WHAT’S Darryl Strawberry’s plan for staying clean and sober?
Steer clear of baseball.
In a documentary premiering this week on Spike TV, the troubled former Met and Yankee slams the door on a return to baseball, whose pressures he blames for his slide into drug abuse.
At age 42 (he’ll be 43 in January), it’s doubtful Strawberry could return to the big leagues as a player anyway. But he means never to return to baseball in any form.
Instead, the struggling addict vows to dedicate the rest of his life to God, and to helping others.
“I don’t think I’ve ever helped anyone by putting on a baseball uniform and going out and performing,” says the ex-slugger in new interviews taped for an edition of the Spike series “Untold,” airing this Friday night at 9.
“But I think in real life, if you can go out and reach and help somebody and make a difference, I think that’s what all our goals are, to make a difference in someone else’s life,” he says.
Well, we’ll see. Strawberry has made promises before. And, as this one-hour documentary makes clear, he has often failed to make good on them.
And no one knows that better than Strawberry, who acknowledges that his problems placed him on the verge of suicide more than once.
“There were times where I would sit at home and say, ‘Man, why not just take this car and drive off of a cliff, you know? Why don’t I just take a pistol and put it in my mouth and blow my brains out and commit suicide?’,” Strawberry confesses.
“Untold” serves as a reminder of why Strawberry was so special in the first place. Drafted by the Mets straight out of Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles in 1983, the show features footage from Strawberry’s high school days, where the 6’6″ senior dominated as a pitcher and slugger.
A uniquely gifted athlete, Strawberry was a big part of the Mets’ storied 1986 season, when they went on to win the World Series against the Red Sox.
But even before that, he discovered cocaine. “The first time I ever tried it, I was on the airplane – you know, a team airplane – flying and I was introduced to it and someone said, ‘Go try this,'” Strawberry recalls. “And, you know, I was young, naive and I said, ‘This is the big leagues,’ and I went and tried it. It was cocaine.”
The show, narrated by Marv Albert, runs down all of Strawberry’s missteps, primarily in the 1990s, when he made headlines not for playing baseball, but for numerous arrests on charges ranging from drug and weapons possession to domestic violence and soliciting a prostitute.
Last year, he completed an 11-month prison sentence resulting from his conviction for cocaine possession.
And by the end of “Untold,” Strawberry promises yet again to stay on the straight and narrow.