Instead of being a public advocate of the dangers of drugs and alcohol, former baseball star Darryl Strawberry has decided to write a book to gloat about how much cocaine and sex he had when he was a player.
Strawberry has a new book coming out in April, and something tells me his ex-teammates aren’t going to appreciate the contents much. Strawberry’s claims about all the cocaine they did and the women they had sex with — sometimes during games — probably won’t sit well.
“We were the boys of summer. The drunk, speed-freak, sneaking-a-smoke boys of summer,” writes onetime home-run legend Darryl Strawberry in “Straw: Finding My Way,” out in April from Ecco. “[An] infamous rolling frat party . . . drinking, drugs, fights, gambling, groupies.”
Beer “was the foundation of our alcoholic lifestyle,” he writes. “We hauled around more Bud than the Clydesdales. The beer was just to get the party started and maybe take the edge off the speed and coke.”
The team’s mantra on the road, he writes, was to “tear up your best bars and nightclubs and take your finest women . . . The only hard part for us was choosing which hottie to take back to your hotel room. Lots of times you . . . picked two or three.”
Then there are these little tidbits about how the Mets would kill time between innings.
Although he doesn’t name names, Strawberry relates how team members picked out girls from the stands for quickies. He once watched a pitcher march a frisky fan to a private room for oral sex: “I was jealous. When I saw her heading back to her seat, I gave her a sign. She smiled, turned right back around, and met me in that same little room . . . I had to be quick and run back out on the field.”
Another time, “I was in the clubhouse, having one last quickie with this cute little Florida girl. Charlie Samuels, the equipment manager, came in and caught us. He just stood there shaking his head while I finished up.”
But, hey, at least they weren’t taking steroids right? That might give them a competitive advantage. All cocaine does is give you superhuman strength and help you ignore any pain you might be feeling. Steroids don’t do any of that.
Great point. So what’s worse, players that are all roided up or the ones who were all hopped up on cocaine and doing unpaid whores in between innings?
The majority of fans just shake their heads and move on when it comes to guys like Strawberry and Dwight Gooden doing cocaine. But Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire are “ruining the game we love” and should be despised. To me, whether morons like Strawberry and Gooden are doing cocaine or cheaters like A-Rod and Bonds are doing steroids, it’s all the same – they should be lumped up in the same category of players that have helped ruin baseball. (And no, I’m not naive to think that some players today aren’t doing hard drugs or the same things Strawberry was doing back in the day.)
If parents needed any more reason not to allow their kids to worship athletes, idiots like Strawberry should do the trick. Outside of guys like Kurt Warner, Warrick Dunn, Derek Jeter and a few others, I would highly stress parents to point their kids in another direction when it comes time for them to start having role models.
