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