From The “I Had No Idea He Was Still Alive” Department
By Mitch Berg
Has it really been 12 years since Darryl Strawberry played for the Saints?
So much has happened to Darryl Strawberry in the 12 years since he resurrected his baseball career with the independent St. Paul Saints. Success. Addiction. Recurring cancer. Divorce. Jail.
I remember seeing Strawberry – and Jack Morris, for that matter – at Midway Stadium, during the Saints’ “antique resurrection” season back in 2003.
No, wait. It says here it was 1996. Again, I think someone screwed up.
Strawberry said he tries not to think about the worst, all the chances he wasted, all the things that could have killed him long before Tuesday’s event, when he sat on a riser at the Crowne Plaza hotel in St. Paul as the honored guest at the American Association All-Star Game luncheon.
“I was spared for a reason,” Strawberry said near the end of a question-and-answer session with KSTP Radio’s Kris Atteberry. “All the things I had to deal with, there was something which I was called for. I used to think it was about baseball. It’s not. It’s about who I can help.”
Read the whole thing.
July 25th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Yes, I was there at Wade stadium in Duluth when Strawberry hit one of the longest homeruns in the history of the universe. Wish I could remember the estimate of the distance.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Strawberry went from the Northern League has-been to World Series champion in less than five months in 1996.
July 26th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I remember that year. I was living in Moorhead, and we were all looking forward to Morris and Strawberry coming to town to play the FM Redhawks. As I recall, both departed the Saints just before the team came to Fargo for a series. I was mildly bummed.