“Doc: A Memoir” by Dwight Gooden and Ellis Henican; New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($27)When it comes to the medium that is the sports autobiography, our nation offers a long and storied history of nonsense.With rare exception, the process goes thusly:Step 1: Athlete signs contract to “write” an autobiography.Step 2: Athlete is paired with an actual writer, who agrees to take, oh, 10 percent of the payout.Step 3: Athlete allows writer two or three hourlong sit-down interviews. They are recorded, then transcribed, then cobbled into a functional narrative.Step 4: Book — filled with glorious stories of this game and that pitch and those touchdowns — is released. Athlete makes a handful of contractually obligated appearances, poses for some pictures, lands three minutes on some mindless morning television show.Step 5: Life goes on.The latest addition to the genre is “Doc,” the memoir former New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden has “written” with Newsday’s Ellis Henican.And it’s (gasp!) outstanding.Let this be said again: Against all precedent, “Doc” is outstanding; a brutally honest, oft-painful retelling of the life of a onetime pitching phenom whose existence has been largely ruined by nearly three decades of on-again, off-again drug and alcohol abuse.If you’re a baseball fan looking for warm stories about the Mets’ improbable 1986 World Series championship, this isn’t your book. Gooden covers requisite on-field turf (the 1985 Cy Young trophy, the Fall Classic, the no-hitter, etc.), but with little enthusiasm. It’s as if, after years of one lie after another after another, Gooden saw “Doc” as an opportunity to stop holding back and hiding behind excuses.In short, he seems to view this as therapy. The most painful segment in “Doc” comes in a chapter titled “Party Time,” during which Gooden is introduced to cocaine a month before spring training 1986.From this moment on, Gooden is less a pitcher, more a junkie. Whenever faced with a choice between sport or family and cocaine, he picks cocaine.Odds are, “Doc” doesn’t sell especially well. Gooden, now 48 and off drugs for two years, hasn’t thrown a major league pitch in 13 seasons. And yet, one gets the feeling this isn’t about reaching a best-seller list. This is about coming clean.