The Bad Guys Won
By Jeff Pearlman
Harper Collins

As a kid, sportswriter Jeff Pearlman was like any decent, god-fearing American boy is supposed to be. He loved sports, particularly baseball, and he loved the Mets, the home-town team for his upstate New York childhood.

In the mid-‘80s he and the rest of the Met-loving world really had something to get excited about. The team, slowly but surely, overcame the all-around rottenness of the preceding half-decade, thanks in part to acquisitions of such standouts as first baseman Keith Hernandez, catcher Gary Carter and outfielder Darrell Strawberry, joined by a formidable pitching staff led by Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez. The team rocketed to the top of its division in 1986, eventually becoming world champs in a now mythical seven-game World Series against the hapless Boston Red Sox.

Pearlman was hooked, not just by the amazing talent of the ‘86 team, but by the devil-may-care, off the cuff and even outrageous attitudes and behavior of a group of highly-talented miscreants that, for one amazing year, made the world forget that the Yankees are New York’s team.

So why so much talk about the author? Besides being a phenomenal sports writer (he’s the guy that broke the news to the world in Sports Illustrated that John Rocker is an ignorant ass), Pearlman is still that little kid who loves baseball, loves the Mets, and misses the days when professional athletes played as much grab-ass as they did ball.

It is through that looking glass that he wrote “The Bad Guys Won,” which shines the light of day on the egos and attitudes that made up the ‘86 Mets.

Pearlman comes at the topic with the youthful enthusiasm he had and still holds for a sport that, by his own admission, has become a little bland. Working as a writer for Sports Illustrated for six years, he says in the preface to “The Bad Guys Won,” crushed his fantasies about who professional baseball players really are.

He describes a flight with the Oakland A’s in 2002, while working on a piece with the theme “baseball’s zaniest bunch.” What he got was not zaniness but tedium – a five-hour flight on which the wildest thing that happened was one player lending another a set of headphones.

Pearlman contrasts the A’s docile in-flight manner to that of the ’86 Mets, who were notorious for rendering the inside of chartered jets uninhabitable. Reading “The Bad Guys Won,” it’s hard to imagine any of the ’86 Mets sitting still even for takeoffs and landings, let alone for the entire flight.

Pearlman write of a notorious United Airlines chartered flight from Houston to New York, following a seven to six win over the Astros in game six of the national league championships. The team was tire, elated and, by the time it reached the tarmac, drunk as a pack of skunks. What happened next is the kind of thing the author had expected from the “zany” 2002 Athletics – drugs, destruction and debauchery.

“…The airplane was a disaster area,” writes Pearlman. “Upon landing, two or three wives had to be carried off the jet. Others weren’t quite sure of their whereabouts. Half the team exited wearing t-shirts and ties. (pitcher Doug) Sisk wore one shoe.”

In the end, the Mets did $7,500 damage to the DC-10, actually destroying three entire rows of seats. It’s an ugly but enthralling tale – and that’s just the first chapter.

The book is full of tales of debauchery and hedonism, but also packed with interesting information about who the players and coaches of the 86 Mets were, what made each of them great at what they did, and how, together, they came to be such a powerful team.

Equally as interesting is the anecdotal evidence Pearlman offers about some of the athletic downfalls even a team as strong as the ’86 Mets copes with. Dwight Gooden’s off-the-field antics are well documented, but lesser known are the problems he had with his pitching. Pearlman blames Gooden’s tribulation in part on pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, who made it his goal to teach the 1985 Cy Young

Award winner a third pitch.

Catcher Gary Carter testifies to just how hard the situation was on Gooden.

“I always thought they should have left him alone,” he says. “Mel thought teaching him a third pitch would be to his advantage. But he didn’t need it. He needed someone to say ‘Hey, you’ve been successful Just keep going at it.’ But they didn’t.

Though the book does get a little wistful in places, Pearlman generally gets away with his “good ol’ days” approach to the sport and his team. The stories of the off-the-field antics of these players are shocking, hilarious and sometimes sad, but all worth reading, particularly in a time when player greed and shallowness are all the color the game seems to muster among players.