Cocaine, diet, age, maturity, injuries, the development of a pitch-count conserving two-seam fastball … all of it conspired to wreck Gooden’s ethereal flow. After 1985 he became a knockoff of himself, like one of those watches for sale on a Manhattan street corner. Gooden trying to do Gooden. Pitching became laborious, especially on the night in 1986 when Gooden left the mound without getting an out in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series against Boston. His worn, worried face was slathered in an oddly expansive pool of sweat on a cool fall night. Four nights later, in the clubhouse immediately after the Mets won the World Series, Gooden dialed his dealer’s telephone number from memory and told him he was on his way to the public housing projects. Gooden got so hammered on coke and booze he missed the ticker tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes. It was only nine months after that first hit at his cousin’s house with those two women.

“In ’84 and ’86 I had the same mentality, the same drive,” Gooden says, “and I could put maybe four out of six pitches exactly where I wanted. In ’85 it was every pitch. My mechanics were so sound. I’m not saying it was easy. It wasn’t. I was totally focused. It’s really hard to explain, like Jordan totally locked in hitting his jumpers. It’s almost the same thing—all year.”

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We had no idea we were looking at the apotheosis of a pitcher at age 20 in 1985. Instead of standing on a springboard Gooden was standing on the edge of a cliff, a twist that makes the year all the more unique. Gooden never would be as good and as gifted as he was in 1985, but how many pitchers ever have been in the history of baseball?

“Nineteen eighty-five was the year I got to say I played behind Dwight Gooden,” says former Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez. “I never got to play behind Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax, but this was the equivalent. Gibson, Koufax, Gooden … legends, true greats. Dwight was in that class. He was so good that year that if he didn’t strike out 10 batters we would joke around, ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ You expected greatness every start. It was something to see.”

Gooden made his major league debut in Houston the previous year at age 19. He was so young and anxious that many hours before the night game he walked from the team hotel to the Astrodome, found it closed, and hopped a fence to get in. Gooden would win 17 games and set a rookie record with a league-leading 276 strikeouts (which would remain his career high). He was the National League Rookie of the Year.

“It was almost surreal, like an out-of-body experience,” says Gooden of his 1985 season. “Every game I felt totally in control. I could put the ball where I wanted it.”

He returned home to Tampa, where he still was living with his parents. The house filled almost every day that winter with people he hardly knew: guys who he had played with in Little League or against in high school; girls who said they were in his third-grade math class; complete strangers who knocked on the door looking for an autograph.

“Nonstop,” Gooden says. “It was unbelievable. It was fun, but it was pretty hectic. My mom, she’d like people to come by and cook for them. She liked the company at the house. She’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come back.’ I don’t think my dad cared so much for it. People I hadn’t seen for years would just pop in and make themselves at home.

“Coming into spring training ’85, I felt like I truly belonged. I was more confident going into my second year. And I knew the league was going to be up for me.”

Gooden had a new catcher in 1985: all-star and future Hall of Famer Gary Carter, then 31 years old and in his prime. The Mets obtained Carter that winter in a trade with Montreal for four players, including their incumbent catcher, 23-year-old Mike Fitzgerald. Carter would catch 31 of Gooden’s 35 starts in 1985.

“Gary and Keith, those guys reminded me in spring training that when hitters face a top pitcher, they get to the ballpark early, they concentrate more in BP … they take the top guys more seriously,” Gooden says. “It was their way of letting me know that I had to be on top of my game.

Ray Stubblebine/AP

“Throwing to Gary, that was awesome. I remember at the [1984] All-Star Game it was Gary who caught me. I guess he saw I was nervous so he told me, ‘Just relax and throw the ball.’ I remember after I struck out three guys he said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice for us to be able to do this every fifth day?’ He was such a nice guy, but on the field he was so competitive and had this incredible drive. He didn’t care if we were up 10-0. He felt like if I was messing around even a little bit with one pitch he would say something. He wanted you to pitch every game like it was 1-0. And he wanted to totally dominate.”

Gooden started on Opening Day against the Cardinals. He took a 5-2 lead into the seventh inning, but when he gave up singles to the first two hitters, Mets manager Davey Johnson pulled him. (Johnson would take the ball from him on the mound only one more time in 34 starts: with one out in the seventh May 15 at Houston with a one-run lead.) St. Louis would tie the game. Carter won it with a home run in the 10th inning.

After 10 starts, Gooden was 6-3 with a 1.89 ERA. In his three defeats, he was removed after seven innings down 2-0, after eight innings down 2-0 and after seven innings down 3-1.

“I’ll never forget, I threw a shutout early in the season,” Gooden says, “and [pitching coach] Mel Stottlemyre asked me, ‘Are you tired?’ I said, ‘No.’ I measured being tired by my shoulder hurting. But that’s not what he was talking about. He said, ‘If you’re not mentally tired, that means you have more to give.’ He was trying to tell me that being mentally tired means you’re into each pitch to each hitter – just totally focused and locked in. Once he explained that to me, it made sense. I got it. I never forgot that.”

