Darryl Strawberry

Darryl Strawberry wore No. 39 for the New York Yankees for parts of five seasons, won three World Series rings in the Bronx, and missed one of those championship celebrations because he was recovering from colon cancer surgery. You don't get a story like that from a normal career. You get it from a guy who'd already lived a full baseball life -- 8 straight All-Star teams, a Rookie of the Year award, a ring with the '86 Mets -- before he ever put on pinstripes.

The Guy the Mets Let Get Away

Strawberry was a legend before the Yankees ever got him. No. 1 overall pick by the Mets in 1980, NL Rookie of the Year in '83, and an All-Star every single season from 1984 through 1991 -- eight in a row (seven with the Mets, the eighth coming his first year in LA with the Dodgers, though a shoulder injury kept him from actually playing that game). He was part of the swaggering, cocaine-fueled '86 Mets that beat the Red Sox in seven games. Then it all came apart -- Dodgers, Giants, suspensions, a tax evasion case that cost him $350,000 -- and by February 1995 he was a free agent nobody wanted, suspended 60 days by MLB for a positive cocaine test.

The Yankees signed him anyway (George Steinbrenner never met a reclamation project he didn't want to bet on). That's who Steinbrenner was.

Signed, Cut, and Signed Again

The deal came together June 19, 1995, with his suspension ending five days later. Strawberry spent August through the end of the season as a bench bat and made two pinch-hit appearances in that gut-punch 1995 ALDS loss to Seattle (yes, the Edgar Martinez series -- still hurts). He hit .276 in 32 games. Reasonable enough. Then spring training 1996 rolled around and the Yankees didn't bring him back.

He went and played for the St. Paul Saints. An independent league team. Darryl Strawberry, former No. 1 pick and 8-time All-Star, hitting .435 with 18 homers in 29 games for a team that wasn't affiliated with anybody, just to prove he still had it.

He had it. The Yankees re-signed him that July, and by October he was doing this: .417 average, 3 home runs, 5 RBI in four games against Baltimore in the ALCS. The Yankees won the pennant and then the 1996 World Series over Atlanta -- Strawberry's second career ring, his first as a Yankee, at 34 years old, a year after nobody wanted him.

The Peak, and Then the Diagnosis

1997 was a lost year -- knee problems limited him to 11 games, and the Yankees went out in the ALDS without him being much of a factor. But 1998 was the real Strawberry, the version everybody remembered from Shea Stadium a decade earlier. He played in over 100 games for the first time since 1991 and put up 24 homers, 57 RBI, and a .896 OPS as Joe Torre's bench bat and part-time DH on what's still argued as the greatest team ever assembled (114 wins that year -- go ahead and argue otherwise). On May 2 and again on August 4, he hit pinch-hit grand slams -- the first American League player ever to do that twice in one season. Freakin' clutch.

Then, in late September, his stomach started bothering him. Doctors found a tumor. Colon cancer. His season ended October 1, 1998, the day before Game 3 of the ALDS, and two days later he was in surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian having a chunk of his colon removed. The cancer had already spread to a lymph node -- Stage III.

He never got to play in the 1998 World Series. The Yankees swept San Diego while Strawberry recovered at home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, unable to travel. His teammates called him from the clubhouse the second the last out was recorded so he could hear the celebration. They dedicated the whole thing to him. He still got a ring for it -- his third career championship, his second as a Yankee -- and he never took a single postseason at-bat that October. That's the kind of thing that puts a whole season in perspective.

Back on the Field, Back in Trouble

Here's where the story gets hard to write cleanly, because it should be a redemption arc and instead it's messier than that. Strawberry came back for 1999 determined to play through his recovery. Then on April 3, he was arrested in Tampa for soliciting an undercover police officer and possessing a small amount of cocaine. MLB hit him with a 140-day suspension. He pleaded no contest that May and was sentenced to probation and community service.

I'm not going to pretend the addiction and the cancer were separate stories running side by side. They weren't. The man was fighting for his life against a disease that doesn't care about your batting average, and he was also fighting an addiction that had chased him since his 20s, and both of those things were happening at the same time, in public, while he was trying to help the Yankees win a championship. That's not a footnote. That's the whole story.

He came back in September 1999 -- first at Triple-A Columbus, then with the big club -- and hit .327/.500/.612 in 24 games down the stretch, mostly as a platoon DH against right-handers. In the ALDS sweep of Texas, he delivered a home run that helped push the Yankees into the ALCS, and across that whole October run -- ALDS, ALCS, and the 1999 World Series sweep of Atlanta -- he went 5-for-15 with 2 home runs in a limited platoon role. Third ring as a Yankee. Fourth of his career. The 1999 season closed out the best stretch of his career, and he closed it out from the bench as much as the batter's box.

What Happened After

Strawberry's major league career effectively ended before the 2000 season -- a positive cocaine test in January led to a full-year suspension from Commissioner Bud Selig, his third drug-related suspension in five years. While he was away from the game, his cancer came back, requiring a second surgery in August 2000. It was, by any measure, a brutal stretch for a man who'd already been through so much.

He was never a Hall of Fame candidate, and the addiction chapters of his story are permanent parts of his record -- there's no cleaning that up, and this site isn't interested in trying. But the baseball part of the Darryl Strawberry story, the five years he spent in the Bronx specifically, is one of the more remarkable footnotes in the dynasty. A former Mets legend, written off by half of baseball, shows up in New York, gets cut, goes and hits .435 in an independent league to prove a point, comes back, and ends up with three championship rings and a spot on one of the greatest rosters ever assembled -- all while fighting cancer in the middle of it.

Three rings in five years, and he barely got to enjoy the middle one. That's Darryl Strawberry's Yankees career in a sentence -- brilliant, interrupted, and somehow still a winner every time it mattered.