24 @SPORTSNET
THE
MONEY
ISSUE
THE FINAL
STRAW
After years of hard living—blowing through more than $30 million—
former slugger Darryl Strawberry found his true calling
BY KRISTINA RUTHERFORD IN ELIZABETHTOWN AND HERSHEY, PA.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEVE BOYLE
D
arryl Strawberry paces back and forth on a creaky
stage barely bigger than a batter’s box. He exhales,
then looks up at the ceiling of the Mount Calvary
Christian School gym. “He’s so loving,” Strawberry
says, smiling. “He is so wonderful.” Behind him hang
decades-old banners celebrating volleyball and basketball championships. An “Amen, brother” comes from somewhere in this
crowd of 450, followed by a bunch of “mmm-hmm”s. Strawberry
is wearing a dark-blue suit jacket and pink button-up, and his arms
are going. He comes to a stop on the stage. “God is the only reason
why I’m standing today,” he says, looking over his audience. “Not
because of anything I’ve done.” On the wooden podium in front
of the eight-time all-star and four-time World Series champion—as
he’ll remind the crowd several times this evening—there are no
notes. He doesn’t need them to keep this audience spellbound for
the next 47 minutes.
This highly anticipated speech is the main event of the spring
banquet to benefit Cornerstone Youth Center, a religious hangout
some 10 minutes away, here in Elizabethtown, Pa. (Last year, the
banquet’s keynote speaker brought owls and snakes.) All the
guests—Strawberry included—have just been treated to a dinner
of chicken, canned corn and boiled green beans on plastic plates.
Blue and orange Mets-coloured tablecloths adorn every table, each
decorated with a handful of Styrofoam baseballs that’ve been
dutifully cut in half by some volunteer, then sliced again at the top
so a Darryl Strawberry baseball card could be wedged within.
Tickets to tonight’s fundraiser were free.
Hands up if you’d be more surprised to find Darryl Strawberry
in a church than a crack house. The last we heard of him, he’d
thrown away what should have been a Hall of Fame career because
he was a drugged- and boozed-up disaster. Cocaine forced Strawberry’s retirement in 2000 after Major League Baseball handed him
a year-long suspension for failing yet another drug test, and then
he faded out of public consciousness, unless you include here-wego-again news reports of his subsequent screw-ups. The way his
life was going—rehab, relapse, repeat—you had to figure that was
the end of the story. And it is. Because Darryl Strawberry The
Addict is dead. And so is Darryl Strawberry The Baseball Player,
the one who played 17 MLB seasons, made more than $30 million
and lost it all. Today, it’s Darryl Strawberry The Man of God, and
you wouldn’t recognize him. He’s a 52-year-old ordained minister
who doesn’t own a ball glove and prays before every meal. The man
who tried so many times to reinvent himself, only to fall back into
drugs and women and booze, swears this is his final reinvention.
And, Minister Strawberry says, if he could do it all over, he never
would have played baseball.
@SPORTSNET 25
THE MONEY ISSUE DARRYL STRAWBERRY
I
26 @SPORTSNET
put a lot of pressure on him.” And Strawberry played to
it. He crushed 26 home runs and ran away with the NL
Rookie of the Year award. Nobody got out of their seat
for a hot dog when Strawberry was at the plate, because
no fan wanted to risk missing a 500-foot dinger. In 1985,
he cracked a homer off Reds left-hander Ken Dayley that
hit the clock on the right-field scoreboard at Busch Stadium. On opening day in 1988, he authored a moonshot
that looked like it would carry for days but hit the cement
rim of Olympic Stadium’s roof in Montreal. Says Hall of
Fame Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda: “He had as
much power as anybody that’s ever played.” And about
as much pomp, too. The man was an entertainer, taking
what seemed like 10-minute long trots around the bases
after a homer. “I always thought, take your time and
enjoy it; what’s the hurry?” Strawberry says, grinning.
He revelled in the taunting “Da-rryl! Da-rryl!” chants
he’d get at away parks while he stood in right field, tipping his hat to the other team’s fans. Today, if you ask
him to, he’ll imitate the chants.
FROM
PLAYER...
