He Quit Baseball Once as a Teenager and Vowed Never to Quit Again

As a freshman in high school, Darryl Strawberry quit baseball.

It was a brief walkaway, but he remembers quitting in his freshman year. Strawberry, the former Mets and Yankees slugger, grew up without a steady father at home. His mother was raising five children by herself, and what she gave him, he said, was strength and courage for moments like this.

That lesson became a vow. Strawberry said, "I would never quit again, no matter what came against me."

He needed it. After high school, Strawberry entered the minor leagues, the chain of farm teams where young players develop before the majors. There, he said, people insulted him with demeaning name-calling and he faced racial hostility.

He did not quit. As he put it, "if you give up, you never know the miracle that might be on the other side." He went on to a successful baseball career, even with pain, playing 17 years in the major leagues, driven in part by a private score to settle. Strawberry said he wanted to prove to his father "that he was wrong about us."

At times, that anger stayed with him at the plate. Years later, Strawberry said he swung so hard he pictured "my father's head" on the ball because he had held anger inside for many years.

That image explains the vow. A boy who had quit once decided he would keep going through the taunts to prove his father wrong about him and his family.