Poll: Which athlete wasted the most talent?

I was actually thinking about him and his 120-mph curve. Wow. Talk about a waste.

 

Yup. An epic asshole who didn't have an outside game, leading St. John's to a 14-15 record in his one and only season at the little Catholic school on the corners of Union Turnpike and Utopia Parkway. Last I heard, he was in the NBDL, still learning that he doesn't have to take a shot as soon as he crosses half court.

 

There's a decent list of players who might be in the Hall if they hadn't gotten associated with cocaine, or had their numbers affected by it. Raines is one of them, and Dave Parker is certainly another.

 

While Strawberry had talent, it's difficult to guage just how good he could have been, because he was never great. He hit some long home runs, but he never really performed like an all-time great. Some of the hype was justified, some was hyperbole.

Gooden was great for his first 2 years, so we see more clearly what he could have done over his career. In '84 & '85 he was the most dominant right handed pitcher in the NL since Gibson in '68, and no one has been better since. He could have had a career like Clemens' had he kept his head on straight.

 

Tim Raines was a great player and would've been Hall of Fame-bound had it not been for the end of his career. Great guy. So was Dave Parker who told things as he saw it. He's pretty much in the same boat with Raines. Did they waste their careers, I wouldn't say so. Both were pretty damn good.

 

There was a great story in some sports magazine 20+ years ago about Steve Dalkowski, this Orioles farmhand in the 1950s and 1960s. Cal Ripken Sr. said he threw harder than Nolan Ryan....but the guy was a terrible alcoholic. When the magazine caught up with him, he was hanging out in southern California, living on skid row, drinking cheap wine and working as a day laborer picking fruit -- he was basically a character in a Charles Bukowski novel.

 

Thomson: When I - and I think a lot of other observers at that time - saw what Strawberry could go on a baseball field he sure looked like somebody headed to the Hall of Fame. He had a great swing, great power, maybe struck out too much but that's something younger players get better at. You were talking a five-tool player who reached the majors at 21. Gooden was 17-9 in 1984 - a really good season and remarkable for somebody so young. His 1985 season might have been the best pitching season in the second half of the 20th century... Gibson's 1968 season was in a time when the strike zone gave a huge advantage to pitchers. In 1985, he had about six no-decisions where he pitched very well - with luck Gooden could have won 30 games at the age of 21 - he nearly carried the Mets to the Division title before the Cardinals finally won.

 

Dave Parker has a better claim to the Hall of Fame than Jim Rice. Look at the numbers and the fact that Rice played in a favorable park... Rice hit less than .280 away from Fenway Park and didn't have nearly as long a career.

 

No doubt Parker belongs there. But Rice, primarily because he was with the Red Sox when there weren't many African Americans on that team, is my sentimental choice for induction.

 

I remember hearing about him too. I think the story I saw was from some sports video I had as a kid. The video didn't mention anything about him being an alcoholic, instead they said that it was his control problems that prevented from amounting to anything. If I remember correctly, they said that a pitch of his was once clocked around 110mph.

 

Dalkowski was the fastest pitcher in the history of baseball. He also had little control.

He had alcohol problems, but Earl Weaver had some insight into him. Weaver said the Orioles organization gave some intelligence tests, and Dalkowski tested really low... something in the bottom five percent. Weaver said that led him to believe he had to keep things really simple for Dalkowski, just boiling things down to "Just throw strikes and you will win" and that trying to make things more complicated made things difficult to the point that he couldn't handle it. Weaver said Dalkowski had his best season when he managed him.

 

The Dalkowski story was in Inside Sports. It had graphics showing his year-by-year stats. The guy would have literally 260 strikeouts and 250 walks in a year.

http://books.google.com/books?id=XNIqinMV3-4C&pg=RA155-PA1972&lpg=RA155-PA1972&dq=%22inside+sports%22+dalkowski&source=web&ots=LijD3x7vpN&sig=otYV3rxmf3LmU5Y3UuuvgP-uB2g

There's a little bit about him here.