AUGUST – 1990: Darryl Strawberry #18 of the New York Mets gets ready to run on a play during a season game in August of 1990. (Photo by Bernstein Associates/Getty Images)
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President Donald Trump has granted a pardon to former baseball star Darryl Strawberry, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion nearly three decades ago.
Strawberry and Baseball
Darryl Eugene Strawberry, who spent 17 years in Major League Baseball, was an eight-time All-Star and one of only five Major League Baseball (MLB) players to hit two pinch-hit grand slams in the same season. He is most commonly recognized as a New York Met, spending nearly half of his career with the team, from 1983 to 1990.
Strawberry made his professional debut after the Mets took him as the Number 1 pick in the 1980 free-agent draft when he was just 18 years old. As is common, he spent the next 2½ years in the minors before moving up to the big league—the Mets offered him a $200,000 signing bonus to skip college. It paid off for the Mets and Strawberry—he was voted the National League’s Rookie of the Year in 1983 after racking up 108 hits, 26 home runs, 74 RBIs, and 19 stolen bases. Three years later, he homered in the Game 7 win over Boston to bring the World Series championship to New York.
Even though the season was a smash for Strawberry’s career, it marked a challenging time in his personal life. He was routinely abusing drugs and drinking heavily, even in the clubhouse. (The MLB didn’t require random drug testing at that point.)
His first wife, Lisa, filed for separation the following year, accusing him of domestic violence. That same year, he led the National League with 39 homers. So long as he was producing, those around him had little incentive to step in. Law enforcement did it instead. In January 1990, Strawberry was arrested in Los Angeles for domestic violence (he had moved to California after signing with the Dodgers). The charges were eventually dropped, after Strawberry went into rehab for alcohol abuse (he stayed less than a week).
Income Tax And Financial Woes
A longer stay in rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic followed in 1993, but by that time, Strawberry’s personal life was unraveling. On December 9, 1994, Strawberry was indicted on one count of income tax conspiracy and two counts of tax evasion for failing to pay $146,000 in income taxes from 1986 to 1990, stemming from failing to report money made at card shows and other appearances. (Pete Rose was hit with similar charges in 1990.)
On February 10, 1995, Strawberry pled guilty to one count of tax evasion and was ordered to repay $350,000 to the IRS. He served just six months of home confinement and two years of probation.
(Strawberry’s agent, Eric Goldschmidt, who was also indicted, chose to go to trial and was found not guilty. Meade Chasky, Strawberry’s former card show agent was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony against Strawberry.)
Strawberry’s legal and financial woes continued. He tested positive for drugs several times, was charged with failing to make child support payments, and sued by his attorney for not paying his bills. He was also arrested for soliciting sex and for possession of cocaine. He was suspended by MLB, but again faced no jail time, being sentenced to 21 months probation and community service.
After enduring cancer treatments in 1999, Strawberry would spend the next three years in and out of drug treatment centers. By the time he had officially retired, Strawberry had been suspended three times by MLB for substance abuse.
An eight-time All Star, he retired with four World Series rings. In his 2009 autobiography, Strawberry noted, “I made some good choices, and I made some really bad ones.” The book made some money for Strawberry, which turned out to be a good thing. In 2010, the IRS was still trying to collect from Strawberry and sent a levy notice to his publisher, alleging that he still owed $405,522 in back taxes, penalties and interest for 1989 and 1990. In 2011, a separate notice of federal tax lien filed in a Florida court case involving the Mets, indicated that he also owed $53,817 in unpaid taxes from 2003 and 2004.
In was a far cry from Strawberry’s heyday in baseball. In 1991, when Forbes started tracking the highest paid athletes, Strawberry was the #1 baseball player, making $3.8 million a year. In his autobiography, he wrote that, sometimes, while riding home in a limo from an appearance gig, “Doc (Dwight Gooden) and I would roll down the windows and toss $100 bills out, just to see them fly away. It was free money, what did we care.”
