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The Bad Guys Won

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Overview

In The Bad Guys Won, award-winning former 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.

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Author Information

Bio of Jeff Pearlman

Jeff Pearlman is a columnist for SI.com and a former Sports Illustrated senior writer. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Boys Will Be Boys and The Bad Guys Won! and the critically acclaimed Love Me, Hate Me. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

779.48 KB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780061155697

Excerpt from: The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman

Chapter 1
Food Flight

It wasn't just guys destroying a plane. It was guys destroying a plane after an emotional roller coaster. There's a difference.
-- RANDY NIEMANN, Mets pitcher

Ray Knight's arms were numb. Not just numb as if he'd spent a few too many minutes in the snow. Numb numb -- as if he'd just swum two thousand laps in an Olympic-sized pool. As if he'd just sparred eight hundred rounds with George Foreman. As if someone had grabbed a 10-foot machete, reared back, and sliced off both limbs. "Maybe someone did," he says with a laugh. "I wouldn't have known."

It wasn't just his arms, either. Inside the head of New York's third baseman a drum was beating. His hands were shaking. His mouth was cotton-dry. His feet were on fire. His uniform must have held twenty pounds of sweat. "I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't move," Knight says. "I couldn't even think."

It was exhaustion, more pure and painful than any he had ever felt before. Than any he would ever feel again. "I haven't been in war," he says. "But..."

But this was war. Or at least the next closest thing.

Sixteen innings. In 16 beautiful, electric, heart-wrenching, gut-churning, bladder-bursting, finger-twitching, eye-bulging, throat-burning innings of baseball, the New York Mets had been pushed to the brink over and over again. On enemy turf, no less. Finally, they had pushed back.

Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series: