NASHVILLE, Tenn. – While his contemporaries pace the halls of the Gaylord Opryland Resort at this week’s baseball Winter Meetings, Floyd Youmans traverses this city in his white GMC Yukon Denali.
Once a talented young pitcher with an encouraging future, Youmans, now 51, spends his days driving for Uber.
He made his major-league debut a month after his 21st birthday, for the 1985 Montreal Expos, as a celebrated right-hander in the mold of childhood friend Dwight Gooden.
Youmans starred in a short stint as a rookie, then in 1986 threw 219 innings, struck out 202 batters, and posted a 3.82 ERA. At the end of the 1987 season, he entered alcohol rehabilitation. In 1988, he admitted to using cocaine and was suspended for failing to comply with the league’s drug-testing policy. The Expos traded him to Philadelphias that winter. He started on opening day 1989 for the Phillies, made nine more starts, and never pitched in the major leagues again.
For the next two decades, Youmans sought a way back into baseball, pitching or coaching or doing anything at all. Over the past five years, he has come closer to accepting he is not welcome in this world. This week, picking up passengers across Nashville and dropping them off at baseball’s temporary headquarters has provided an unwelcome reminder of what he’s missed.
“To be honest with you, when I picked you up, it made me a little sad, because I’m not involved in baseball,” Youmans told a meetings-bound rider in his Denali. “It’s strange how it goes. You feel a little sad, because you know how good you were, and now you’re not even relevant when it comes to the game. Once you’re out of baseball, no one pays you any attention.”
Youmans grew up getting attention alongside Gooden in Tampa, Fla., and excelled on the mound so much that he pushed Gooden to the outfield in high school. Midway through Youmans’s junior season, he left Florida and moved in with his father in Fontana.
The next June, the Mets selected Gooden with their first pick, fourth overall, and Youmans with their second, 33rd overall. New York sent him to Montreal two years later in a blockbuster deal for catcher Gary Carter.
Youmans remembers dueling Nolan Ryan in the summer of ’86, striking out future of Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, staring down Dale Murphy at his peak.
“Handling them guys like they’re Little Leaguers, that was a good feeling,” Youmans said. “Another good feeling is when you’ve got a stadium full of people and it’s a 3-2 count and the guy knows you’re throwing a fastball and he can’t do nothing about it.”
“I raised a little bit of hell.”
Off the field, too, where he fought addiction – to alcohol, never to cocaine, he says – and battled depression. He believes his crazed reputation was built in part by his association with Gooden, but he acknowledged the outrageousness of his actions.
“The mistakes you make as a young man, you sit back and look at them now, they were silly,” Youmans said. “I mean, come on: Other than playing ball, what are you doing? You’re spending money, you’re chasing women, and half the time you’re doing (expletive) you’re not supposed to do, because you’re living on the edge.
“Now, it’s like, my day-to-day life is productive.”
The only friend from baseball Youmans keeps in touch with is Wally Backman, the former Mets second baseman who’s held various coaching roles since retiring in 1993. Backman hired Youmans to be his pitching coach while he managed the independent league Joliet Jackhammers in 2009. That spring, while Youmans drove from Florida to Illinois, he stopped in Nashville to watch a friend coach a Little League team, and in the stands met Dr. Regina Offodile, a breast-cancer surgeon and resident at Meharry Medical College in this city.
She didn’t care about his baseball background, but loved his spirit. They soon married, and he moved here. She supports the family with her practice, and Youmans helps take care of her kids he treats as his own. During normal business hours, he drives for the ride-sharing service Uber to support the occasional hunting trip.
“A lot of people think that without baseball, life is tough,” he said. “It’s not. It’s OK. I have a nice home. I have a good life. But, yeah, I miss baseball. I miss it like crazy.”
Sometimes, his wife senses his aggravation at his isolation while he watches games on TV. She said she has asked her boys to go outside on occasion, to address it with her husband alone and ask if she can help.
“I can’t make this feeling go away,” he’ll say. “But it’s OK for me to feel that way, because I love the game. I’m not gonna go off the deep end.”
He has neared it in the past. In 1990, he became despondent when, in a three-month span, his two grandmothers died and the mother of his son was murdered the day before their child’s first birthday.
Life has presented him problems. In 2013, Youmans was diagnosed with heart disease and instructed to begin using a portable pacemaker. He changed his diet, lost 60 pounds and his condition improved rapidly. But he had spent a week in the hospital; the only people to visit were his wife and their kids.
“That’s when you start feeling the whole thing, about the friends you think you had,” he said.
Youmans’ wife knows how hard he has tried to get back into baseball. On Monday, he told her he had dropped off several baseball people at the Winter Meetings. She knew how he’d handle it: He’d reminisce for a bit, and then bounce back to the life he has grown to find fun.
“Important days of baseball, as they occur, he has a little bit of melancholy about it,” his wife said. “And then he puts them in perspective and moves on.”
Youmans recalled the sorrow and the success this week, and how it took him most of his life to become comfortable with how he had prospered and how he had failed. He flickered his turn signal and steered the Denali onto a frontage road five minutes from the Opryland.
“You spend so much time chasing trying to get back to somewhere,” he said. “But where you’re at might be better than where you’re trying to get.”
Contact the writer: pmoura@ocregister.com
