MOUNT VERNON – Five minutes before Darryl Strawberry was scheduled to speak to a capacity crowd at Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s Chapel Auditorium on Wednesday night, he made his way through the crowd to find his seat.
The 6-foot-6 former Major League Baseball star ambled across one row and down another, and a hush came over the crowd as he greeted folks in the front row.
As the church band kicked off the night with three tunes, Strawberry came alive. He stomped his right foot and snapped to the beat, exchanging warm smiles with churchgoers across the aisle.
He rose his left arm to the sky, dressed in a navy blue collared shirt – the same shade he wore when he won three World Series titles with the New York Yankees in the late 1990s – and he sang aloud with the entire congregation behind him. When it was finally his turn to speak, he walked onto the stage and adjusted his headset microphone.
“If you’ve never seen a miracle, you’re looking at one right now,” he said, smiling.
Strawberry came to Mount Vernon to share his journey and provide perspective on how his relationship with God changed his life. He was the lead-off speaker for North Central Ohio District Church of the Nazarene‘s Family Camp, which will continue through Sunday.
During Strawberry’s 17-year MLB career, he hit 335 home runs and won four World Series rings. He was an eight-time all-star. But his career was marred by drug and alcohol addiction, as well as prostitution stings and prison sentences.
He grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father, who Strawberry said impacted his behavior.
“He beat me to crap, told me I’d never amount to nothing. I was abused. Before I ever put the uniform on, I already had scars,” Strawberry told the congregation.
But after bouncing in and out of rehab and prison after his pro career ended in 1999, he met his wife, Tracy, at a narcotics anonymous convention. She introduced him to the Bible and told him about how Christianity had impacted her recovery, and he was hooked.
Since their marriage in 2006, Tracy and Darryl have become ordained Christian ministers. They tour the country and spread their message of “healing through a relationship with Christ.”
“I don’t know what took me so long to read this,” Strawberry said, holding up his Bible, which was tattered and wrinkled from use.
Strawberry conducted an hour-long sermon, mixing in his own story with memorized Bible verses to back up his beliefs. The crowd was highly engaged, sprinkling in shouts of “Amen!” and “That’s right!” in between breaths and sometimes breaking the service with applause.
People came from across the Midwest to hear Strawberry speak, and many in the crowd vividly remembered watching him during his playing days.
Eliza Miller found her seat an hour before the service was set to start, sitting four rows from the back. She traveled over four hours, from Bedford, Pennsylvania, to see the service.
“What I’ll get out of it is I will watch the young people come and see how his speaking affects their life and their behavior,” Miller said before the service. “As I look through the congregation, my interest is more on how the other people respond to it than how I respond to it.”
Bob Shipe got there early as well, sitting seven rows up from the stage. He is a Mount Vernon native who remembers watching Strawberry play when he was younger. He hoped the service would bring the community together.
“You look at the big names that come around the bigger cities, and we’re not a big city and we’ve got a big name coming to visit us. So it’s a good thing,” Shipe said. “I guess I’ve lost track and I don’t know where he’s come from, but I know that he had some hard times. And you always like to hear the stories of the guys that picked themselves up.”
Sitting five rows back, Patti Evans and her husband traveled from Wooster to attend the service. They had the event on their calendar ever since their church announced it.
“He is a shining example of someone who made the wrong choice but Jesus brought him back,” Evans said of Strawberry.
While Evans is not from Knox County, she believed that the service would be important for any community.
“I don’t know particularly (about) this community, but I don’t think there’s a community in the United States that doesn’t need Jesus,” she said.
Rev. Wendell Brown, the North Central Ohio District Church of the Nazarene superintendent, sat in the front row. He said he’s developed a relationship with Strawberry and that they have worked together many times.
The NCO District Church of the Nazarene organizes events across 67 churches in 22 counties across north central Ohio, including Family Camp this week.
This year’s camp theme is “Now.” Brown emphasized in his opening remarks that he wanted the congregation not to be afraid of “opening up your heart to the power of Jesus Christ.”
Gliding back and forth across the stage, Strawberry revealed how his religious transformation changed his life and how he feels everyone can learn from his journey.
“Everyone struggles with something,” he said.
He spoke intimately about his downward spiral and the crowd applauded his honesty.
“See, I wasn’t always like this. I was a liar, I was a cheater, I was a womanizer, I was an alcoholic, I was a drug addict, I was a sinner. I was rich and famous, have been privileged my whole life, but I was broken on the inside. See we can all look good on the outside, TV and stuff makes us look good on the outside, but there (can be) a brokenness of who we are on the inside,” Strawberry told the congregation.
“I went through dysfunction in my life because I was broken on the inside and empty on the inside. I just accumulated a bunch of worldly things – fame, fortune, stuff. But it served no purpose, to gain all that and lose your soul.”
He also spoke of hope.
“God is waiting for you to come back home,” Strawberry said. “We think God needs something from us. He don’t want anything from you, he just want you, baby.”
At the end of the service, Strawberry encouraged members of the congregation to come down to the altar near the stage to pray. He joined them, hand-in-hand, as many were driven to tears.
“I was a baseball player when I put that jersey on,” Strawberry said with his deep, steady voice. “I was a man when I met Jesus.”
