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The basic approach to an Is this true? query about a particular event is to find someone who witnessed or participated in the incident and can therefore provide a first-hand account of the facts. This approach is not always straightforward, however, because human beings, and their memories, are fallible. People forget, they misremember details, they exaggerate, and sometimes they even tell outright lies. Having two witnesses to an event is even better, of course, but that situation can create additional difficulties if their accounts of same incident differ substantially. One might be able to sift through their stories and piece together a reasonably accurate account from parts of each, but the process is usually problematic. And what about a situation in which two people, both supposedly participants in the same event, not only can't agree on whether the incident took place at all, but the one who first maintained that it did also claims, incredibly, that he never talked about it! That last scenario applies to a pair of baseball players who were teammates on the New York Mets in the mid-1980s, pitcher Dwight Gooden and outfielder Kevin Mitchell. In his 1999 autobiography Heat, Gooden related a chilling and disturbing tale about his former teammate: This narrative would seem to be everything necessary to confirm this tale as true: a detailed, first-person account related by someone who was a direct participant in the event (and found it significant enough to include in his autobiography). However, as author Jeff Pearlman documented while conducting player interviews for his book about the 1986 New York Mets championship team, The Bad Guys Won!, Kevin Mitchell not only vehemently denied that the incident described by Gooden ever took place, he insisted he was going to get Gooden for spreading such wild tales about him. And when Mitchell finally had an opportunity to confront Gooden, the latter insisted he hadn't said anything about the alleged cat-beheading incident (despite that fact that it was described in his autobiography), and, incredibly, Mitchell seemed perfectly satisfied with that answer: Clearly, someone was lying. But who? Did Dwight Gooden fabricate an account of something that never took place, or did Kevin Mitchell fib in claiming that what Gooden had written was fiction? Jeff Pearlman suggested the former: It's possible that Dwight Gooden (who was twice suspended from baseball after testing positive for cocaine use) was seeking to deflect attention from his own substance abuse problems and made up a salacious story about a teammate to accomplish that goal, but that explanation doesn't seem likely. Gooden wrote candidly, at length, about his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in his autobiography (indeed, the majority of Heat is a recounting of Gooden's drug problems; discussion of his baseball career is a distinctly secondary portion of the book). Moreover, many of Gooden's teammates on the Mets were enmeshed in scandals involving drug abuse, sex, and violence, but Gooden didn't offer up comparable tales about any of them in his book. An obvious explanation that springs to mind is that, despite the paradoxical name, many celebrities (especially athletes) don't write their autobiographies. It has long been the practice in the sports field to pay star players to put their names to newspaper columns, books, and even autobiographies ghostwritten by professional scribes, often with little or no input from the players themselves. New York Times reporter Buster Olney described an instance when a bit of newspaper ghostwriting came back to haunt Mets pitcher David Cone, one of Gooden's teammates: Gooden's autobiography, Heat, was written with that very same Bob Klapisch, so how much of the finished work was Gooden's own words (rather than the product of his co-writer's efforts) is difficult to discern. Nonetheless, Klapsich is a well-known sportswriter, and it's rather unlikely he would have fabricated a libelous tale about Kevin Mitchell and inserted it into Gooden's autobiography, all without any input or foreknowledge on Gooden's part. And such an act would have been rather ironic, considering that Heat contains a passage in which Gooden maintained he was hurt by false accusations about him printed in teammate Darryl Strawberry's autobiography, and accepted Strawberry's explanation that his ghostwriter had put words in his mouth: (Of course, Gooden could have engaged in a technically correct but deliberately misleading dodge when he responded by saying he didn't write about the alleged beheading, since his co-author presumably was the one who actually put his words down on paper. We tried contacting Bob Klapisch to see if could provide any insight on the story, but we did not receive a response from him.) Darryl Strawberry supposedly confirmed the beheading tale when asked about it in a 2014 HuffPost Live interview, saying: That's a pretty good story. I think that's pretty accurate. Kevin Mitchell did do that. Kevin Mitchell, he's a different type of guy ... I guess he figured that the girlfriend was acting a little crazy, so I'll kill her cat. Strawberry's confirmation was less than convincing, though: according to Dwight Gooden, Strawberry wasn't present when the alleged cat-beheading incident took place, so he couldn't have witnessed it himself. And his remarks about how the tale was a pretty good story, that I think [it's] pretty accurate, and I guess [Mitchell] figured that the girlfriend was acting a little crazy ... suggest that, like most everyone else, Strawberry merely heard about the alleged incident second-hand and assumed it was true because it seemed like the kind of thing Kevin Mitchell was capable of doing. With nothing more to go by, it's a toss-up for us to determine whether this is a true story or not. By Gooden's account there were a couple of witnesses to the alleged incident (Gooden's friend, Meade Chassky, and Mitchell's unnamed girlfriend), but we haven't found any evidence that either of them has ever discussed the matter publicly. Dwight Gooden might have told the truth, he might have made the whole story up, he might have related a greatly embellished version of something that did take place, or he might even have heard about the incident (true or otherwise) from a third party and retold it in the first person as if he had actually been there. All in all, it adds up to a We don't know.
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