Interview: Darryl Strawberry

Interview: Darryl Strawberry

By Scott Bolohan

My first baseball glove was a brown Rawlings. I can remember going with my dad to Sports Authority to pick it out. My fingers barely reached past the palm of the glove. And on that palm was the facsimile signature of Darryl Strawberry.

I was five when I got the glove, and I don’t think I could have told you much about Strawberry other than that he was in the Major Leagues and good enough to have his signature on my glove. So naturally, I wanted to be like him.

When he joined the Yankees after serving a suspension for cocaine use, I was at his first game with the team on August 4, 1995. I remember a buzz around Tiger Stadium watching him take batting practice. Well out of his prime, he still had that star power that only a handful have had in baseball history. Years later, he signed a baseball for me before a game and I remember thinking how tall he was, his 6’6” frame dwarfed me as a kid who literally looked up to him. He was bigger than the game.

I always knew there was a darker side to him, that he had struggled with his demons ever since he was in the spotlight.

After his playing career ended, most pictures I saw of Strawberry were him in court wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. There was a stretch of every few years where something else would pop up in the news about the trouble he was in. So often these stories have a tragic ending, and I don’t think it would have surprised anyone if that was Strawberry’s fate as well.

And then, I heard nothing about him.

It turns out I had been missing an incredible story. I didn’t hear about him getting sober. I didn’t hear about him becoming a minister. I didn’t hear about him dedicating his life to helping others.

I spoke on Zoom with Strawberry about his latest book, Turn Your Season Around. Far from his days as an egotistic baseball star, Strawberry was soft-spoken and humble. He talked about how in normal years, he would have been traveling the country preaching to people who are hurting and “so fearful that somebody might know they have problems.” Darryl doesn’t shy away from his past struggles and says people “will come tell me their problems after they hear me speak because I’m sharing everything that I overcame.”

We talked about his life on and off the field and how he hopes his book can inspire people—just as he did with a 5-year old with a brand new baseball glove.

There’s a great passage in your book, when you talk about your hitting coach getting you to focus on slowing down and getting back to the basics when you were in a slump. And right now, the whole world has slowed down. How are you getting through this slump that is the pandemic?
 
That’s a good question. It’s been good for me, you go back to your real principles of who you are, and what life is really all about. I think everybody gets consumed with life moving so fast, and everything is supposed to be right. We knew that at some point we would be in moments like this—there would be trials, there would be tribulations. But how do we do through those periods of time? I think being an overcomer in life and knowing where your real principles are is so important because I think people weren’t prepared for the challenges that we faced this year. No one was prepared for a pandemic, but it’s here. And it’s the reality that we have to live in. So what do you do when your reality is changed to something else? You learn to live according to who you are, and your faith, and you stand on it and don’t waver. I think the real key for me is not wavering from who I was before the pandemic. I was doing what I was called to do in life, and now continuing to do it.

When did you start writing this book?
 
I started writing this book way before the pandemic, even before I even knew COVID-19 would be a season where we would all be stuck. The book was written way before that. I picked the title way back then, and they said, ‘Well, what do you what are your ideas about writing a book?’ I said, ‘Well, I think is for people that will have to turn their season around—we always have to turn our season around.’
 
I was kind of using it like playing baseball, in the sense of you have 80 games in the first half of the season, and you could be in a slump. A lot of times, things like that happened during the course of a season. The media would write things saying, ‘Well, he’s not going to have a good year,’ but they forgot there was a whole second half of the season, there were 80 more ballgames left. They don’t understand that you don’t cut the season off. It’s like the life that we’ve been living for the last six months, but you still have another six months to bring joy to your season where you can finish up strong. Little did I know that we would all be in the season that we would have to look to turn it around in some kind of way.

I was doing some research for this, and I typed into Google, ‘Is Darryl Strawberry…’ And then the first two search results are ‘Is Darryl Strawberry in the Hall of Fame?’ And the second one is ‘Is Darryl Strawberry dead?’ There were some times in your life where that seemed a real possibility. But it sounds like you are doing better than ever.

Better than ever. Better than ever playing baseball, better than ever hitting home runs, better than championships, better than making millions of dollars, better than ever. You find such a great joy and reward for having peace with God. At the end of the day, I’m a sinner, I’m a heathen who was broken and lost and living in sin. And I was separated from God, and God’s Spirit came to me, and not only did he give me grace, he gave me his gift to utilize this platform to reach others. I think that’s incredible that your mess becomes his message to other people.

I think a lot of times people don’t realize that, because everybody’s pointing at people’s issues. We don’t know why people have struggles, we don’t know where people are coming from. Some of us do actually get on the other side. I’ve had a transformation in my life with God and submitted myself and surrendered my life and basically turned away from all the worldly things.

I think a lot of fans view your career as sort of a wasted opportunity. But from the perspective that you have now, how do you view your baseball career? Did that help set you up for what was to come?
 
