Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the '86 Mets

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 ca

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 on the World Champion 1986 Mets. He is currently a team ambassador to the Mets and a Christian minister.

Erik Sherman is the coauthor of two other highly acclaimed baseball autobiographies, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story and Steve Blass: A Pirate for Life. His work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Bergen Record, as well as other newspapers. He has appeared in documentaries produced by Comcast SportsNet and Root Sports, and his speaking engagements have taken him from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, to the Yogi Berra Museum on the campus of Montclair State University. He is a graduate of Emerson College and blogs regularly at ErikShermanBaseball.com.