Why Darryl Strawberry isn’t in the Hall of Fame

Last Updated on August 28, 2023 by Dave Farquhar

Darryl Strawberry was one of the most surprising 1980s stars to fall short of baseball’s Hall of Fame. Although he didn’t hit for high average, he was otherwise a five-tool player thriving in baseball’s biggest market. Here is why Darryl Strawberry isn’t in the Hall of Fame.

Everything went right for Strawberry until it didn’t

It’s easy to look at his decision to leave New York for Los Angeles in 1990 and conclude free agency ruined him. But much like his longtime teammate Dwight Gooden, there wasn’t a single thing that kept Darryl Strawberry out of the Hall of Fame

In a nutshell, the overarching thing that kept Darryl Strawberry out of the Hall of Fame was that he never played a full season after the age of 29.

If anything, Darryl Strawberry had more going on than Dwight Gooden. Take everything Dwight Gooden had going on, everything Jack Clark had going on, everything his good friend Eric Davis had going on, and throw in a messy divorce on top of all of that, and then you start asking different questions about Darryl Strawberry’s career. The question turns from why he couldn’t stay on the field after the age of 29 to how he found a way to play baseball at all after the age of 29.

Darryl Strawberry had Hall of Fame talent

Let’s get one thing out of the way. What Strawberry did on the field was otherworldly. The only weakness in his game was that he didn’t hit for exceptionally high batting average. But he had Reggie Jackson-like power while not striking out as much. And while Reggie Jackson probably had a better throwing arm, Strawberry fielded his position better and was good enough to occasionally slide over to center field. And while you generally don’t want your cleanup hitter stealing too many bases for risk of injury, Strawberry was very much capable of stealing a base when the situation called for it.

When Strawberry retired after a turbulent second half of his career, advanced metrics were still in their infancy. But when we look at advanced metrics today, Daryl Strawberry’s OPS+ falls right in line with Reggie Jackson. If you weren’t a New York fan, it was easy to point at Darryl Strawberry’s batting average and say he was overrated. But his adjusted OPS suggests that if anything, he was a bit underrated. That’s a strange thing to say about the biggest star in the New York Mets lineup in the 1980s, but I do think people like me who didn’t root for the Mets didn’t appreciate him for what he was.

What kept Darryl Strawberry off the field

The Mets teams of the 1980s were notorious for partying off the field harder than they played baseball. And in that regard, Darryl Strawberry was right there with Dwight Gooden and Keith Hernandez. Drug addiction wasn’t necessarily the thing that knocked him down all of the time. But when something else came along and knocked him down, the drugs had a tendency to come back around and keep him down.

Beyond that, he had a back injury in 1992 that caused him to miss almost an entire season, and his attempt to come back too soon caused him to miss additional time.

Once he was over the back injuries, he had a messy divorce, financial problems due to not reporting his income from signing autographs at sports conventions, a cancer diagnosis and treatment, and a recurrence. That helps explain why he only played 100 games in a single season one time in his career after age 29.

A comeback with the Yankees

George Steinbrenner was determined to rehabilitate Strawberry, so the Yankees signed him in 1995. Steinbrenner had a Yankee employee shadow him at all times to keep him out of trouble, substance-wise. But Steinbrenner couldn’t do much to prevent injuries and could do even less about cancer. Strawberry mounted a comeback in 1998, getting into 100 games for what would prove to be the only time in his 30s, and showing that he had something left.

But then, in 1999, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. And a spiral followed the cancer treatment, as sometimes happens, and Major League Baseball suspended him for 140 games. He managed to get into 24 games in 1999 after the suspension, then retired.

Then, if none of that was enough, his cancer returned in 2000. And so did his other problems.

Taking responsibility

To his credit, Strawberry takes responsibility for those actions and has spent his life after baseball doing everything he can to help other people not make the same mistakes he made. In a book published in 2009 he admitted, “I made some good choices, and I made some really bad ones.”

My argument isn’t that the Hall of Fame voters got it wrong when they disqualified him for the Hall of Fame after a single vote. And I also don’t fault the voters who did cast votes for him. I don’t have a Hall of Fame vote and I never will, but in things I do have a vote for, there have been times when I voted yes for things to keep the discussion going.

I will also say the life Darryl Strawberry lived after baseball is more important than a plaque in a museum.

Concluding Darryl Strawberry’s Hall of Fame case

But ultimately, he falls short of Hall of Fame standards because he wasn’t healthy after age 29. It wasn’t one single thing that kept Strawberry off the field. Some of it was within his control and some wasn’t. But the effect was that he had Hall of Fame talent, but wasn’t able to stay on the field enough to pull together a Hall of Fame career.

So he ended up with anywhere between half and 2/3 of the accolades he would have needed to gain Hall of Fame induction. Had Strawberry been able to play three to five more full seasons and fragments of a few more, instead of fragments of eight seasons, there’s every reason to think he would have been a Hall of Famer. His OPS+ compares very closely to Reggie Jackson. He may or may not have been able to keep that up, because every player deals with some amount of decline after about the age of 32. But you can be 10 percent worse than Reggie Jackson and still make the Hall of Fame. Why Darryl Strawberry isn’t in the Hall of Fame is a valid question to ask, because the player we saw from 1983 to 1991 had what it took.

I never saw him play in person. But I did see him on TV a lot, because WOR TV was a standard part of cable TV packages in the 1980s. That may have made it too easy to take him for granted.