Jeff Pearlman (born 1972) is an American sports writer. He has written nine books that have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list: four about football, three on baseball and two about basketball. He was the author of the infamous 1999 John Rocker interview in Sports Illustrated.

Pearlman is the author of The Bad Guys Won, a biography of the 1986 New York Mets subtitled, "A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo-chasing and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, The Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform--and Maybe the Best." In 2004, the book spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Pearlman followed that up with his 2006 publication of Love Me, Hate Me, an unauthorized biography of Barry Bonds for which the author said he interviewed 524 subjects.

Pearlman was born and raised in Mahopac, New York. He got his start in journalism in 1989, when he interned at a weekly newspaper in Cross River, titled The Patent Trader. After graduating from the University of Delaware, he was hired as a food and fashion writer by The Tennessean in Nashville. In 1996, Pearlman was hired by Sports Illustrated, where he spent nearly seven years as a baseball writer.

In 2002, Pearlman left Sports Illustrated and spent the next two years at Newsday, but left to focus on writing books. He also keeps a personal online blog, where he posts a weekly Q&A series, The Quaz, with athletes, politicians, actors, singers and many random people.