Word: gooden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...