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To the end of his life, Joe Black was grateful just to have had the chance to play in the majors at all. And considering the way his own manager ruined him following that striking rookie season, that tells you an awful lot about him.

I wish that he might have been available to Dwight Gooden in 1986. This isn't generally remembered, considering what happened to Gooden later on, but in spring of 1986, Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre did almost the same thing to Gooden that Dressen did to Black - tell a pitcher who had just dominated the league and bore more poise already than most of the pitchers he was going up against that, in effect, it wasn't good enough, that he just had to have more in the repertoire. So Stottlemyre convinced Gooden to begin integrating a changeup. Now, remember 1986. Gooden fell back all around and the newly integrated changeup was pulling something off that famed fast ball and that elegant curve ball. (Another comparison: Sudden Sam McDowell. McDowell was fool enough to think for himself that he needed more than just his own deadly fast ball and snapping curve ball, and guess what - as would happen to Gooden in 1986 and happened to Black in 1953, the hitters were praying for that changeup.) Gooden had enough natural talent that he still ended up as almost the best pitcher of the 1980s, but he wasn't even close to his 1984-85 form ever again.

And who is to say that Gooden's confidence wasn't shot enough that he was only too open to seeking comfort in shadowy places, as in short enough order he did? You take a kid who was way younger than Black was, shoot his confidence out of the water, and you're playing with fire - you're playing with turning a poised kid into what Thomas Boswell called "a deer frozen in the headlights watching his own parade go by". This was a kid who knew what he was doing on the mound and did not seem like a kid when he pitched (or when he wasn't pitching, for that matter; the stories abounded, not just in New York, about his surety and maturity). Taking Dwight Gooden in spring 1986 and telling him in effect that he just wasn't quite there was something like what you could imagine it to have been if someone had taken Juan Marichal aside after his breakout season (1963) and told him, in effect, that he just wasn't quite there. (And don't think there wouldn't have been coaches around the leagues who wouldn't have told Marichal that that animated windup and Rockette-high leg kick just could not be if he expected to stay successful!). He didn't need to be a rocket scientist to know he was going from the best pitcher in baseball to just another pitcher in almost as fast a time as he'd become the best pitcher in the first place. And when you've just made yourself the toast of the game and now you've been told effectively that you weren't good enough even so, you'd have to be something close to an android to just shake it off when you're going out there and the mojo isn't working the way it used to work any more.

It's too simple to say it in hindsight, but what a difference it might have made if someone in the Mets' organisation had had the prescience to get hold of Joe Black and get him to work with Gooden and pound some sense into the Mets. Maybe we'd be talking about Gooden the prospective Hall of Famer, instead of Gooden the might-have-been.