The Bad Guys Won

A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform - and Maybe the Best

By: Jeff Pearlman

Narrated by: Jeff Pearlman

Award-winning Sports Illustrated baseball writer Jeff Pearlman returns to an innocent time when a city worshipped a man named Mookie and the Yankees were the second-best team in New York.

It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake-hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.

With an unforgettable cast of characters - including Doc, Straw, the Kid, Nails, Mex, and manager Davey Joshson - this "affectionate but critical look at this exciting season" (Publishers Weekly) celebrates the last of baseball's arrogant, insane, rock-and-roll-and-party-all-night teams, exploring what could have been, what should have been, and what never was.

©2004, 2011 Jeff Pearlman (P)2021 Tantor

My childhood memories now come with some flavor!

I was 11 when the Mets win the ‘86 World Series and to me, they where the Olympian Gods of baseball. To see them as they really were does not diminish that memory for me, but enhances it with the full story. I will always cherish those ‘86 Mets and to see them as human, as flawed, makes them all the more dear to my heart.

Jeff Pearlman ALWAYS Delivers

Everything Pearlman writes is creative, literary, yet also accessible. This is no exception. Great storytelling with amazing attention to detail.

Worth a read… Even if you are nowhere near a Mets fan

Went from listening to “Three Ring Circus“ – Jeff Pearlman‘s 2010’s-era account of the LA Lakers – to this, and it certainly shows the maturation of Jeff Pearlman. First, this inaugural voyage of his does a very good job of chronicling the Mets’ 1986 success, with sufficient profiles of the players and administrators at hand. However, it definitely shows that Pearlman was still learning, and still growing as a novelist, because his later works show just how much more depth he goes into to show the three dimensions of each person involved in his writings a decade later. It also shows the maturation of Pearlman (or his Audible editor) to realize that Perlman - like many of those scribes from this era – is a good writer, but not a great speaker. In some ways, he sabotages his own great writing in this, So in later books, he/they let more professional speakers handle delivering his prose. Still definitely worth a read.

The author and his presentation were both excellent

The stories were great as well as the presentation and tone of the author in particular

Even I Loved It

This was a great overall book! Having grown up a Yankees fan in NYC, I appreciated this Mets prospective. I was too young to really understand what was going on, but it's great to understand now. Highly suggested for any baseball fan!