Book Review: Kings of Queens

Kings of Queens: Life Beyond Baseball with the '86 Mets by Erik Sherman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I’m a Midewstern New York Mets fan which generally draws questions.

Baseball has become a regional sport and being a fan of a long distance team makes no sense.

It goes like this though, around 1984, two of the most gifted athletes of my generation joined the Mets- one a hitter (Daryl Strawberry) and one a 19 year old pitcher like no one else (Dwight Gooden). Occurring closely to this was the acquisition of two stars (Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez) to join them. In 1986, the Mets won the World Series. They were a great team again in 1988 but fell short and have yet to win another one since.

For starters, I was prime age (12) and baseball was a national game in some sorts with the Game of the Week, This Week in Baseball and any chance you got to watch the game, you took.

Ironically, baseball is very regional nowadays despite Fox and ESPN both having highly publicized games of the week and technology making it very easy to watch any and every game of every team.

Yet, where football has done quite well with this, and National teams have been the norm (Cowboys, Niners), and a new generation has grown up cheering for the Steelers, Patriots and Packers regardless of locale.

The NBA has even taken that further to be a players league. Fans now follow LeBron James or Steph Curry or Kevin Durant or Giannis, and not necessarily their current team.

So, through the years from WOR to MLB.TV, I have followed the Mets. That special Mets team was never able to go back to the top again. Years of mismanagement led to 1986 (a bunch of early draft picks) and arguably mismanagement has made the team the LOLMets of today’s Deadspin

An aura has been attached to the team because of this, as well as the drugs and personal issues that have derailed Gooden and Strawberry through the years.

Erik Sherman picked 14 of the most interesting players from that 86 team and met them and interviewed them.

Doc Gooden and Strawberry are here, of course, as well as fan favorite Mookie Wilson, Keith Hernandez, Wally Backman, loose cannon Lenny Dykstra, and “scum bunch”ers Danny Heep and Doug Sisk.

It’s a simple enough format which some classic baseball books have followed. To Sherman’s credit, it makes it a quite breezy book. Sherman knows the team well and he stays positive throughout. It never varies from being a love letter to the team. Even the crazy Dykstra gets a free pass. (Conversely, he probably wouldn’t have gotten the interviews he got without being supportive of the subject).

Unfortunately, it seems to keep that book at a certain level. Written in the internet age, there’s little surprise. Daryl and Doc have been chronicled extensively (an ESPN documentary in recent years was pretty high profile) and in a 24/7 news cycle, many Mets fans know about Backman and Dykstra’s progress.

It was logical to make each player their unique charter. However, it seems like each one runs a sequence of went to visit and asked these questions, then wished them well. Sherman has great questions but his incidental reporting seems limited to “his beautiful wife brought us lemonade” style comments. One feels the book might have been better served by just printing the Questions and Answers outright.

Even then, perhaps grouping chapters into topics might have gave it better flow. The last chapter focuses on the late Gary Carter and works well as each player shares their thoughts. Bouncing back and forth between voices would liven things up.

Trends do show up. Much has been made of how hard the 86 Mets partied. It gets played down here but the thread is that these guys loved baseball through and through. The other thread is that the Mets have passed on using these veterans to fill coaching and management vacancies.

All in all, as a Mets fan, this was a nice breezy nostalgic read, and I got to learn stuff about players I had not heard from in awhile. I also loved that Sherman did brief profiles on the players he could not fit in.



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