastball pitchers, it's Gooden's curve ball that really leaves the hitters standing." After his two glorious years, Score lost the 1957 season to a line drive in the eye. His arm shortly withered. "Whatever it is that makes you have a little extra, I just didn't have that anymore. It can be taken away, you know."

Gooden does know. His mildly sprained ankle this winter almost panicked Wall Street. "All pitchers hold their breath about arm injuries," he says. "Mostly, people hold their breath around pitchers, especially young fastball pitchers." And yet, says Mets Trainer Steve Garland, "of all the pitchers we have, Dwight's the one I least expect to get hurt." His motion is flexible and his fundamentals flowing; the really heavy work falls to his legs, which are as thick as the rest of him is lithe. "Some pitchers who are overpowering," Tom Seaver says, "you can see the clock is ticking down on them. They just have terrible fundamentals. Gary Nolan, Don Gullett, Mark Fidrych, there's a whole list. Gooden's mechanics look outstanding: I figure him for a long run. Knowing his trade and his own heart, being able to adjust mentally when it comes time to adjust physically, those are always the tests of longevity, and they'll be his challenge someday."

Unable to apply words to the serenity he feels now even in the face of Philadelphia's fierce Mike Schmidt, Gooden can say nothing more than "It's God-given." Seaver has no difficulty seeing the order in Gooden's pitching. "It's a lot more than natural, believe me," he says. "Let him have some time to find the words for it. It's enough for him to do these things at 21, he can explain them later." It has occurred to Gooden to ask himself, "Are you really this good?" But the answer is classified. "You shouldn't dwell on that," he says. "It can scare you." With no declared goals except to "stay hungry," Gooden pledges, "I'll never say I'm satisfied. I can still get quicker to the plate with men on base." Stealing was an early problem of his: base runners were a novelty.

Aged pitchers, like old fans, might be expected to minimize Gooden's brief achievements. But not Hall of Famer Robin Roberts. "I think maybe we're the most impressed of all," he says. "We know what he's doing, what a gift he has. It's obvious that his start is better than anyone else's, even Feller's. His control is better than Feller's." A big leaguer at 17, Feller was Gooden's age before he found the plate. "Go up and hit what you see," Bucky Harris used to advise his Washington Senators, "and if you don't see it, come on back." Ralph Kiner, the Mets' announcer, nee '40s slugger, testifies, "No question about it, Feller was faster." But Gooden, he says, has the more advanced "control" and "command."

Not surprisingly, Feller's view is that two seasons are insufficient for comparison. "People are always wanting to know too soon what I think about a Willie Mays or a Joe Charboneau or a Mark Fidrych or a Dwight Gooden. Gooden seems like a hard worker, and he's off to a fine start. As far as I can tell, he's keeping his ducks in a row." By that, maybe he means Gooden doesn't brag much. "Only in the middle of 1946," Feller thinks back, "did I ever try to strike everybody out. I had a chance for the single-season strikeout record, a situation brought to my attention by General Mills (Wheaties) in the form of a $5,000 bonus. I got it too." He has been wondering if the strikeout hasn't been devalued since then. "Not striking out used to be a moral victory. There just isn't as much stigma to swinging and missing anymore."

One of Gooden's most eloquent admirers consecutively struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Simmons and Cronin in the 1934 All-Star game: Carl Hubbell, 82. "The most amazing part of the whole damn thing is he's so cool and calm," Hubbell says. "You used to have to get broken into it. A lot of pitchers seem older than their years today, but Gooden most of all. Also, he's got one of the best curves I ever saw--he throws it so hard! The damn thing breaks nearly from the guy's shoulder to the ground." Evidently, Hubbell has been studying him on television. "That's the kids' advantage, don't you see? I was raised on a cotton farm in Meeker, Okla. Didn't even get a newspaper. Never saw so much as a picture of a real major league pitcher in his windup."

Advancements in technology and improvements in early-level coaching may be part of what Manager Johnson terms Gooden's "instinctive sophistication." But poise is unteachable and Gooden's kind of confidence inexplicable. By Johnson's calculations, "Dwight's already got more command than any pitcher I ever saw." Off the field, absently tapping his drums or vaguely thinking of marriage, Gooden is also the picture of control. Strawberry, the Met outfielder Gooden is no longer mistaken for, took a square look at his friend in his wet new hairdo this spring to see if $1.32 million wears any differently than $450,000 wore last season or $40,000 did the year before. It has bought a few more chains (to complement his golden smile), but also a new house for his parents. "I think it's just another natural gift of Dwight's," Strawberry says, "handling New York, handling the media, handling the money."

Orel Hershiser, a late bloomer mislaid for five years in the Dodger farm system, considers Gooden's primary talent "just the fact of how natural he can make himself feel in a stadium full of people. I've watched him, and I don't know whether he's any more natural when he's alone. The days I make it look easy when it wasn't easy are my proudest. But for him, I think it is easy. I just think he knows what he wants to be. If you don't know what you want to be, people are going to make you what they want."

Bret Saberhagen's teammate, iconoclastic Relief Pitcher Dan Quisenberry, cannot ordinarily resist such deep discussion, but he has a simple view of Gooden's class. "Joseph Heller used the phrase in a book title: Something Happened. That's it. About every decade or so in pitching, a little group shows up with something special, a secret recipe. They have something a lot of guys with great arms never get. And this time, whatever it is, Gooden got most of it. It's not fair."

Mysteriously, and maybe a little more irregularly than by the decade, pitchers do seem to travel in clusters. Hubbell materialized in the swift company of Dizzy Dean and Lefty Gomez. Seaver enjoyed the prolonged fellowship of Steve Carlton, Jim Palmer and Nolan Ryan. Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry formed their club. Even Walter Johnson had Rube Marquard. "There's some safety in numbers," Tom Browning agrees. "Last year, when Pete (Rose) was drawing the crowds, I was left alone to get a nice quiet 20."

This spring the noise level has been up. Even Gooden has heard the unfamiliar sound of cowhide meeting ash. But then, hitters forget every winter and have to be reminded every summer who the pitchers are. A young fellow named Floyd Youmans had a bright spring for Montreal and has pitched his way into the starting rotation. Maybe the best pitcher in baseball should dig up a hard rubber ball, a red brick wall and a chalk-drawn strike zone. There could be Strikeout games this summer.

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