{"id":5724,"date":"2011-04-18T15:18:57","date_gmt":"2011-04-18T19:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=5724"},"modified":"2011-04-18T15:18:57","modified_gmt":"2011-04-18T19:18:57","slug":"former-baseball-star-doc-gooden-gets-probation-for-dui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=5724","title":{"rendered":"Former Baseball Star Doc Gooden Gets Probation For DUI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Former Mets and Yankees star <strong>Dwight Gooden <\/strong>was sentenced Friday to five years of probation for driving under the influence of cocaine and sleeping pills while taking his 5-year-old son to school.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gooden<\/strong>, 46, faced three years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors several months ago. But Superior Court <strong>Judge Donald Venezia<\/strong> said the former pitcher deserved another chance to rid his life of addiction. <strong>Gooden<\/strong>, he said, is a decent guy who had a good chance of \u201cfinishing the game.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The judge told the 1985 National League Cy Young Award winner that he should think of himself now as a fourth-inning pitcher who is getting walloped by the opposing batters and whose coaches are contemplating whether to take him out of the game.<\/p>\n<p>In this game-of-life analogy, <strong>Venezia<\/strong> said, failure could mean ruining his legacy, embarrassing his children or even dying at a young age.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Gooden<\/strong>, agreed in an interview after the hearing in Hackensack that his life is on the line.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI just have to take it a day at a time, and sometimes an hour at a time,\u201d <strong>Gooden <\/strong>said. \u201cI can\u2019t look at it like I have to do this for 10 years. I just have to look at it like I have to get through today and then deal with tomorrow when it comes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Mets and Yankees star Dwight Gooden was sentenced Friday to five years of probation for driving under the influence of cocaine and sleeping pills while taking his 5-year-old son to school. Gooden, 46, faced three years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement he struck with prosecutors several months ago. But Superior [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}