Peter Hyatt - Darryl Strawberry Lashes Out At Mets

As if this season could not get any more dreary for the Mets, Darryl Strawberry is disowning them." so said the NY Post, playing into the hands of the attention seeking and troubled Darryl Strawberry. 

Strawberry ripped the organization he started his baseball career with while fondly remembering his time with George Steinbrenner and the Yankees.

“He is probably the greatest owner there ever will be in sports. He loved people and he loved his players. Anyone that puts on a Yankees uniform is family to him,” Strawberry said in a radio interview. 

His praise of Steinbrenner is because when MLB had just about enough of Strawberry, the Yankees gave him yet another chance.  

“He doesn’t turn his back on his players, like the other organization across town. It’s just the reality, it’s real. The players on the ’86 championship team, we don’t even deal with the Mets. It’s not Fred Wilpon, it’s the new thing.”

Strawberry reveals his own weakness of assertion by his pronoun change.  He has the need to portray his anger with the Mets as 1986 team wide.   

It is not.  

It is Strawberry and only Strawberry.  

How out of touch is Strawberry with reality?  Forget that two teammates are still currently employed with the Mets as announcers, and others, including Doc Gooden, have been to Citi Field this year 

That “new thing” is likely in reference to the Sandy Alderson regime and their awkward relationship with the franchise’s most famous title squad. Former Alderson lieutenant Paul DePodesta famously said in 2011, “I’m tired of hearing about the ’86 Mets.”

This was the last time the New York Mets had won the World Series.  These are the words of one who is not satisfied to watch decades of not winning the World Series pass, while others want to mainline nostalgia.

Strawberry cannot speak for himself.  He must, like the kindergartener in trouble, look for strength in numbers.  It is something guilt causes:

“We’ve never been back. I never want to go back, I’d rather stay with the Yankees than deal with the Mets,” Strawberry said. “It hurts us. It hurts what they’ve done to the players I’ve seen. What they did to Ray Knight, what they did to Gary Carter. Those were key players that gave so much. They laid their life on the line those years.”

Being paid millions of dollars for a boys' game is "laying your life on the line"?  This is the linguistic signal of just how disassociated the addiction has taken him from reality.

Men with weapons fighting enemies with live ammunition is laying one's life on the line.

Perhaps Strawberry's own verbal leakage about "lines" is evident.

The Mets' management is made up of flawed humans who anger other flawed humans.  They low ball salaries and they go into a fight in arbitration.  It is a business.  

Strawberry, though, worked with Mets-owned SNY as an analyst from 2007 to 2009.

He is not known for his intellect, but his mouth.  This is a similar reputation that Noah Syndergaard is working hard at maintaining.  The incessant victim fighting the system.  Its an old story, but not a recipe for consistent winning.

Strawberry isn't the only 86 Met to have worked for the Mets.  His memory is short:

 Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling have been part of the network since its inception. Tim Teufel, Howard Johnson, Mookie Wilson, Lenny Dykstra, Wally Backman, Bob Ojeda and Randy Niemann have had different roles in the major and minor leagues since retiring.

Strawberry left the Mets for the Dodgers in free agency following the 1990 season, and after struggling with injuries and drug issues off the field, for more money.  It was he who was not loyal; not the Mets.

He squandered world class, and possibly Hall of Fame talent, and eventually landed with the Yankees in 1996.

Keith Hernandez recently said that Strawberry was one of three best talents he had ever personally played with.  Its high praise.

Strawberry, the grown man millionaire knows the lingo of playing himself as both victim and "little boy lost"; something men sometimes use to exploit women:  

“He was a father, a father to the hopeless,” Strawberry, who won three World Series with the Yankees, said of Steinbrenner.

“He would go get players no one else would touch. There was a few of us, and he just loved us. He was different than anyone I’ve ever experienced.

Who's "us" here?

No one else would "touch"?

How strange that major league teams might be reluctant to take upon cocaine addicted narcissists with big mouths. 

Strawberry portrays himself as a victim; something every addict knows leads to more substance abuse.  Those working sobriety take full responsibility for life; they don't talk about taking full responsibility, they take it.  

Strawberry was a talented but very troubled man who was not able to handle retirement and not being the center of attention. In spite of his millions, he could not be happy unless everyone was looking at him.  He has always done whatever he could, including tearing down teammates, in order to gain attention.  

He immediately became a "minister", without the requisite need to go to 3 years of Seminary after 4 years of college.  No, he would just stand up in front of people and be a star. 

His brand of "Christianity" was an insult to the ideology of Christianity.  He soon learned that he could not draw in the crowds and get the rush he once had when 50,000 people screamed his name.  What devoted men call a "calling" in life, he quickly abandoned.  

The need for attention continues to drive Strawberry.  Recall his "public concern" over Dwight Gooden recently where he claimed Gooden was "definitely using again", though Strawberry did not have first hand knowledge of such.  All it accomplished, besides angering Gooden, was to get Strawberry a few more minutes of media attention.  

His need to speak for others is inherently weak.  

He does not represent the 1986 New York Mets.  

He has become a sorry excuse of a whiner who speaks in ways that would make his AA or NA sponsor very nervous.  

He has always held authority in contempt.  Whether this authority be in a manager, teammates, local law enforcement or the laws of the land, Daryl Strawberry has always seen himself as above all. 

It is getting late in the game for Strawberry to find dignity. 

There is a huge difference between one who finds quiet dignity in life, and another who, every few years, declares publicly to have finally found it. 

One is reality; the other is a verbalized perception of reality only.