PORT ST. LUCIE – Darryl Strawberry admittedly tried just about every other drug in the 1980s.
Would he have taken steroids, too?
“Hell yeah, I would have used them!” thundered the former Mets and Yankees great yesterday. “Are you kidding me? I mean, c’mon. Some things are part of what athletes go through, and they happen.”
Strawberry, who is in Mets camp this week as a guest instructor, offered up that not-so-surprising admission about his drug-laden past yesterday while defending Alex Rodriguez in the wake of A-Rod’s confessed steroid use.
Steroids weren’t prominent in baseball in the ’80s, but Strawberry said they would have been a no-brainer for him simply to keep up with his peers.
“Our nature [as athletes] is that we’re competitive people with a tremendous drive and high tolerance,” Strawberry said. “I’m not saying that was the right thing to do, but if that was going on in the era of the ’80s, it definitely . . . would have been in my system, too.
“I probably would have been part of it, too, and I wouldn’t have denied it, because you guys know I don’t deny anything.”
Strawberry, who still looks muscular and youthful at age 46, played 17 years in the big leagues until finishing up with the Yankees after a battle with cancer.
The late 1990s were well past the widespread introduction of steroids into the sport, but Strawberry said he didn’t take peformance-enhancing drugs then because he was too old.
“I was late in the game,” he said. “If you’d caught me when I was 24 or 25 in the midst of my career, of course I [would have taken steroids]. I was naive. I was stupid. . . . I could relate to [A-Rod’s recent comments], because I was stupid, too, when I was 24, 25, 26 years old. I did a lot of stupid things.”
Strawberry defended A-Rod, saying fans and media should lay off the Yankee slugger now that he has confessed. Strawberry also blasted the players’ union for not destroying the confidential tests in 2003 and paving the way for Rodriguez’s name to leak to SI.com last month.
“I love Alex, and I respect him,” Strawberry said. “And I’m glad Alex was man enough to stand up and tell the truth. But I have a hard time with the union when one player out of 104 players’ names comes out, and it’s Alex Rodriguez. On testing that was done with the promise of confidentiality.”
Strawberry said he thinks the other 103 names on the 2003 list should be released instead of letting A-Rod twist in the wind.
“Obviously, somebody’s had it out for him, and it’s not fair,” Strawberry said. “If you’re going to name one, then name all of them. That’s the only problem I have with this whole situation. They have put Alex in a situation where it’s him against the world, and that’s not fair.”