Word: dwights
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...