Strawberry
delivered the big
hits while playing
for the Mets in the
mid-’80s, but he
also got caught up
in a downward
spiral of drugs
and partying
RON VESELY/GETTY IMAGES
t doesn’t take a sociology degree to understand
the power of sport, to know that a kid who grows
up in a crime-riddled neighbourhood can sometimes find his way out on the sandlot or the court
or the field. Darryl Strawberry grew up in South
Central Los Angeles, where homegrown rapper Ice Cube
says the first rule of survival is “Get yourself a gun.”
But today, sitting in a hotel restaurant in Hershey, Pa.—
yes, Strawberry in the land of chocolate; it’s perfect—
wearing sneakers, jeans and a black Mizuno sweater,
he looks like the product of an upper-middle-class
upbringing. The only sign he didn’t grow up privileged
are the braces that now line his bottom teeth. He downplays how bad it was in South Central’s Crenshaw District when he was a kid. “It wasn’t like Boyz n the Hood,”
he says, grinning. But baseball, he admits, was the safe
haven. All three Strawberry boys—Mike, Ronnie and
Darryl, the youngest—found the game as little guys,
watching their dad suit up in the post office league, then
imitating the sweet cut of their pop, known on the field
as Big Hank, before joining teams of their own. They
were the highlight in Crenshaw. People from all over
the neighbourhood gathered to watch the Strawberrys
play. Coaches from all over L.A. recruited the brothers,
trucked them around the city for games and practices.
Teams were built around them. A coach named Mr.
Anderson—the Strawberry boys claim they never knew
his first name—saw the three playing on a sandlot and
promptly started a team. “The Blacksocks,” Strawberry
says, smiling. “That was cool.”
No Strawberry was more captivated by the game than
the youngest. When he was 10, Darryl told everyone he
was bound for the majors. He slept while clutching his
baseball bat in the room he shared with Mike and Ronnie
in the family’s three-bedroom brick home. “We’d be like,
‘What is wrong with you?’” Mike says, laughing. “His
heart, though, was all about baseball.” The body caught
up the summer after Grade 8, when Darryl grew four
inches. The newly six-foot Strawberry ran like a blind
baby deer on muscle relaxants, but his raw power was
shocking. By the time he was a senior at Crenshaw High
School, Strawberry was six-foot-four and a national sensation with an insanely fast bat and a looping swing,
making headlines as the black Ted Williams, even if he
didn’t know who that was. He pitched, played right field,
hit .400 and had five home runs as a senior. “My gift,” he
says, simply, “was baseball.” He seldom let go of his bat.
“You gonna learn how to hit the ball a long way,” he’d
tell that bat. It makes Strawberry laugh today, to remember how he’d talk to it. He laughs so hard he can barely
get the words out: “We gonna do some great things.”
The expectation was beyond mere greatness when
the New York Mets picked Strawberry, straight out of
high school, first overall in the 1980 MLB amateur draft.
The Mets hadn’t made the playoffs in seven seasons,
their lone World Series victory came in 1969, and Strawberry was branded the guy who could lead them to
another championship before he even got to New York.
His first year in the minors, the Kingsport Mets let fans
in for free on Sundays if they brought a strawberry to
the park. When he was called up to the big club in May
of 1983, during what looked to be another dismal season,
Strawberry mania hit a boil. “He was the story,” says
the team’s 35-year public relations man, Jay Horwitz,
whose memory is a Mets library. “He was expected to
hit a home run every time up. If the guy’s name is Darryl
Smith, it probably wouldn’t have been as bad. But Darryl
Strawberry? A six-foot-six kid with a ton of talent? That
DARRYL STRAWBERRY THE MONEY ISSUE
...TO PRAYER
Nowadays
Strawberry works
as a minister and
travels around the
U.S. giving giving
sermons and
religious speeches;
earlier this year, he
talked to 10,000
men at a
conference in
Tampa, Fla.
What endeared Strawberry to the
legions of fans who sought his autograph decades ago hasn’t changed;
he’s amiable and approachable, an
open book. He immediately nicknames
the waitress during a lengthy menu
consultation before he goes with meatballs and a side of pasta with sausage.
“All right, I’ll trust you, Lise,” he says,
handing over the menu. Sipping on a
diet Pepsi, Strawberry says he loves
New York. But his eyes widen and he
shakes his head when asked if he was
prepared to play there: “No.”
