Whatever Happened To? Lenny Dykstra

To make a long story short, ‘Nails’ went off the rails.

Nails is the baseball player Lenny Dykstra. Dykstra was the center fielder and leadoff hitter for the 1986 World Series champion New York Mets. He played six seasons with the Mets, after which he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies where he put in another seven seasons. Three times he was an all-star. Fans of both teams saw him as an embodiment of the fighting spirit of the team. With his cheek packed with tobacco he was gritty, aggressive and reckless, characteristics that did not serve him quite so well off the field.

At first things seemed to be going pretty well after he retired.. Ben McGrath wrote a story in the New Yorker in 2008 with the headline “Nails Never Fails: Baseball’s most improbable post-career success story.” Sitting down to lunch with Dykstra, McGrath wrote: “Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (“the best car”) and a Gulfstream (“the best jet”). The occasion for our lunch, however, was a new venture: Dykstra is launching a magazine, intended specifically for pro athletes, called The Players Club. An unfortunate number of his former teammates have ended up broke, or divorced, or worse.” All of which would soon apply to Dykstra.

In June of 2011, a Philadelphia Daily News reporter Paul Hagan caught up with Dykstra in Lynchburg, Va., where he had come to watch his son play minor league ball. His piece, headlined “The Strife of Lenny,” told a very different story:

“Lenny Dykstra could have been anywhere on this hot Sunday afternoon.

“Well, that’s not exactly true. His passport had been taken away. He needed a judge’s permission to leave Southern California and travel to City Stadium. His driver’s license had been revoked, too, so he had to take a $60 cab ride to Roanoke to catch his flight home.

“The high-profile Chapter 7 bankruptcy that he calls a ‘death sentence.’ The smutty allegations that he groped a teenaged girl, demanded regular oral sex from his housekeeper, bounced a $1,000 check to an escort service. The divorce. The arrests that would put him in jail and drag him down, ruin his reputation and cost him everything but his desperate determination to fight to the bitter end.”

Dykstra had since been identified as a steroid user. In the coming years he would be charged with grand theft auto, bankruptcy fraud, identity theft, indecent exposure and possession of cocaine. He was sentenced to 6-½ years in prison for his fraudulent bankruptcy filing.

Prison did not rehabilitate. In 2018, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist MIke Sielski wrote a story “Dykstra shows true face again and it’s not pretty.” Sielski described this incident: “Early Wednesday morning, he was arrested in Linden, N.J., for allegedly making terroristic threats to an Uber driver and for possessing illegal drugs, among them ecstasy, cocaine, and marijuana. The driver reportedly told police that Dykstra threatened to kill him with a gun, though police found no gun at the scene, and in an interview with the New York Daily News, Dykstra suggested that he himself was the true victim: ‘The guy went nuclear on me.’”

Sielski recalled some incidents from Dykstra’s playing days. “He could have killed himself and (teammate) Darren Daulton in 1991 when, while drunk, he sent his red Mercedes careening off a Radnor Township road, crashing into a tree. Yes, he could wink-wink away those ‘special vitamins’ that revitalized his career. Yes, he could lose a small fortune in one night playing baccarat in Atlantic City, then try to throttle some poor bystander who dared to wonder aloud how and why someone would be so self-destructive.”

In 2017 he published an autobiography: “Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge.” Richard Sandomier of the New York Times offered this review: “Lenny Dykstra emerges as a figure of enormous braggadocio who moves swiftly from roguish to Trumpian. He can hardly stop admiring his hitting skills, his houses, his private jets, his magazine for wealthy athletes and his epiphany that steroids would help save his craving to make millions of dollars after the Mets traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies.”

Bleacher Report slotted in Dykstra as #9 on its list of The 25 Biggest Sleazeballs in MLB History.Why only #9. Well consider that the list includes such legendary sleazeballs as Ty Cobb, Pete Rose, Charles Comiskey and Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

And Dykstra’s legal woes are not quite behind him. In March of this year mylanews.com reported that “jThe U.S. Attorney’s Office has filed a notice of lien seeking more than $150,000 in restitution the office says former MLB baseball player Lenny Dykstra owes in restitution as part of his 2012 sentencing in a bankruptcy fraud case.”

You can catch up with Lenny Dykstra and get a first hand look at the vitriol he continues to spew on Twitter. I checked out his account and found this piece of nonsense.