Well now you've done it, Darryl. You've snorted away your last chance, and I'm afraid I can never believe you again.

There aren't many abusive baseball players I have ever been inclined to defend. Until a week ago, Darryl Strawberry was one of them.

His history of drug and alcohol abuse is well-documented, both his wives' noses probably still sting from all the punches they've taken from Strawberry, and he is a convicted tax cheat. Yet, I am not the only New York skeptic who honestly thought the man had redeemed himself.

Maybe the fact that he was on my baseball team clouded my common sense. A Yankee never cheats and a cheater never...Yanks?

Or maybe I simply believed too strongly in the healing powers of colon cancer. Once Straw became a victim, his turbulent past was quickly forgotten. "No one with cancer can do something bad!"

Strawberry's latest transgression made me realize what really was behind my confused reaction to this confused man--he's a myth.

From the day he first set foot onto the "strawberry patch" in Shea Stadium's right field, with the long, lean frame of Ted Williams and the prodigious speed of a young Mantle, the man with the fruitiest name in the game was the ultimate baseballer.

His rise to fame was engineered before it even happened. Said the New York Times in February, 1983, before his Rookie of the Year campaign, "Strawberry's record had preceded him

and there was no doubt that a potential