The Mets announced they will retire the numbers of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, two players who emerged in the mid 1980s to propel the Mets to a World Championship. The two discussed their downfalls in a new conference:

“We were mentally crazy at the time, so we needed a lot help,” Strawberry said Wednesday. “We could have used every doctor and every psychiatrist — they probably would have ran away from us every time because we were so young and so focused on what it was like to be on the field and doing what we was doing on the field and we was not taking care of ourselves.”

…

“I remember at times literally crying, going to get drugs, crying to go buy alcohol. That’s a problem. That’s a mental problem,” Gooden said, recalling his last descent in 2019. “Last time, instead of going to rehab, I put myself into a mental hospital.”

ESPN.com

Their peaks were short but spectacular. Too bad they didn’t last longer.