“Doc Gooden” shows us a snapshot of a baseball pitcher who hopes it’s coming back but knows it probably isn’t.

Track: “Doc Gooden”
Album: In League with Dragons (2019)

Dwight “Doc” Gooden pitched in Major League Baseball for 16 years. He was excellent and then he wasn’t. He battled addiction and he’s been arrested several times for a variety of offenses, mostly drug related but not entirely, and he was on a VH1 reality show about addiction with Lindsay Lohan’s dad and a guy from Baywatch.

There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about people who are troubled and a lot of them aren’t about real people. The benefit of using an unnamed character is that we only know what you tell us about them. Someone standing by a river as a boat pulls away also has another life we don’t get to see. We fill in what we need to be true about them to support the story. John Darnielle loves quotidian details in songs to help tell us what kind of person this is, but it’s never enough to know them completely.

That’s not true for “Doc Gooden.” This is someone who is in the falling action of their career, but they don’t know it’s going to get much, much worse. They are engaged with failure directly, though, which is unique. “Summon up the spirit of a brighter time // looked back last week against the Blue Jays” is a fascinating set of lines. Gooden wants to feel better about how it used to be, but the immediate past tells him he’s not that guy anymore.

We know, because we exist outside of this song, what is going to happen after this. We know that even this distant hope for a triumphant second act isn’t going to pay off. It deepens the sadness because it’s real, and it especially does because even the worst that Gooden is bracing for isn’t as low as it’s going to go.