No question it did. They’re looking at a wasted opportunity from a natural perspective. God was looking at it from the supernatural. He was looking at it from the long term, not the short term. They were looking at the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame really means nothing at the end of the day, because had I stayed on that course, I probably would have made another $50-$60 million playing baseball, and I probably would have never met Jesus. I probably would have never had the relationship and understanding I have today and wouldn’t live by real biblical principles. I know something that they don’t understand because I lived it. There were a bunch of yes-people that said, ‘You can live any kind of way.’ But when I entered in into this relationship, He said, ‘Well, you can’t live this way.’ He’s very easy going about you living according to the right way that’s going to make you better and that’s what we all really want. At the end of my life, I’m not going to have to answer to man, I’m going to have to answer to God. And I think so many people are going to miss that part because they’re so focused on right now. And then they don’t ever think twice about the end.
 
So, many fans probably think that way, too. ‘Oh, he had missed opportunities,’ no, now I got the greatest seat that you can ever imagine. Remember, fans were cheering for me when I was playing, and I’m always grateful for fans, I love fans, and I appreciate fans. But the gift that God has given me to go and minister to people and win souls and see people come down to the altar on the altar call, and weeping and crying and their life is being changed—that is the ultimate dream a person can ever have.
 
You talk a lot about the importance of taking off your baseball uniform. In your book you say, “My uniform was merely a facade for greatness, shielding the brokenness that ached within me.” When did you realize that? And how did that change?
 
I think you realize that when you’re playing. You saw a few players who played at the highest level.  I got a chance to see a guy like Gary Carter live an abundant life in the uniform. I got a chance to see a guy like Mookie Wilson live an abundant life in a uniform. I can’t say that about many people. But I can say I saw a few people living in my time because their life was different, their life was not the uniform. There was something special about the way they lived and what they cared about. The uniform was just a part of who they were. When I was wearing the uniform, the uniform was who I was. And once I took the uniform off, I really understood that I had the wrong identity. I was identifying myself as what everybody saw me as and what the media was projecting I should be. I was trying to live as what they wanted me to be instead of who God wanted me to be. And that’s the difference. I saw the lifestyle that those players lived. They didn’t have egos. They weren’t prideful, they didn’t boast, they didn’t run around with women, they didn’t go out and drink and they didn’t go out and party. That’s what a real man is all about. You see real character from that. I just wasn’t there to be able to receive that at that time.
 
There’s another moment in the book where you talk about hitting the home run in Game 7 and you said you didn’t even really enjoy it. What did you learn from that experience?
 
The hype of everything can really get to you, especially when you’re an everyday player and your star on the team, you’re just consumed with so much media attention to focus on you, ‘Are you going to do better?’ It’s just so much that goes into it. And when you finally reach that point, and you achieve all that, and then you say, ‘Okay, who am I? What’s next?’ Because that’s only going to last for so long. A lot of times you only remember athletes for what they did last. Then you play again next year, and you make a mistake, and then everybody else has something to say about you. You can’t live in the past and that happens with so many great athletes, they always want to scream about ‘he’s not this, he’s not that’ and when you take the uniform off, who are you? Just because you have all these earthly things, who are you in these earthly things because one day all that’s going to be so old to you. Then that emptiness on the inside of you that’s never been filled by the right stuff, God Himself makes you search from the outside for everything.
 
I didn’t want to be in the headlines anymore. I wanted to be a man like those that I’ve learned from, like Moses and Peter. They all had issues, but they found a way to walk with God. I learned that God loves a man that has some type of humility about himself and no ego. Because egos are big, that’s a three-letter word ‘ego’—Easing God Out. You ease God right out, and you play God yourself. And so I just didn’t really want to be that person anymore, I just really wanted to find a different road to life. Finding that road to life was not easy. It was a very difficult challenge. But my wife, Tracy, she helped me find the way. She was the one that really said to me, ‘When are you going to finally take off that uniform and figure out who you are?’ And I was completely blown away by that—it was a real statement. Everybody else was following me and slapping me on the back saying, ‘You’re great, you’re great.’ She says, ‘When are you going to take the uniform off and really find out who you are as a man?’ That’s when the change came about.

Was that a turning point for you?

That was really a turning point. I mean, because she helped me get past the uniform. Because if you can’t get past the uniforms, the trophies, the success—and a lot of guys can’t. That’s why they stay around it, because they can’t get away from the game. It’s all that they know, it’s all that they’ve done the whole life. I did the same thing. People ask me all the time, ‘Why don’t you coach, you have so much wisdom and knowledge?’ I probably do. But I needed to remove myself from that. And God was calling me to a bigger picture.

Darry Strawberry won four World Series, made eight All-Star teams, and is a New York Times best-selling author. His latest book is Turn Your Season Around, out January 12, 2021.

Scott Bolohan is the founder of The Twin Bill. As a kid, he tried to copy Darry Strawberry’s swing, which just doesn’t work as a righty.