A little over 18 years ago, Darryl Strawberry’s now-wife, Tracy, was pulling him out of drug houses. As he, in his own words, “was shooting dope, smoking crack and just wanted to die,” she continued chasing him around, banging on doors, finding him and promising him there was more to life.
In one instance, Tracy, perhaps out of desperation, spoke the words that changed her husband’s life.
“When are you going to take that baseball uniform off?” she asked him.
“What do you mean?” Darryl responded.
“When are you ever going to stop being the baseball player Darryl Strawberry – you’re not him no more – and when are you going to be the man that God called you to be?” Tracy said, according to Darryl, who recalled the situation in a recent phone interview with The Record and NorthJersey.com.
Since that time, Strawberry, now 58 years old, has been in ministry for 17 years, preaching for the last 12. Once thrust into a life of partying and drugs, he says he has transformed himself.
This journey is the subject of the former New York Mets and Yankees star’s latest book, "Turn Your Season Around: How God Transforms Your Life". With writer Lee Weeks, Strawberry – a New York Times Bestselling Author who has penned multiple books – opens up about his struggles, how he overcame them, and the role his faith played in it. The book releases on Jan. 12.
Strawberry, who lives in a suburb of St. Louis, says he now has purpose and is living a fulfilling life. He says he realized money, fame and other material objects couldn’t satisfy him forever.
Years ago, after his playing career ended, he found himself in bad shape. Baseball was all he knew, but he didn’t have it anymore. He felt he had nothing to lose, so he partied and used drugs.
“You’d rather be dead,” Strawberry said.
His lowest point came when Tracy had to scrape and claw to remove him from drug houses. She assured him God had a plan for him. He didn’t want anything to do with it.
“Why don’t you just let God leave me here and let me die?” Darryl would ask her.
“You’re just not that lucky,” Tracy would say.
Like Darryl’s mother, Tracy didn’t care about baseball as much as she did Darryl being a good man. Tracy wasn’t by Darryl’s side as he won four World Series championships and received eight All-Star selections, among other accomplishments.
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Darryl and Tracy – who have now been married 14 years – met 21 years ago at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in South Florida. At the time, Tracy was one year clean during her recovery, while Darryl had been using.
She saw him not as a former baseball superstar, but as a broken man searching to get his life back on track. As others at the convention mobbed Darryl and asked him for autographs, Tracy thought: “The guy needs help. Won’t you leave him alone and let him be?”
“She saw me at my worst time of addiction, which is really hard,” Darryl said. “I just believe that God used her to rescue me from me, more than anything. She was the turning point.”
To that point, Strawberry had been miserable and felt hopeless. An example from his book: When his cancer returned at one point, he hoped it would take his life, just as it had claimed the lives of his mother and sister before him. He just wanted to end the pain he was dealing with in life, but he reluctantly agreed to undergo surgery to remove the cancerous tumor.
“As the anesthesia slowly escorted me into a field of dreams,” Strawberry wrote, “I hoped never to wake up again.”
These days, Strawberry says: “God found me in a pit and put me in a pulpit to preach.”
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Strawberry says it's important to him that those he preaches to know the brokenness from which he came, the demons he overcame to be speaking in front of them.
He was in substance abuse rehabilitation centers. He faced charges for domestic violence and tax evasion. He was imperfect.
Strawberry doesn’t want to be another holier-than-thou former athlete or movie star telling you about God, Jesus and redemption without actually having done the work themselves. He didn’t want to be just another hypocrite.
No, he is someone whose status as a public figure means everyone knew about his battles. He preaches now because he has undergone a transformation and believes others can do the same.
During his playing career, Strawberry often observed the way Mets teammates Gary Carter and Mookie Wilson lived. Those two would join the team for dinner, for example, but would go straight back to their hotel rooms afterward.
Nowadays, Strawberry is the one declining party invites. “Where you at?” people would ask. “Where you been?”
Strawberry, time after time, had to explain that he had changed his lifestyle.
It’s been a difficult but rewarding journey.
“Did I straddle the fence at times? Yeah,” Strawberry said. “But I never went back – completely went back – to the old ways and stuff like that.”
Strawberry says the toughest part of it all has been that his mother, who died long before he turned his life around, couldn’t witness him become a new man.
Nowadays, when he’s on the road preaching, he will sometimes break down and cry upon checking into a hotel room – because he says it breaks his heart that his mom, the one who wanted him to live this way more than anyone else, is the one who can’t see him do so.
As he sat down to write his book, Strawberry felt it easy to reflect on his struggles – after all, he’s already overcome them. Now, it’s about letting others know they can do the same.
“I’ll always be proud of who I am and what I’ve been through,” Strawberry says, “but I’m more thankful for the grace that has been given to me because I don’t deserve it.”
Justin Toscano is the Mets beat writer for NorthJersey.com. Email: toscanoj@northjersey.com. Twitter: @justinctoscano
