“Doc & Darryl,” which ESPN will broadcast on July 14, arrives as the Mets have been celebrating the 30th anniversary of their second World Series championship. Two books by members of the 1986 Mets have been published, one by Ron Darling (“Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life”), another by Lenny Dykstra (“House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge”). But the current Mets, at 44-37 after Sunday, have grown weak offensively and do not look like the team that finished strongly last season before losing the World Series in five games to the Kansas City Royals.

Apatow grew up as a Mets fan, and he prefers their underdog, underachieving days.

“I loved the Mets when they were terrible, “ he said, tossing out his favorites of lesser times, such as George Foster and Dave Kingman. “I was also a Rusty fan,” he said referring to Rusty Staub. By the time the Mets won the 1986 Series, Apatow had graduated from Syosset High School and was at the University of Southern California and following the Mets less intently.

“Doc & Darryl” should not be compared with last month’s five-part “O.J.: Made in America” documentary that was the most important edition of the “30 for 30” series. Yet “Doc & Darryl” is a valuable work that synthesizes the lives of two men who uplifted fans for a certain time with their athletic skills but were unable to control their addictive impulses. Yet, their careers lasted long enough for Gooden to pitch a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1996 and for Strawberry to experience his own Yankees renaissance in the late 1990s.

Apatow and Bonfiglio could have produced a broader work on the dysfunctional Mets of the 1980s or about substance abuse in baseball, but they chose to burrow in on Strawberry and Gooden.

“We wanted to focus on them and their interaction with each other,” Apatow said.

Gooden and, to a greater degree, Strawberry, volunteered the grim narratives of their substance abuse, much of which is already known.

Gooden shows where in Tampa, Fla., he drank and smoked marijuana in high school, and he discusses missing the World Series parade because he was snorting cocaine and watching it on TV, overwhelmed by depression and self-pity. Strawberry talks about his abusive, alcoholic father; about passing Major League Baseball’s drug tests and about the “many days of hangovers where I’d hit two homers like it was nothing.”