Hard-throwing left-handed relief pitcher. Steve Howe joined the major leagues in 1980 at the age of 22. He was National League Rookie of the Year that year.
In 1981, he helped the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series.
But by 1982 Steve Howe’s life and baseball career were starting to unravel, done in by alcohol and cocaine abuse. In 1984 Howe was banned from baseball but reinstated on appeal.
By 1987 his baseball career appeared to be over for good. It would be another four years before he was able to re-sign with another team, this time the New York Yankees.
While he was away from the game, Howe wrote a book, an autobiography that he called Between the Lines. I talked with him in the summer of 1989 about the book
So here now, from 1989, Steve Howe.
Steve Howe retired from baseball in 1997. In 2006 he was killed in a single-vehicle accident – a toxicology report later showed methamphetamine in the system. He was 48.
