"Good to be here, " Gooden told a fan on his way toward the field.
Former Mets ace Dwight Gooden sat four rows behind home plate, updating Harvey's K count on Twitter, as usual.
Update: I received a few emails after this posted that suggested that A.G. is Andrew Gooden, who plays basketball for the Milwaukee Bucks.
While the Marlins won't let Fernandez get anywhere near Gooden's 218 rookie innings, the totals of Sabathia (180.1) and Saberhagen (157.2) appear within reach.
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Harvey grew up in Connecticut and recently said he'd heard about those crackling Friday nights in the 1980s when Mets phenom Dwight Gooden pitched at Shea Stadium.
He mixed a 97-mph fastball with a knee-buckling curve, similar to Gooden's when he captivated the baseball world as a 19-year-old New York Mets rookie in 1984.
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Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry were their Strasburg and Harper.
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Only a bullpen collapse prevented him from joining CC Sabathia, Bret Saberhagen and Dwight Gooden in a select group of pitchers that won their debut before their 21st birthday.
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Carter turned out to be one of the last missing pieces on a New York team that already had the likes of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden and Keith Hernandez.
Although the Mets failed to make the playoffs in 1985, they took the World Series in 1986 with a team of high-visibility stars including Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden and Keith Hernandez.
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Gooden, along with fellow Mets greats Darryl Strawberry and John Franco, will play in the All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game on July 14 as part of All-Star festivities at Citi Field.
With Carter starting behind the plate in the opener (he would sit out the nightcap), the Mets jumped out to 6-0 lead after four innings on their way to a 7-1 win behind Dwight Gooden.
Since K-rate is usually considered the single best predictor of how well a pitcher will age, from this angle the inevitable comparisons to past Mets greats like Dwight Gooden, Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver make sense.
Shea is whooping it up with my father as 19-year-old phenom Dwight Gooden whiffs 12 Dodgers one night in 1984, the "K Corner" patrol in the left field upper deck acknowledging each one with a sign.
For some Mets fans, this game might've rekindled a night former star Dwight Gooden pitched as a rookie in 1984 late that year, he dominated the Cubs with a one-hitter, allowing only an infield single by Keith Moreland.
Drafted No. 1 overall in 1980 by new Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday, Strawberry, with his 6-foot-6-inch frame, power swing and cocksure attitude, became the cornerstone of a talent foundation that also included Dwight Gooden and Lenny Dykstra.
Dickey finished second in the NL in ERA (2.73) and third in walks and hits per inning (1.05) on his way to becoming the first Met in a generation to win 20 games and the first since Dwight Gooden to win the Cy Young.
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This would leave him an even more effective pitcher than he already is not necessarily the peer of a young Gooden or Seaver, but quite comparable to David Cone, the last pitcher who made this kind of impact on his first run as a Mets starter, and one whose development in his mid-20s tracked this exact pattern.
If you divide individual rate by league rate, though, it comes out that he's striking out a third more hitters than average impressive, but no better than what Brett Myers did with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2005, and nothing close to what Gooden did at 19, when his K-rate was more than twice as high as the league's.
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