Post Baseball Life
Although his career officially ended in 2000, Strawberry’s number 18 was retired by the New York Mets in 2024. At the ceremony, Strawberry said, “I don’t regret what happened to me because it made me the man that I am today,” he told the crowd. “I’m thankful for every challenge that I had to face and every circumstance I had to go through, because it just just kept me moving forward to try to be a better man.”
Since leaving baseball, Strawberry has become an ordained minister. He is now a preacher with his own congregation. He’s also opened several treatment centers in his name and shared his story on multiple platforms, including CrisisNextDoor.gov, an initiative launched by the first Trump administration in 2018 to combat the opioid epidemic.
It wasn’t Strawberry’s first interaction with Trump. In 2010, Strawberry appeared on NBC’s The Apprentice—Trump fired him at the end of the third episode.
Strawberry’s Pardon
Strawberry announced his pardon on Instagram, including a picture of himself and Trump. He wrote, “Thank you, President @realdonaldtrump for my full pardon and for finalizing this part of my life, allowing me to be truly free and clean from all of my past.”
Screenshot from Darryl Strawberry’s Instagram dated 11/07/2025
Kelly Phillips Erb
Strawberry said he was “overwhelmed with gratitude — thanking God for setting me free from my past, helping me become a better Man, Husband and Father.”
Trump Pardons
Strawberry’s pardon is one of roughly 1,600 granted by Trump in 2025.
(About 1,500 of those pardons are tied to convictions for the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, and last week, Trump had signed a proclamation granting pardons preempting future federal prosecutions for 77 people, including Rudy Giuliani, associated with the plot to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.)
In just over nine months since Trump has been back in office, roughly 10,000 people have filed petitions for pardons or commutations.
Over his two terms, Trump granted clemency to a number of people convicted of white-collar offenses. In 2025, Strawberry joined six others who were granted clemency after committing tax crimes. Those include reality television stars Julie Chrisley, convicted on conspiracy to commit bank fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. to obstruct and impede tax laws, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice, as well as her husband Todd Chrisley, who was convicted of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. to obstruct and impede tax laws, and tax evasion.
Also pardoned was Marian Morgan, who along with her husband John, stole roughly $28 million from 87 victims, according to prosecutors. She was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, transfer of funds taken by fraud, money laundering, and making false statements on income tax returns.
Trump also pardoned former U.S. Representative Michael Grimm (R-NY), who had been convicted of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false and fraudulent tax returns; venture capitalist and political fundraiser Imaad Shah Zuberi, who was sentenced to 12 years for concealing his work as a foreign agent while lobbying high-level U.S. government officials, evading the payment of millions of dollars in taxes, making illegal campaign contributions, and obstructing a federal investigation into the source of donations to a presidential inauguration committee; and former Arkansas State Senator Jeremy Hutchinson, who had been sentenced for accepting multiple bribes and tax fraud.
You can see the full list here.
Clemency v. Commutation v. Pardon
The legal terms—clemency, commutation and pardon—are sometimes tossed around as though they are the same thing, but they are not.
A pardon is an act of executive power that results in the complete forgiveness of a crime. The result is an absolution of guilt, meaning the conviction is wiped out. Any related penalties that might apply to the crime—like the inability to hold public office or vote—are also eliminated. In that way, a pardon more or less restores you to the way that you were before the conviction. That means, for example, that you do not have to disclose that you were ever convicted on future job applications.
Article II of the Constitution grants the President the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” (Notably, the power only applies to federal offenses and does not include state crimes.)
A commutation is not as powerful. A commutation shortens or eliminates the punishment for a crime but does not erase the conviction—the guilty label still stands.
Clemency is used to describe both pardons and commutations. It’s a catch-all phrase for mercy or relief from punishment.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2025/11/14/darryl-strawberrys-long–path-to-a-tax-conviction-and-trump-pardon/
