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.

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 Also the book was published in 04 or 05, so the epilogue is laughably outdated, but I’m assuming that matters to a very small subset of readers (it’s me, I’m readers).

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was a fun, fast paced read detailing the events that built up to the New York Mets winning the 1986 World Series including the magical season and incredible playoff run. This team was stocked full of tons of interesting characters with backstories that could fill multiple books. Jeff Pearlman did a fantastic job pulling some interviews from many of the players and coaches that surrounded this team.

As a lifelong Mets fan, who was seven years old when the miracle Mets won the 1969 World Series, I love this book. The 86 team was a hodgepodge of eccentric characters, eccentric and extremely talented. As this book ably demonstrates this was a team destined to win and yet it could’ve gone the other way so easily. If you want a quick and extremely entertaining read about a quirky baseball club this book is for you.

I really wanted to like this book. Though the stories of the games were interesting, the writing is geared towards a teenage male who thinks pranks and fart jokes and treating women like objects and trashing property are funny. The jokes are really forced and completely weighed down with embarrassing similes every other line... It was painful to read at times. If I wasn't such a die hard Mets fan who wants to learn more about this WS win I would have given up pretty quickly.

The 1986 Mets: 108 wins, two incredible play-off series that included the infamous Bill Buckner error that prolonged the "curse of the bambino", the beginning of the fall of Daryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, both of whom had such potential and such a meteoric rise to fame that their falls take on the dimensions of Shakespearean tragic heroes.
This story deserved so much better. The ingredients are there for a serious work that transcends sports journalism, such as "The Summer of '49". If writing strictly as a fan the entry-style account utilized by Bill Simmons' "Now I can die in peace" about the Red Sox finally winning the world series would have been effective. If a character study was desired, Gay Talese's "the Silent Season of a Hero" could have been the model.
Instead, Jeff Pearlman wrote a book-length tabloid.
For some reason there is a trend toward taglines, blame the internet. Discerning readers are deemed incapable of deciding on a book based on subject matter and browsing a few passages. We now have taglines, as if we are online and being tempted to "click" for the full story.
The tagline for this book is alliterative, ridiculous and accurate:
"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 uniform---and maybe the best."
As the tagline promises, Pearlman teases the reader with lascivious morsels and insinuations---no character study, no scholarship. He merely collects the good bits from various autobiographies and interviews and arranges them in chronological order. The book has the depth expected from a pseudo sports journalist working in the 24 media world where everything needs to be loud, outrageous, and unique. How else can he expect to get our attention?
Fortunately for Pearlman, he chose a great topic. My hope is that this book inspires a good writer to give this team the book it deserves.