Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the '86 Mets (Signed Book)

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Overview

They said it was the “Curse of the Bambino.” They said “the bad guys won.” Now one of baseball’s all-time good guys, New York Mets legend Mookie Wilson, tells his side of the story—from the ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs that capped the miraculous 1986 World Series Game Six rally against the Boston Red Sox to the rise and fall of a team that boasted such outsize personalities as Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Lenny Dykstra, and Davey ...

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Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the '86 Mets

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More About This Book

Overview

They said it was the “Curse of the Bambino.” They said “the bad guys won.” Now one of baseball’s all-time good guys, New York Mets legend Mookie Wilson, tells his side of the story—from the ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs that capped the miraculous 1986 World Series Game Six rally against the Boston Red Sox to the rise and fall of a team that boasted such outsize personalities as Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, Lenny Dykstra, and Davey Johnson.

Growing up in rural South Carolina in the 1960s, Mookie took to heart the lessons of his father, a diligent sharecropper who believed in the abiding power of faith—and taught his son the game that would change his life.

When Mookie landed in Shea Stadium in 1980, the Mets were a perennial cellar-dweller overshadowed by the crosstown Yankees. But inspired by Mookie’s legendary hustle, they would soon become the toast of New York. And even when their off-field antics—made famous by a contingency of the team called “the Scum Bunch”—eclipsed their on-field successes, Mookie stayed above the fray.

In 1986, the Mets were a juggernaut, winning 108 games during the regular season and edging the Houston Astros for the National League pennant following a grueling 16-inning Game Six classic. In the World Series against Boston, in an epic at-bat that led to the Buckner error, Mookie would ignite a fire under the Mets, helping to force a Game Seven. New York would win to become World Champions.

In an era when role models in sports were hard to come by, some tarnished by their own hubris and greed, Mookie Wilson remained the exception: a man of humility and honor when it mattered the most.

WITH A FOREWARD BY KEITH HERNANDEZ

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What People Are Saying

From the Publisher
“Mookie is a classy and compassionate person. Because he had feelings and respect for me as a player, I never wanted him to feel guilty about ‘the play.’ Instead, I wanted him to enjoy and appreciate the accomplishment of being on a World Championship team.”—Bill Buckner, member of the 1986 American League Champion Boston Red Sox, 22-year Major League veteran, and 1980 National League Batting Champion

“There's nobody that I thought more highly of than Mookie Wilson on that '86 Mets team. He was respected, funny, honest, and just as solid a citizen as anyone I've ever known.”—Tim McCarver

“One of my favorite teammates—a class act, an even better person than the great ballplayer he was. Mookie was the moral rudder wherever he went.”—Ron Darling, Former All Star Pitcher and Member of the 1986 World Champion Mets, Current SNY and TBS Color Analyst

“All the clichés you hear about Mookie are true. On a team of ‘out there’ characters, Mookie was mature and wise beyond his years. In a selfish, me-first business, Mookie was a great mentor and legitimately cared for others.”—Bobby Ojeda, Member of the 1986 World Champion Mets, Current SNY Studio Baseball Analyst

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780425275009
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 4/29/2014
  • Edition description: Signed Edition
  • Sales rank: 26271
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Mookie Wilson

Mookie Wilson, a native of South Carolina, is a former Major League Baseball player, known best for being an optimistic switch-hitter and for his time in the World Champion 1986 Mets. He is currently a team ambassador to the Mets and a Christian minister.

Erik Sherman is the coauthor of Pittsburgh Pirate Steve Blass’s memoir, A Pirate for Life, and major leaguer Glenn Burke’s biography, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story. A graduate of Emerson College, where he lettered in baseball for four seasons, Erik currently resides in New Rochelle, New York, with his wife and two children.

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Customer Reviews

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  • Posted Mon Jun 09 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    more from this reviewer

    The sub-title of this book says it all: Almost everything one w

    The sub-title of this book says it all: Almost everything one would want to know about this iconic baseball player, the sport which was the passion of his life, and the fabulous 1986 team that won it all. From the first pages: a terrific brief Forward by Keith Hernandez, continuing with an equally brief Preface by Mookie wherein he states, among other things: “It is my hope that this book is really going to let people know that I have a life outside of baseball and that I am more than just another pretty face,” followed in turn by a brief Introduction by his co-author, Erik Sherman, stating the incontrovertible fact that “Mookie Wilson is the most beloved Mets player in the history of the franchise,” the book goes on to make all of that abundantly clear, and tells us that the man is “an accomplished chef, a fisherman, a licensed securities trader, a soon-to-be ordained Christian minister, and a truck driver who goes by the nickname Night Rider.” The introduction includes the fact that Mookie “never forgot where he came from . . . growing up black and poor in the then racially divided South of the sixties and seventies.” His father was a hard-working sharecropper “who supported a family of fourteen on a $25 a week salary.”

    The first chapter, appropriately, describes in detail the tenth inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series, when that miraculous team came from behind to win the game and go on to the championship, propelled by the ten-pitch at bat that ended with the slow roller that went between the legs of Bill Buckner (called by some “the greatest single at-bat in World Series history,” and Mookie did “what I always did, which was run as hard as I could. That was the only way I knew how to play the game.” This chapter, and the ones in the ensuing pages describing other games, felt like listening to a play-by-play account, especially the 16-inning Game 6 of the NLCS in Houston (which Mookie describes as “The Greatest Game Ever Played”) that led to that wonderful World Series.

    Mookie is never less than candid about his teammates, pulling no punches, at the same time unstinting in his praise for many of those supremely talented men with whom he played. As a devoted baseball fan since the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and an ardent Mets fan ever since that phenomenal season, and team, of 1986, I have often been asked who is my favorite Mets player. There is only one answer to that: It could only be Mookie Wilson. This is a terrific and heart-warming book, and it is highly recommended, for baseball fans and others alike, but especially for baseball fans.

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