Book details lives of the 1986 Mets; great team, not-so-nice guys
(AP) – The 1986 New York Mets were larger than life. Literally.
At one point on the West Side of the city, a 25-foot-high mural of pitcher Dwight Gooden stared down from a building, a stunning symbol of the shadow the brash and talented team cast over New York during that dominant season which ended with a World Series win.
To capture the hearts and minds of a city the way the Mets did in 1986, it is necessary for a team to be not just successful, but colourful. There have been countless teams that have won championships, even more that have featured young stars on the rise.
But the Mets – who did win and had more than their share of future Hall of Fame-calibre talent – were not just any other team. They had personality (many would say unabashed arrogance) to spare. And in 1986, with the New York Yankees still years away from their later dominance, the Mets were the best show in town – on and off the field.
This is, after all, a team that had nine players record a rap song inspired by the Super Bowl Shuffle by the Chicago Bears – winners of the 1985 Super Bowl. The only difference was the Mets recorded Get Metsmerized only one game into the 86 season.
It is this irresistible mix of talent, arrogance, personality and general trouble-making that Jeff Pearlman looks back at in his book The Bad Guys Won!
Pearlman, who wrote the Sports Illustrated article in which pitcher John Rocker, then of the Atlanta Braves, disparaged minorities and homosexuals, has crafted an entertaining romp of a book through the successful and turbulent season – albeit one that provides more gossip than insight.
After a brief recounting of how all the principal figures in the Mets organization (general manager Frank Cashen, manager Davey Johnson, the players) came to be with the team in 1986, the focus swings quickly to the championship season.
“The Mets were Satan,” Pearlman writes at one point.
The team wasn’t quite that bad, but they weren’t choirboys either. Still, much of what Pearlman writes is far from a revelation. It has long been known that Gooden and fellow young superstar Darryl Strawberry were out of control, abusing drugs and wasting their talent. It’s no secret that Gary Carter’s rah-rah style of play irritated many opponents and teammates, and that Lenny Dykstra lived his life off the field as hard as he played baseball on it.
The 86 Mets are one of the more charismatic teams of recent times (for better or for worse) and many of their exploits and downfalls have long since been public knowledge. What Pearlman has done is collect them under one umbrella of a book, and provided salacious details for some of the wilder stories.
The Bad Guys Won! is entertaining, but it would be hard for any book about this team not to be. Where Pearlman has failed is in not getting past the outrageousness of the team to look deeper into the effect its rise – and downfall – had on sports and baseball in general, and New York in particular.
Instead, in the pages of this book, the Mets remain caricatures, punch lines to jokes that never seemed possible back when the team was on top of the world.
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 was written by Jeff Pearlman and published by HarperCollins.
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