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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the story about how the New York Mets went from the laughing stock of baseball with average crowds of 9700 to a team of stars, crowds of 35,000 and victory in the 1986 World Series - and then how it all fell apart.
Although you will need a basic understanding of the rules of baseball to follow the on-field action, this is not just for the baseball fans. Jeff Pearlman has a clear, journalistic style that captures the energy and drama of the 1986 Mets baseball team - the triumphs and the disasters, the fighting, gambling, beer drinking, drug-taking, womanising and the baseball.
By the time it gets to chapter 19, the scene is set for "the greatest managerial screwup in baseball history", and, in the most unlikely of circumstances, the crushing of the Boston Red Sox' dream of breaking the Curse of the Bambino.
Overall this book fizzes along at great pace and captures the human stories behind one of baseball's most remembered World Series. A great read.
Although you will need a basic understanding of the rules of baseball to follow the on-field action, this is not just for the baseball fans. Jeff Pearlman has a clear, journalistic style that captures the energy and drama of the 1986 Mets baseball team - the triumphs and the disasters, the fighting, gambling, beer drinking, drug-taking, womanising and the baseball.
By the time it gets to chapter 19, the scene is set for "the greatest managerial screwup in baseball history", and, in the most unlikely of circumstances, the crushing of the Boston Red Sox' dream of breaking the Curse of the Bambino.
Overall this book fizzes along at great pace and captures the human stories behind one of baseball's most remembered World Series. A great read.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Pearlman's roundup of the '86 season feels like a dusted-off high school yearbook, packed with distant memories of old friends. The Mets were the cool kids, the jocks, the guys you wanted to hang with. Turns out they were also the coke addicts, the jailbirds, and the boors who trashed airplanes. (One of them may've even decapitated a cat!) Yet all the while, through the madness and mayhem and brawls and squabbles (and Roger McDowell's endless hot-foots), they did what general manager Frank Cashen assembled them to do -- win games. With the incredible Game 6 of the World Series, which began with a descent to the infield by a Met-crazed parachutist and ended with the most famous grounder in the history of baseball, they even managed to win games they'd already lost.
Yearbook browsing, though fun and filled with laughs, inevitably causes sadness. Lost youth, wasted opportunities, and so on. The Bad Guys Won is less a celebration of a season of destiny and more a gossipy, behind-the-scenes exposure of shortcomings, immaturity, and human frailty. For a sports fan, any recounting of the details of '86 are worth reading, and Pearlman's evenhanded coverage is certainly just that -- equal parts sensational and poignant. Was Darryl Strawberry "selfish and vicious," or a good guy possessed of "a warm heart?" Was Davey Johnson a managerial genius, or a lucky guy with the right team at the right time? To his credit, Pearlman simply relays his sources' stories and lets you decide for yourself.
Yearbook browsing, though fun and filled with laughs, inevitably causes sadness. Lost youth, wasted opportunities, and so on. The Bad Guys Won is less a celebration of a season of destiny and more a gossipy, behind-the-scenes exposure of shortcomings, immaturity, and human frailty. For a sports fan, any recounting of the details of '86 are worth reading, and Pearlman's evenhanded coverage is certainly just that -- equal parts sensational and poignant. Was Darryl Strawberry "selfish and vicious," or a good guy possessed of "a warm heart?" Was Davey Johnson a managerial genius, or a lucky guy with the right team at the right time? To his credit, Pearlman simply relays his sources' stories and lets you decide for yourself.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Recently we have been asked to reconsider sports writers as maligned and overlooked authors with as much style/worth as any other. Here's a book which seems designed to undo that conceit.
It is extremely badly written, full of inane similes and ridiculous cliches. The writer simply cannot write, he contradicts himself at length, spending a chapter asking us to reconsider a player and then two chapters later you'll find him happily rehashing the same, easy generalisations himself. His style is overwrought, confused and confusing, at times he switches between players surnames, first names or nicknames for no apparent reason and this is certainly not his most grievous crime.
It has the feel of having actually been written by one of the sozzled players on the drunken and drugged up plane ride back to new york, in which case perhaps it is a startling work of vérité and the product of a misunderstood genius, but I fear not. If you are familiar with this team you will have no reason to read this book and if you are not but are interested I can't imagine there will be many worse places to start.
It is extremely badly written, full of inane similes and ridiculous cliches. The writer simply cannot write, he contradicts himself at length, spending a chapter asking us to reconsider a player and then two chapters later you'll find him happily rehashing the same, easy generalisations himself. His style is overwrought, confused and confusing, at times he switches between players surnames, first names or nicknames for no apparent reason and this is certainly not his most grievous crime.
It has the feel of having actually been written by one of the sozzled players on the drunken and drugged up plane ride back to new york, in which case perhaps it is a startling work of vérité and the product of a misunderstood genius, but I fear not. If you are familiar with this team you will have no reason to read this book and if you are not but are interested I can't imagine there will be many worse places to start.
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