It was a hell of a time
to be a Met, on and off
the field. From 1984–
1990, the team never
finished worse than second in the NL East, with
a roster that included
No. 1 draft pick Dwight
Gooden (another potential-filled youngster
who’d fall hard) and
veteran stars like Gary
Carter and Keith Hernandez. It was a different time in baseball—
players drank, smoked, did coke and speed
and popped amphetamines in and outside
the clubhouse. That fast, hard living permeated every part of the Mets’ identity.
They were the brashest team in baseball,
involved in five bench-clearing brawls in
a single season. “We didn’t take no nonsense. We inhouse fight, we out-house fight,” Strawberry says. “It
was a bad bunch o’ boys, there.” Strawberry tried
cocaine for the first time the week he got called up to
the majors, thanks to a teammate who set up his first
line in a bathroom stall at the clubhouse. “Once I got
into coke, that was it,” he says. “Loved it.” And much
more than most. He’d party until 5 a.m. with the pitchers who didn’t have to play the next day. When teammates criticized Strawberry for his off-field behaviour,
for showing up drunk or for missing a workout because
he was hungover, he ripped them back: On team photo
day, he took a swing at Hernandez (then kissed the top
of his head and made up 24 hours later). Strawberry said
he was sick and missed two games in July of 1987, but
used the time off to record a rap song (“Chocolate Strawberry”; it wasn’t a hit). When second baseman Wally
Backman called him out, this was Strawberry’s response:
“I’ll bust him in the face, that little redneck.” Teammates
called Strawberry a walking stick of dynamite. They’d
pass by him and say, “Tick, tick, tick.” He regrets none
of it. “That’s part of it, there’s egos and stuff that gets
involved. That’s the nature of the beast in us,” Strawberry says, shrugging. “Here’s a guy, multi-talented,
could do whatever I wanted on the ball field. I was confident, not cocky. It’s a big difference. There was no
doubt in me. I wasn’t afraid to fail.”
And fail he did. Oh so famously. Three times MLB
suspended Strawberry for cocaine use.
Every team he played for—the Mets, the
Dodgers, the Giants and the Yankees—
tried to control his behaviour. And for
every club after the Mets, Strawberry said
he’d start fresh, claimed he was reading
the Bible daily, or had become a staunch
member of Alcoholics Anonymous, or was
ready to start a new life, or had cleaned
up after his latest stint in rehab (he thinks
there were four or five), or all of the above.
His first reinvention came in Los Angeles,
where Strawberry signed a five-year,
$20.25-million deal ahead of the 1991 season. The previous off-season he’d been
arrested for drunkenly pulling a gun on
his then-wife, Lisa, and breaking her nose.
Strawberry had since made his first visit
to rehab for alcohol abuse and declared
himself a born-again Christian. Lasorda’s
wife took Strawberry with her to church.
The team even employed the only full-time psychiatrist
in baseball. “He promised me he wouldn’t give in,”
Lasorda says. “I believed him, yeah. I did. He had it all
right there, in the palm of his hand.”
It was in L.A. that Strawberry earned his eighth and
final all-star team selection. It was also in L.A. that Strawberry tried crack for the first time. Newly divorced from
Lisa, he got drunk and hit his pregnant girlfriend and
future wife No. 2, Charisse. Lasorda has one word for how
he felt when Strawberry fell short on his promise: “Irate.”
The Giants went a step further to protect Strawberry
from himself when they signed him ahead of the 1994
season: They put his oldest brother, Mike, on the payroll.
Then an LAPD officer who worked narcotics, Mike
HE ONCE
BOUGHT A
BLACK 560
SEC MERCEDES
AND HAD THE
TOP CUT OFF TO
MAKE IT INTO A
CONVERTIBLE
@SPORTSNET 27
THE MONEY ISSUE DARRYL STRAWBERRY
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wo Armani suits come flying out the back
of the truck. Baseball jerseys, T-shirts, shoes
and pictures follow, all chucked on the front
lawn. An irate blond woman, propeller of
the belongings, is now pounding on the
front door, screaming for Darryl Strawberry to get the
hell out. Her car, which he stole to drive here, is parked
on the street. He hears her call his name but he’s not
answering. “That’s it!” she yells. “You can get yourself
out of this mess!”
Inside this Boca Raton, Fla., crack house, Strawberry
is out of his mind. He won’t come outside because he’s
getting high with three women. He doesn’t care that his
belongings are strewn all over the lawn because he’s
too busy smoking dope. A couple of hours later, he collects his stuff. A few hours after that, when he notices
28 @SPORTSNET
1980
Strawberry, 18, is chosen
No. 1 overall by the Mets in
MLB’s amateur draft.
1983
Hits 26 homers, steals
19 bases, wins NL
Rookie of the Year.
his girlfriend, Tracy Boulware, has reclaimed her car, he
calls her, crying. “Come get me,” he says. She won’t.
Asked if this was rock bottom—and you’d be hardpressed to find a man with more options to fit that label
than Darryl Strawberry—he shakes his head. (After all,
Tracy Boulware is now Tracy Strawberry. She did give
him another chance.) No, rock bottom came
a year earlier, in April 2002. At 40 years old,
Strawberry stood before a judge in a Hillsborough County courtroom, given a choice
between six years of probation and an
18-month prison sentence. His decision:
“Lock me up. I’m dead anyway.” He’d spend
11 months behind bars, a shorter sentence
thanks to time served. The road there was
a long one, and this is why it takes the alltime low title in Strawberry’s books: More
than two years earlier, he was arrested in
Tampa for cocaine possession and soliciting
prostitution (the incident that led to his
year-long suspension from MLB). Six times
since, he’d violated the probation stemming
from those charges. He was kicked out of
one drug treatment facility after having sex
with a woman in the program. He broke out
of another recovery facility, despite the
ankle bracelet designed to keep him there,
to hole up in a crack house. Four days after
that, he turned himself in to friends. They
drove him directly to a nearby hospital’s
psychiatric ward, because he told them he
wanted to die. “I had nothing left to give
my kids,” he says of that time. “No love for
them, no love for myself.”
You have to wonder, all this considered, why Darryl
Strawberry doesn’t look godawful today. He’s even fought
cancer—twice; first in his colon and then in his lymph
1990
Signs a five-year,
$20.25 M deal with
the L.A. Dodgers.
THE
DIVORCES FROM
HIS FIRST TWO
WIVES WERE
LIKE A BATH
LEFT RUNNING
FOR CENTURIES:
STRAWBERRY
FIGURES THEY
COST HIM
$7 MILLION
BRUCE BENNETT/GETTY IMAGES
handed in his gun and badge—giving up the job he’d
been dreaming about since Grade 8—so he could chaperone his 32-year-old millionaire little brother. Mike
travelled with the team, had the locker next to Strawberry’s, worked out with him, and was on his case about
keeping clean. “It would appear, talking with him, ‘Oh,
he’s getting this.’ Several times. I believed him. That
was part of my demise,” Mike says. That off-season,
Strawberry tested positive for cocaine. The Giants
dropped him. “I gave up my livelihood to support you
and help you,” Mike told Darryl. “How could you do this?
You have everything you could possibly want, and you
messed it up. Again.”
Strawberry had more than everything he could possibly want. “You think you’re King Kong or something,”
he says, throwing his hands up. “I look back on a lot of
that stuff and think, what a waste.” Strawberry describes
flinging $100 bills out of the window of his limo after he
made $15,000 in cash at card shows. He once bought a
black 560 SEC Mercedes and had the top cut off to make
it into a convertible because he didn’t like the convertible
style on offer. In the late ’90s, he lived in a $2-million
home with a marble foyer and tennis courts and pools
in a gated community in Palm Springs, Fla. He’d buy 50
pairs of shoes at a time. “Gimme one of those, those,
those, those,” he says, pointing in the air at his fictitious
selections. His approach to women, whether he was
married or not, was similar: “You want one short, you
want one tall, you want one blond, you want one brunette. Whatever suits you.” He believes 90 percent of
men are “addicted to women.” The divorces from his
first two wives, Lisa and Charisse, were like a bath left
running for centuries: Strawberry figures they cost him
$7 million. “People think, well, you made $40 million, it’s
gonna last forever. It doesn’t,” he says. The only thing
that didn’t cost him was drugs: “I got ’em free.”
Darryl Strawberry The Baseball Player disappeared
for good in 2000. In 1999, he’d won a fourth and final
World Series title with the New York Yankees as a 37-yearold DH. He hit .327 in 49 at-bats during that championship
season, and he’d cleaned himself up after starting the
season under a drug suspension. It could’ve been,
should’ve been a nice end to a tumultuous career, a final
solid year in New York, where he started. But in January
of 2000, Strawberry tested positive for cocaine and MLB
suspended him for a full season. And that was it. He’d
swung a baseball bat for the last time ever. He hit 335
home runs, still holds the Mets record in that category,
and had 1,000 RBI. “I reached all that drinkin’ and druggin’,” he says, matter-of-factly. And once he was done
with baseball, that was all he had left.
DARRYL STRAWBERRY THE MONEY ISSUE
1995
Released by Giants
after a positive
drug test.
252
No player hit more
home runs than
Strawberry
between 1983–1991
23
MLB players,
Strawberry
included, with
300-plus homers
and 200-plus
stolen bases
280
DOUG ENGLE/AP
He’s the New York
Mets’ all-time
home run leader
2000
Retires after MLB
suspends him for
cocaine use.
2002
Sentenced to 18 months in jail for violating
probation stemming from cocaine
possession and soliciting prostitution.
nodes, though he’s clear today. But there’s no sign on
his face of the crap he’s been through, no sunken cheeks,
nothing defeated in his expression when he talks about
those lows. The man looks good, and he says it’s because
he’s born again, happy for the first time in his life. He
says the start of his turnaround—though he’d visit more
than a few crack houses after this—began shortly after
his rock bottom, during that 11-month stay at a Gainesville prison, where he did yardwork on the grounds and
was by all accounts a model inmate. Gainesville had a
baseball field and Strawberry coached one of the softball
teams. Many of his fellow inmates, obviously, begged
him to suit up, but he never even picked up a bat or a
glove. “I was done with baseball. After all, I mean, I’m
sitting here in the Florida State prison. What am I gonna
be doin’, playin’ softball? Livin’ the dream? Trying to
bring memories back or something?” Strawberry’s chuckling. “I don’t think so!”
There’s no pretentiousness to Strawberry today. He
swears he’s “nothin’ special.” Back when he was taking
drugs, he’d walk into a crack house and say: “You and
me, we’re the same, we’re both sittin’ here, we’re both
usin’.” The first time Tracy laid eyes on him was at a
narcotics convention in Florida in 2003. Strawberry was
chatting, smiling and engaging a crowd that had formed
around him. Tracy wasn’t impressed. “Everyone’s going
crazy because they don’t see this fragile man that is
dying, that has lost his soul,” she says. “All they see is
the baseball player, the home runs he hit, the celebrity.”
Strawberry noticed the pretty blond woman, heard
her say she wanted to leave. He shook her hand with
both of his and convinced her to stay. “She was different,” he says, between bites of meatball. “She didn’t
care that I was a baseball player.” The two spoke for
hours, but never about the game. To this day, seven years
after they married at a tiny Las Vegas church, both wearing jeans and tennis shoes, Tracy doesn’t know his stats
2006
Becomes an
ordained
minister.
2014
Opens Strawberry
Ministries’ second
rehab centre.
or the details of his career. She doesn’t care. The afternoon
they met, Strawberry told her: “Girl, you have no idea
what you’re getting into. You don’t wanna mess with
me.” Tracy was drawn in by his honesty.
Then only recently clean herself after a 12-year battle
with alcohol, coke, crack, crystal meth and whatever else
she could get her hands on, Tracy rescued him over and
over, beat down crack-house doors and dragged him out.
“It’s a classic love story!” Tracy says, laughing. She’s a
sparkplug. When Strawberry faltered, she told him, “I’m
gonna love you out of this.” But there were times when
her faith flagged. About a year after they first met, she
moved back to her childhood home, in St. Charles, Mo.,
to live with her parents. She told Strawberry she didn’t
care if he came or not, she needed to move to continue
her recovery. “I told him,” she says—and this is where
that Missouri drawl gets extra heavy—“I’m suitin’ up and
showin’ up and growin’ up, and you gotta do the same.”
Strawberry says he balked at first (“There ain’t no
black people in Missouri!”) but eventually followed Tracy
there (“I ain’t got nowhere else to go”). Together, they
lived in her high-school bedroom, slept in the same bed
she slept in back then, stared at the same 1970s linoleum
floors. He cried, a lot. A four-time World Series champion
living in his girlfriend’s parents’ basement, unemployed
and $3 million in debt thanks to unpaid child support and
back taxes. He’d lost everything and then some. Strawberry didn’t even have a driver’s licence. “Is this all life
has left?” he asked himself. “Where do we go from here?”
By the time they moved to Missouri, both Tracy and
Strawberry had embraced religion, he for about the 10th
time. Strawberry had lived there less than a year when
Tracy told him they couldn’t have sex anymore because
they had to “do right by God.” He smiles: “Defining
moment in my life.” He left and moved in with his sister
CONTINUED ON P. 60
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Regina in San Dimas, Calif., about 25 miles
west of L.A. For six months he helped her
take care of her three kids and he read the
Bible and he lived clean. At 42 years old, this
was the end of Darryl Strawberry The Addict.
The toughest of his vices to give up: “Drugs,”
he says. Then he quickly amends his answer.
“Drugs and women. They run hand-in-hand.”
Strawberry finishes off his meal. He uses
his index finger to pick a chunk of meatball
out of his braces. “I was ready,” he says. “I
was finally ready.”
D
arryl Strawberry wants to
know how many of the 30 or
so kids in this room with
JESUS written on the wall in
metallic letters have low
self-esteem. “Hands up,” he says. He’s at
Cornerstone Youth Center, off High Street
and just past Peace Alley, here in this town
full of churches and American flags,
addressing a room full of people who
weren’t alive the last time he swung a bat.
A bunch of hands fire up. “I’m gonna build
you self esteem, and I’m gonna build you
something to walk out of here so you can
be proud of who you are,” Strawberry says.
His hands are in the pockets of his dark
blue jeans, and a silver bracelet that says
“Believe” in dark letters hangs off his right
wrist. “God created you,” Strawberry says,
eyes wide. “You’re not a mistake.” He
pauses. “You’re not a mistake. Don’t ever
let anyone tell you that you are.”
This is the narrative that ran through his
own life. Strawberry claims his pop, Henry,
was an “alcoholic who beat the crap out of
me as a kid, told me I’d never amount to
nothin’.” Henry threatened the family with
a shotgun and left when Strawberry was
13. “Why did my father not love me? I
struggled for a very long time with low selfesteem and identity,” he says. “I had millions of dollars, all the kind of stuff you could
want, but I had nothing inside.” It’s this
“inside work” he tells the kids here to focus
on. “If I could do it all over again, I woulda
never played baseball,” Strawberry says.
“If I knew I woulda had to go through all
that hell just to play baseball, I woulda
chose God.” The last message, before he
leaves for the evening event to benefit Cornerstone, is that everyone should get to
know Jesus, “because he’s so cool.”
60 @SPORTSNET
This is Darryl Strawberry’s third life, as
“a leader for God.” A minister who travels
around the U.S. giving sermons and religious
speeches, he’ll do some 50 appearances in
2014, including a conference in front of
10,000 men in June in Tampa, Fla. Pastor
Strawberry hasn’t gotten high or had a sip
of alcohol or said a curse word in 11 years.
He calls sleepy St. Peters, Mo., home, and
his idea of a night out is a slow walk while
he holds hands with Tracy, herself a minister. They live in a four-bedroom, two-storey
home worth $500,000—five months worth
of alimony and child support, back when he
was a ball player—and when they barbecue
hamburgers outside in the backyard they
can see their neighbours on either side.
Strawberry drives a GMC Yukon and Tracy
drives a Nissan, and there is absolutely no
sign in their home that the guy residing here
ever swung a bat.
But it’s baseball that pays Strawberry’s
bills. That’s how he got out of debt, collecting $500 and $1,000 each time he made an
appearance—low fees thanks to a tarnished
reputation—and putting the money toward
that $3-million hole he’d dug himself into.
“I owed everybody,” Strawberry says. He
and Tracy called debtors and explained
their situation, got payments reduced. They
found out Strawberry owed another $1.2
million, thanks to interest and other back
taxes. It took five years to get out of the
red. Strawberry’s now comfortably in the
black; he earned some $300,000 last year
in baseball-related appearances. It helps
put his kids through college. (He has six,
with three different women. His youngest,
Jewel, 13, lives with her mother, Charisse,
and has her eye on the University of Florida
and a volleyball scholarship.) As for the
money he makes for his religious work,
Pastor Strawberry says he told God he’d
use it to help others. He isn’t naive about
the fact that baseball’s the reason people
want to hear him speak. “They want to
know, how does your life transform like
that. How’d you get through hell and get
here,” he says. The past lives—The Baseball Player and The Addict—are fuelling
this new identity, and Strawberry says it’s
all part of God’s master plan. “It’s bringing
a message that can make a difference in
somebody’s life,” he says. The $6,000 he
collects for today’s appearance in Elizabethtown goes back to Strawberry Ministries, the O’Fallon, Mo.-based Christian
organization he and Tracy founded last
year. A couple months ago they opened
two recovery centres for addicts.
Strawberry credits Tracy for turning his
life around. Her name is inscribed with his
on the outside of the thick, black wedding
ring he wears. As he’s talking about their
work, he cuts himself off mid-sentence and
races up to his hotel room to grab the book
they’ve co-authored, The Imperfect Marriage: Help for those who think it’s over. It’s
full of tips from the Strawberry ministers,
who between them have four failed marriages and one success story. The book hits
shelves in August. Imagine that: Darryl
Strawberry, Marriage Expert.
Even more unbelievable is Pastor Strawberry’s stance on baseball. This man named
his first kid Darryl and his first daughter
Diamond, and not after the gem (Jewel and
Jade, his other daughters, are another
story). Yet he has no pictures, no bat, no
glove, no ball, nothing left from a career in
the game (though he says the location of
his four World Series rings is “private”).
Strawberry says he hasn’t swung a bat
since his last Major League rip in 1999. He
won’t hit a ball if you offer to pay him.
Throw a foam one in his direction and he’ll
let it bounce off his chest. He hasn’t worked
out since the Yankees, and there’s a small
paunch above his waistband to prove it.
“Baseball is a past memory. I’m done with
that,” he says. “It’s not my purpose.” Rarely
does he watch MLB games on TV; Pastor
Darryl, as Tracy calls him, would rather hole
up with the Bible. “Once I took off the uniform, I took it off,” he says. “Some players,
the uniform becomes your identity, who you
are. I needed to find out who I really was.”
Back in Elizabethtown, Pastor Strawberry
looks up at the Mount Calvary gym ceiling,
smiling. “God spared an old thing like me,”
he says. The hands-free mic that extends
from his right ear toward his mouth is pale,
and would blend in with the skin of any
other person in this room, but not his. He’s
the only black person here.
“Look what He’s done!” Strawberry says,
arms waving. His 47 minutes at the mic are
just about up. He’ll spend the next 40 absorbing applause, shaking hands, smiling for
pictures and listening to stories guys want
to tell him about seeing his 300th homer live,
or about the Strawberry poster they had on
their bedroom wall as a kid. Nobody talks
to him about Jesus—this crowd is a mixture
of churchgoers and baseball diehards, but
it’s heavy on the latter. One guy wears an
old-school shiny Mets jacket. Earlier, a
woman paid $1,075 for a signed Mets Strawberry Jersey, the highest earner of the auction (the quilt on offer didn’t do as well).
Strawberry will talk to everyone, call
them “sweetie” and “buddy” and thank
them for coming. After a photo shoot with
one of three Bibles found in the high school’s
office—“This is my favourite book, right
here”—Strawberry will be done. Tomorrow
morning, he’ll fly to Tampa for another
appearance, to preach and to tell his story.
He ends today’s talk with a prayer, but first
he reminds his audience why they’re here
in this high school gym on a Thursday night
eating grocery store–bought apple pie with
plastic forks. “All those that wrote about
me, said that I would be dead in a couple
years,” Strawberry says, grinning. “Guess
what? They was wrong.”
@KrRutherford