How Mets legend Darryl Strawberry was told he was going to the majors in 1983
Former Met Darryl Strawberry after his first major-league at-bat at Shea Stadium on May 6, 1983. Credit: Newsday/Bill Davis
The Cincinnati Reds were in the opposing dugout the day it all started for Darryl Strawberry, just as they were Wednesday afternoon when the Mets visited Great American Ball Park.
This was May 6, 1983 and the Mets were in a bad place, with the second-worst record in baseball at 6-15 and badly in need of something that might turn things around. At Met Park in Norfolk, Va., where the club’s Triple-A Tides played, the top prospect had arrived the night before only to be stunned that his name wasn’t in the starting lineup. Strawberry went into the office of then-Tidewater manager Davey Johnson for an explanation.
“Asked him why I wasn’t playing and he said ‘I wanted to give you a rest,’ ” Strawberry recounted to Newsday last week in a telephone interview from his St. Louis home. “Then he said he was kidding and said ‘I wanted you to take it easy today because you’re playing in the big leagues tomorrow.’ . . . He must have been able to tell I was [surprised] from my look because he said, ‘Don’t do that kid — you’re ready.’ ”
That first game against the Reds was memorable for Strawberry, mostly because it was his first big-league game. The Mets won the series opener, 7-4, in 13 innings on George Foster’s walk-off three-run homer, but the 21-year-old Strawberry faced Cincinnati’s Mario Soto his first four trips and struck out three times. He drew a pair of walks in extra innings and stole his first base ahead of Foster’s home run.
His debut did not turn things around for the Mets — who finished 68-94, dead last in the NL East — but it was the beginning of a season for Strawberry that concluded with him winning the NL Rookie of the Year after finishing with 26 home runs, 74 RBIs and 19 stolen bases. It was the birth of a Mets legend.
Strawberry will be back in Queens when the calendar flips from July to August. He will be reunited with his teammates from the 1986 team at Citi Field as the 40th anniversary of their World Series championship is celebrated on Aug. 1. The day before that, he will be at the stadium for a book signing in advance of the release of his book “Another Life.” The book is about his journey from being a baseball star, through tribulations with drug abuse and legal issues, to finally becoming a traveling faith-based speaker who ministers at schools, hospitals and prisons.
As Strawberry remembers it, his arrival in the clubhouse at Shea Stadium wasn’t entirely celebrated.
“A lot of the players seemed thrilled because I’d played a lot of ‘A’ games with them in spring training and knew what I had,” Strawberry said. “But there may have been some others who saw it as a business where they knew I was going to play and that meant they were not.”
In the final game of that series against the Reds, he got his first hit, but it was more than a month before he picked up the rhythms of life as a big leaguer and began to meet some of the high expectations that followed him from Norfolk.
Strawberry said that as a rookie “facing big-league pitching can grind you down and discourage you,” but that hitting coach Jim Frey held daily talks with him to help keep him on track. As club historian and VP of alumni relations Jay Horwitz recounted, Strawberry showed up late for a team workout early in that season. Fry dressed him down for it and threatened not to work with him if it happened again.
“Having Jim Frey there to navigate me through that entire season [really] helped,” Strawberry said. “The whole first month was a [struggle] and there was a session every day with [him] working on the mental and emotional [components] of how to excel. I didn’t get a lot from the other players but he saw . . . a young player that was going to need a lot of help, a lot of encouragement, to be the player I could be.”
Strawberry was still batting under .200 near the end of June when things started to click and the home runs and RBIs became regular events. Asked when he began to see that he was having the kind of season that would end with him voted Rookie of the Year, he replied, “I never really thought about that — it was a matter of growing to develop an understanding of how serious you have to be to succeed and that was what I focused on daily.”
As for what he took away from playing against Cincinnati in his first big-league series, Strawberry said it was too soon to stop overanalyzing everything and asking himself “am I ready for this?” But he did like that third game.
“There it was, a bloop hit to leftfield,” he said. “I said to myself, all right, I got the first hit, and then, what’s next?”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
