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