Doc Gooden’s letter to his younger self in the Player’s Club a few days ago is the type of thing I love reading. Namely, I enjoyed this part of it:

There is one pitch that will forever haunt you. It will happen during the 1988 NLCS with your team up 4-2. In the 9th inning, you’ll walk John Shelby on four pitches, and then face Mike Scioscia. The guy is not a home run hitter but you should respect him as a veteran with a lot of experience. Everyone in the stadium, including Scioscia, knows that you’re going to throw a fastball. With your first pitch, your instinct will be to try to throw it over the middle to get ahead on the count with a quick strike. What you should do is throw it low and away.

Read that last line again. Throw it low and away.

He of course is talking about the home run that ended the Mets run of dominance, the one pitch that everything changed with.

I’m a big fan of 80’s Mets talk, and was surprised by what a good and reflective writer Gooden actually was in this piece.

Because I’m a huge sucker for anything 80’s and especially anything mid-80’s New York Mets, I’ll probably buy Doc: A Memoir and read it within a couple days even though I am already reading a Mickey Mantle book and a Lenny Dykstra book.

I think we’ve all heard the story of Doc Gooden’s morning the day after he became a World Series champion. In case you have not, here is a snippet of what it was like for him:

“As my teammates rode through the Canyon of Heroes, I was alone in my bed in Roslyn, Long Island, with the curtains closed and the TV on, missing what should have been the greatest morning of my life,” Gooden wrote.

“I stared at the TV through narrow, squinting eyes,” Gooden wrote. “And that’s how I watched my own victory parade.”

At this point there will be few surprises that a Gooden book offers. It should still be required reading if you were a fan of baseball during the 80’s or grew up when Gooden was the best young arm in the game. And he’s at least already sold one copy of it. I just want it sitting on my book shelf in my den someday. My personal collection wouldn’t be complete without it.