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The Bad Guys Won! : A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Str

jeff pearlman

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"Jeff Pearlman has captured the swagger of the '86 Mets. You don't have to be a Mets fan to enjoy this book—it's a great read for all baseball enthusiasts." —Philadelphia Daily News 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 Johnson—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.

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 26,2005
Places
new york (state), 

This edition

Format
304 pages, Paperback
Published
April 26, 2005 by Harper Perennial
ISBN
9780060507336
ASIN
0060507330
Language
English

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About the author

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jeff pearlman

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Jeff Pearlman is an American sportswriter. He has written nine books that have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list: four about football, three on baseball and two about basketball. He authored the 1999 John Rocker interview in Sports Illustrated.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
42(42%)
4 stars
28(28%)
3 stars
30(30%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
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JazzLux
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Good look back at the '85 Mets as well as the years leading up to it and the players and personalities involved. A must read for Mets fans to learn more about the best team they've had, as well as a solid read for baseball fans to see how wild these players and teams truly were.
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blacoffee
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Thoroughly enjoyed this book and Pearlman has cemented himself as my favorite sports writer, but this one did not hit as hard as Showtime. Still a fantastic read and a lot of it gave huge “dudes rock” vibes (except for the drug addiction parts), but only having one year worth of stories meant there just wasn’t as much to explore as Showtime. Also the book was published in 04 or 05, so the epilogue is laughably outdated, but I’m assuming that matters to a very small subset of readers (it’s me, I’m readers).
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huachengontop
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Great read as a Mets fan, obviously. I loved the ride from when Cashen takes over the team through the entire 1986 season. Once you hit the chapters that cover the series against HOU and BOS, it’s hard to put down.

PS: I added this book as “reading” on July 14th but didn’t actually pick it up for a while. I’m not THAT slow!
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rizuky
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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Really enjoyed the 30 for 30 doc so I picked this up to continue the story. Well written and captivating team—even as a former Red Sox fan. Ironically, I bought this book for a friend years ago. Will have to check in to see if he read and enjoyed it
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asunoII
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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As a lifelong Mets fan, I wanted to love this book. And, to be sure, it was an engaging book and briskly readable. It's very well reported. Pearlman gets some astonishingly candid quotes; players are fearless about ripping each other on the record (one wonders what the author heard *off* the record). So why only three stars? The writing can be a little grating, especially toward the end when the narrative feels rushed and the author starts larding on the cliches and attempts at humor that fall flat. Still, worth your time is you're a Mets fan, remember the '86 team, and you're willing to have a few of your illusions punctured.
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Kinspie13
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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I'd recommend this for anyone who was a baseball fan in the late '80s/early '90s. It's a really fun team to read about, but Pearlman is kind of obnoxious and any writerly touches detracted from rather than added to the fun of reading about these Mets.
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Mayokawa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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My views are a little split — on one hand, it provides excellent insight into those 1986 Mets, who I never had to chance to watch. It was almost like living the events through the writing. But about that writing — some of the topics approached by the author were done so in an already-outdated manner. Perhaps that was intentional, to make you feel like you were back in '86, but I don't think so. In the end, I really enjoyed it and thought it was tied together remarkably well. Wish I could give it a 3.5.
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BijuuTitan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 1,2025
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So, if you want to tarnish your vision of a great baseball team, then this is for you. I rooted for the Mets against the Red Sox in 1986 because I was a national league fan. If I had known what the Mets were really like, I would have rooted for the Red Sox. This book is the inside scandal tabloid of baseball-perhaps more than Ball Four. The latter was funny, but not cruel. In the Bad Guys Won, Pearlman recounts some of the most disgusting, belligerent, egotistical, jealousies, and even criminal behavior of the characters that made up the 86 Mets. This is far more than juvenile behavior, or "boys being boys". This is assaulting police, domestic violence, cocaine use, bar brawls, and almost sociopathic behavior. It made me lose respect for virtually the entire team-except Tim Teuful, Mookie Wilson, Ray Knight, and Gary Carter. But even Carter takes a beating for his camera obsession and egotism above team. To a lesser extent Knight is bruised slightly because of ego. But the book is more than sophomoric hijinks. It also recounts GM Frank Cashen's build of a team that should have been a baseball dynasty. I enjoyed the recap of the great playoff with the Astros, and the classic-never to be forgotten-1986 World Series against the Red Sox. All in all, it is an entertaining book about a bunch of misfits who managed to pull it together and win it all.
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