Strawberry Hits Mets With Book : Baseball: In autobiography, he accuses his former team of insensitivity toward blacks and tells of trouble during and after championship 1986 season.

By BILL PLASCHKE

March 3, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

VERO BEACH, Fla. — Darryl Strawberry takes big swings to all fields in his soon-to-be-released autobiography, discussing his drinking during and after the 1986 playoffs, accusing the New York Mets of insensitivity toward blacks, and describing his battles with alcohol and his wife.

“This was stuff I felt needed to be said,” Strawberry said Monday from the Dodgers’ spring training site. “I wanted to tell what really happened in New York.”

In the book, “Darryl,” written with Art Rust Jr., Strawberry writes of the 1986 Mets during the emotional National League championship series against the Houston Astros:

“I was also drinking to blot out the physical pain of having to go out there every night and work muscles that were past the point of strain. I don’t know ‘firsthand’ who else might have been abusing which substances, but months later Doc (Gooden) went to Smithers to recover from cocaine addiction. If he was using cocaine during that series, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least because the pressure was so intense, it made everybody do crazy things.”

Gooden has denied using cocaine during the 1986 postseason.

Strawberry also wrote of racial issues with the Mets: “There were so few black players on the team as it was, I felt as if I were playing baseball at Dred Scott Memorial Park in glorious downtown Johannesburg instead of in the middle of New York City. . . . I began to think that all of my real emotional hang-ups were made even worse because I was a black player on the Mets at a time when they weren’t especially sensitive to black players’ issues, let alone my own personal needs.

“I looked around me on the Mets and I saw black players come and go and I noticed that all of them had problems. Nobody was talking about Keith’s (Hernandez) acknowledgment of his drug problems back in St. Louis, but they sure were talking about Mookie’s (Wilson) ‘attitude problems,’ Doc’s recovery program at Smithers, and ‘Darryl’s drinking.’ White players like Gary Carter were allowed to shrug off their bad seasons, but the black players, it seemed, were ‘problems.’ It was a double standard.”

Strawberry claimed it was this atmosphere that led him to drink.

“My drinking really started to get worse after the 1986 World Series when I blew up at Davey Johnson for taking me out of Game 6. His managing decisions on the field at times seemed to come from outer space and not from the situation in the game. They were unique, but rarely logical. . . .

“I was still only 25 years old when I found myself overwhelmed by the pressure to perform and work miracles on the field. I would reach for booze the first chance I got. And I became angry, nasty, and selfish. I was an uglier s.o.b. the more I drank, lapsing into gluttony and sloth. . . .

“Some mornings I was so hung over, I literally had to be dragged over to Shea or to practice. . . . Being out the night before at clubs until 4 a.m. or at recording studios playing ‘Chocolate Strawberry’ instead of at the ballpark didn’t help either. . . . I drank my rum until I would fall asleep and forget that I was a drunk.”

Strawberry cites alcohol as one of the reasons he brandished a gun at wife Lisa in their altercation in Los Angeles on Jan. 26, 1990.

“Ten years’ worth of drinking, club hopping, fighting, and screwing around finally led us to that early morning where those years would be suddenly topped by a moment of total stupidity . . . what had been a long-simmering argument between Lisa and me over my drinking and fornicating broke out into open warfare. . . .

“I don’t remember exactly what my wife said before the violence began . . . suddenly I was out of control and I cracked Lisa across the top of her head with a thudding punch that echoed through the whole house. She fell over backward and then slowly got to her feet. . . .

“Her quivering lower lip was puffy where I’d caught here with the heel of my hand as it came down. I’d hit her before, but this time she intended to fight back. She grabbed a metal rod from somewhere and whipped it with full force toward my rib cage as if she were swinging a bat. . . . The metal cracked across my wrists and sliced into my side. . . .

“Before I could stop myself, I ran to the closet where I kept my .25- caliber semiautomatic pistol. . . . I pulled my gun out of the closet and pointed it in her face as her mother . . . started screaming.”

Strawberry was arrested for possession of a handgun, but charges were later dropped after he completed an alcoholism program.

Strawberry also writes about leaving the Mets in the winter of 1991. “The team was in such a mess under Johnson’s lack of leadership that guys were getting away with murder. But if I did one thing amiss, had one late practice, for example, he would fine me and make it a public hanging. . . . If I had been paranoid, I would have thought he was doing it on orders from (General Manager Frank) Cashen to reduce my value to the team to make it easier to deal with me in negotiations.

“Would Frank Cashen sacrifice a pennant just to get a better deal with Darryl Strawberry? I’d put money on it. . . . Poor, dumb Frank Cashen never realized that I really did love the Mets, New York and baseball after all. He never figured that out. He had his calculator out, of course. He figured he would undercut me, good businessman that he is.”

New York Met General Manager Al Harazin told Newsday that Strawberry’s charges of racism by the Mets were “garbage.”

Harazin also said: “I don’t recall anyone on any club ever saying anything bad about Mookie (Wilson),” and “I would think some of the players (Strawberry) mentioned would take umbrage at being dragged into this.”

Gooden, reached Monday night, was startled by passages from the book and scoffed at the mention of Wilson, but declined to comment specifically. Said Wilson: “Somebody might have said that I wasn’t any good, but I never heard anyone say that I had an attitude problem.”