Strawberry Tries to Reach Vast Potential This Year

It’s only misdirection to be told that because the Mets have Gary Carter and a lineup that’s wide and deep that there’s any less demand for Darryl Strawberry to be all that he can be. He will always have to face the comparison with himself.

Having what he innocently pluralizes as his “potentials” is his blessing and his curse. Players like him--and there are so few who have potentials like him--are never seen as what they are but as what they can be. And then when they are through, often they are recalled with a shake of a head for what they might have been.

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle immediately come to mind. Does Strawberry grow up like them? Or does he play out his career like Bobby Bonds, who did so much but never did it all? Does he finish up like Cleon Jones and Cesar Cedeno and Joe Pepitone? Does he never grow up?

Of course there’s help for him in this lineup. But the fact is that if he has a big year, the Mets can win and all the others need to have is their usual years. Established players usually do just about what they’ve always done.

“Nobody knows about young players,” Strawberry mused not long ago, sophisticated after two years in the big leagues at the age of 23. “They don’t know what their year is. I’m not aware of what my potentials are, what would be a good year for me. I’m wanting to know.”

Last year’s 26 home runs and 97 runs batted in amounted to a good year, but for somebody else. In August, when the Mets were falling out of serious contention, Strawberry batted .177--a stretch of 14 hits in 79 at-bats with no homers, 7 RBIs and an awful lot of outs when there were games to be won. The race was still alive when he was talking about next year and how it would all be a learning experience, which was galling to teammates.

That month is the enduring damnation of his season. If there is evidence of his growth, it’s in how he reflects on that time. “Nobody can say what a slump is like until you’re into it,” he said. “It just seemed that everything said to me and everything I saw was negative; I took it wrong.”

He plunged into a wallow of self-pity. The Mets absorbed a painful three-game battering in Chicago and were bouncing back in St. Louis when Strawberry blew a fly ball and a ballgame because he wasn’t paying attention. In Los Angeles, Strawberry had his family and friends in the ballpark and did poorly; shortly afterward he showed up late for work and was fined.

“He did give up,” said Rusty Staub, whose comments--professional and public--often stung Strawberry.

“I can understand,” Strawberry said months later, “how certain players felt: ‘Here he is showing up late to the park in the middle of a pennant race. We’ve got a chance to win and you’re not there.’ I never realized how important a fellow like me can be at a time like that.”

Staub was saying things about realizing other people depended on him to do his job and he ought to want pitchers to beg him to play because he can win a game with a throw or a catch even if he is in a slump. “I was 10 times rougher on ‘The Mex,’ ” Staub said.

But “The Mex,” Keith Hernandez, takes criticism as a grown man. “Rusty said it to the papers,” Strawberry recalled. “Keith, he said it to me.”

Staub was a pinch-hitter, which often carries little status for a young player. That Hernandez was willing to find time for somebody else while he was having such a wonderful year himself impressed Strawberry enough for him to absorb some of the intent.

“One thing you can’t do is carry a slump out on the field with you and be thinking about your hitting,” Hernandez said. “That’s what he has to learn.

“He can go 3 for 50 and win six games with his glove and his arm; that’s what he’s got to realize.”

Hernandez passed along lectures he got as a rookie with St. Louis. Lou Brock told him: “You can feel sorry for yourself and prolong the slump, or turn it around. Get mad at the pitcher; he’s the one who’s going to put you in a 9-to-5 job.”

Hernandez harped on Strawberry’s work habits. “If he hadn’t slept well or something was bothering him, in batting practice he’d take lazy swings just feeling for the ball with no purpose,” Hernandez recalled. “B.P. is so critical to work on good habits. He had a long slump because he had bad work habits.”

He wasn’t a rookie; he was 22 and not exactly a child, but Strawberry had gone that far in baseball essentially untouched by life.

“I always played on natural talent,” he said. “I didn’t know what work habits mean. I didn’t know what it takes to be a good player. I was just there playing on talent.

“Now I jump in the cage serious to hit. When I feel myself struggling, I have to concentrate harder than before. I put it in my mind; I don’t think a slump will ever bother me like that again. Got to be.”

Things like that are so easy to say that Joe Pepitone could say them every spring. Pepitone was smart enough to know he ought to say them, but not smart enough to do them. Strawberry did have a fine spring--the statistics are irrelevant--and he worked hard.

Strawberry says there are things he wants to prove to himself. “I’ve been blessed with a world of talent,” he said with no false modesty. “I haven’t realized how to use it until coming into this season.”

He can make it an exciting season. “There will be a lot of eyes on him this year,” Hernandez said.

Strawberry can be Pepitone or Cedeno or Bonds or Jones. Or he can be anything; history is counting.