“I never got to play behind Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax, but this was the equivalent,” says Hernandez. “Gibson, Koufax, Gooden ... legends, true greats.”

Gooden lost once in the final 134 days of the 1985 season. He went 18-1 with a 1.39 ERA in 200.1 innings in that run. It began May 30, when Gooden beat the Giants, 2-1, with 14 strikeouts. “Astounding,” Carter says about Gooden’s pitches that day.

The next day, a bombshell hit: seven men were indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on drug charges, principally for providing cocaine to major league players, none of whom were yet publically named. Speaking to a group of sports editors in New York, baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth said, “This has not been a bellwether day for me … I want to see how much of baseball is involved.”

Before there was Gooden, there was Fernando Valenzuela. In 1981, a strike-shortened season, the Dodgers lefthander won the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards at the age of 20. Gooden, then in high school, was enamored with Valenzuela’s style and success.

As a rookie in 1984, Gooden matched up against Valenzuela twice. He beat him both times with complete games. On May 25, 1985, however, Valenzuela and the Dodgers handed Gooden a rare loss at Shea Stadium, 6-2, in which Gooden left after seven innings trailing 3-1. (Gooden would not lose at home for the rest of the year.)

A rematch took place June 4 at Dodger Stadium in front of 49,386 fans. The 20-year-old Gooden entered with a 1.79 ERA. The 24-year-old Valenzuela entered with a 1.85 mark.

Peter Read Miller for Sports Illustrated

The stars delivered. The score was tied at one entering the bottom of the eighth inning when Steve Sax led off with a single off Gooden. Ken Landreaux followed with a hit-and-run single. Sax took third and Landreaux advanced to second on the throw. Johnson ordered Gooden to intentionally walk Pedro Guerrero, who in the sixth inning had blasted an 0-and-2 fastball for a home run.

Now Gooden faced the bases loaded and no outs in the bottom of the eighth at Dodger Stadium with the knowledge that one run would likely mean defeat. What happened next was legendary. Gooden ended the inning with nine pitches—all of them fastballs and all of them strikes. First he whiffed Greg Brock on three fastballs. Then he handcuffed Mike Scioscia on a first-pitch fastball, getting a foul pop-out to Carter. Then he blew a fastball past Terry Whitfield, who had managed the small triumph of two foul balls before succumbing.

Gooden was clocked at 94 mph in that inning, though the radar gun used at the time typically measured the speed of the pitch as it neared the plate, not as it left the pitcher’s hand, as is commonly done today. His fastball likely would have been clocked at about 99 mph with today’s technology.

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Twice during the nine-pitch sequence Carter had called for curveballs—Gooden’s Uncle Charlie was so good it was known as Lord Charles—only to have the kid shake off the veteran each time.

“I knew I had to try for the strikeout there,” Gooden explained after the game. “I just decided to go with my best, and that’s the best I could be.”

The game still was tied but the Dodgers were defeated. Valenzuela coughed up three runs in the top of the ninth. Gooden knocked him out with his third hit of the game, an RBI single. Naturally, Gooden went back out for the ninth, once again serving as his own closer. He finished with 12 strikeouts. The Mets had grown accustomed to his greatness.

“I used to get goosebumps,” Johnson said after the game, “but not any more. Dwight’s like a security blanket for me.”

Johnson approached Gooden in late June with an idea: “How would you like an extra start?”

The Mets wanted to send their ace young to the mound as often as possible. Johnson could arrange his rotation to have Gooden start the last game before the All-Star break and the second game after it, but the plan required Gooden to make a start on short rest in Atlanta on the Fourth of July.

“Yeah, I’ll take it,” Gooden said.

“You’re looking at something special,” said Johnson after Gooden’s 16-K shutout of the Giants. “You probably won’t ever see anybody at his age who dominates so completely.”

The start of the game in Atlanta was delayed 84 minutes by rain. In the bottom of the third, with the game tied at one, another storm swept through. This one caused a delay of 41 minutes. Johnson decided not to bring back Gooden when play resumed. (Technically, it was a third start in which Gooden was removed mid-inning.)

“I was so hot and pissed off that I didn’t even shower,” Gooden says. “I just got up, walked out, got a cab and went to the hotel. I watched the game on TV for a while, then fell asleep with the TV on. I woke up about three, three-thirty, and I saw the game was on. I thought it was the highlights, actually. The game was still going on.”

The Mets won, 16-13, in 19 innings. Ron Darling threw the last pitch at 3:55 AM. Six minutes later, the Braves began their post-game fireworks show.

New York was a Mets town in 1985. For the first time since the remodeled Yankee Stadium opened in 1976, the Mets drew more fans than the Yankees. The Mets drew 2.7 million fans, an almost unheard-of 50 percent jump from the previous season, and a threshold the Yankees would not reach until 1998. Gooden was the biggest drawing card of all in 1985.