Gooden deserves a full house at Citi Field

NEW YORK — Forty years after he had to sneak into the Astrodome as a teenager to make his first start in the big leagues for the Mets, a year before he was as dominating and dazzling as any righthanded pitcher you will ever see in your life, Dwight Gooden will be young again on Sunday at Citi Field when his No. 16 is finally retired.

It will happen in the year when he will somehow — amazingly — turn 60, after the long and hard road that brought him to a day like this, a moment like this, one that will be filled with memory and also regret.

“So much of this doesn’t seem real,” he told me the other day. “You know what really doesn’t seem real? That I’m going to be 60. I mean, are you kidding me?”

He has still made it here, after all the days and nights when he lit up old Shea Stadium, and jump-started The K Korner all over again, and seemed perfectly capable of throwing fastballs past the world. After that, of course, because of the power of his addictions and his own weaknesses, he famously tried to throw it all away.

But on Sunday, when people should come out to see him at Citi Field the way they used to come to see him at old Shea, he won’t just be young again. He will be a Met again, one of the most important they ever had, despite all the heartbreak later.

I asked him what the best of it was for him in 1985, the year before his Mets won the World Series, when he was 24-4 and every start felt like a compelling as the ones we would get much later when Aaron Judge was trying to break home run records in September of 2022.