Strawberry Is Going Back to the Root of All His Evil

Yankee Stadium, halfway house for cocaine-brained pitchers and alcoholic outfielders, has invited Darryl Strawberry back to continue his rehab before 30,000 screaming banshees a night.

Once again, George Steinbrenner, a man who will risk anything to score a run, rule out nothing to sell a ticket, has spared no moral expense by offering a contract to a man who would be better off anywhere on God’s green earth than on a baseball diamond in the Bronx.

There ought to be a law. There ought to be a law preventing a baseball team from indecently exposing a substance-abusive athlete to the needs of a greedy employer, to the gladiatorial excesses of a manic public and to the daily magnifying glass of an ever-yellowing journalism.

To put Strawberry on display in the zoo that is New York is so unkind and cruel as to be sinful. Souvenir programs at the stadium should carry a disclaimer: “Management is not responsible for the physical or emotional stability of any of today’s players.”

In pretending to be doing Strawberry a favor, Steinbrenner is throwing him to the crocodiles and urging him to swim as fast as he knows how.

So persuasive is Darryl, as he has been many times before, that his condition is in check and that he is 100% sound and raring to go, the Yankees are willing to overlook the fact that nobody in Strawberry’s condition will ever be 100% again, and that every attempt should be made to keep him away from the very environment that contributed to his downfall.

Strawberry becomes like the punchy prizefighter whose eyesight has gone bad and whose entire skull has become cauliflowered, only to continue to make periodic comebacks with the full approval of those doing the hiring, men whose single concern is to line their pockets. They don’t care if Strawberry is an Elephant Man, as long as they can exhibit him nightly from 7 to 11.

How sad it must be that the New York Yankees need one more left-handed hitter or hunger for one more round of publicity so much that they would not only further endanger Strawberry’s well-being this way, but force Yankee fans to pay the tab. How sad that baseball permits it. How sad that the man’s agent permits it.

Just what baseball’s image needed this season, Yankee fans having to cheer or jeer nightly for a man whose mental welfare hangs by a thread.

And to think this follows on the heels of Mickey Mantle’s near-death experience, an episode brought about by a lifetime of internal abuse in direct proportion with the company Mantle kept in and around Yankee Stadium. Yes, when the Yankees go pound down a round after a hard game these days, surely they will tell Strawberry to go straight to his room.

Funny that an impression exists that no major university will ever again hire Michigan’s Gary Moeller as a head coach, in the wake of one night of rip-roaring drunkenness. Although Moeller sold no drugs and operated no heavy machinery while under the influence, he apparently violated ethical standards so unforgivably that college football is through with him forever.

Although it is understandable that a campus atmosphere must keep a closer check on its influential figures than professional teams do, this latest maneuver by the Yankees is nonetheless spectacularly bone-headed. Anyone in the Apple can tell you what a lightning rod Strawberry is there and what incredible pressures await him.

There was a Harvey Keitel film a few years ago called “The Bad Lieutenant” in which an entire subplot revolved around a New York policeman’s fixation on what Strawberry does at bat. Strawberry had practically a cult status in New York, and not necessarily a loyal cult. It is the last place he should be.

But what does Steinbrenner care? The guy might get some hits. The guy might fill some seats.

Darryl Strawberry will tell the world that he is all better now and that all of his trouble is behind him, and the world will sit there and nod, and nod and nod. These same people won’t be nodding a few months from now. They will simply be shaking their heads.