Word: pitcherful
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
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...