Baseball Star Lenny Dykstra Recalls his Life on the Edge 

Lenny Dykstra waves to a crowd in 2016 (Flickr by slgckgc.)

 

Lenny Dykstra was a professional Major League Baseball (MLB) player for over a decade with both the National League’s New York Mets (1985-89) and the Philadelphia Phillies (1989-96). He knew a lot of inside stuff about MLB and some of it wasn’t pretty.

Dykstra, now 57 years of age, has had a lot of ups and downs in both the sports and business worlds, including a short stint as a jailbird in federal prison. At times, like when he was hanging out with whacky Charley Sheen, he came off as yet another egomaniac.

Somehow, however, Dykstra landed on his feet just in time to pen a very entertaining book in 2016. It’s called: “House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge.’

A ballsy, Napoleon-like complex was Dykstra’s calling card. You know: that little guy with the big mouth down at the end of the bar, who’s forever looking to agitate a fight, preferably between two of the bigger dudes. Well, that’s Dykstra. I’m sure you know at least one windbag, like him.

Dykstra’s real moniker is Lenny Kyle Leswick. He hails from Garden Grove, CA, about an hour south of Los Angeles.

On his father’s side, he’s of French-Canadian stock. Early on his dad abandoned the family. His mother remarried when he was four and her new husband, Dennis Dykstra, adopted him. When his biological father later tried to contact him after he became a baseball star, Dykstra told him “to get lost.” Can’t blame him for that one.

Honestly, parts of Dykstra’s story turned me off. He comes on sometimes as a first-class jerk. Despite his many failings, however, it was hard to put the Dykstra’s book down.

It’s a fast-paced read with plenty of zany yarns. Dykstra understands baseball, for sure, and what it takes to be a winner. There are also a lot of valuable life lessons in his memoirs. His nickname, which was well-deserved, is – “Nails.”

One of the things that I particularly didn’t like about Dykstra’s book is that he took a number of cheap shots at one of my boyhood baseball heroes – Davey Johnson!

Yea, that Davey Johnson! He played second base for the Baltimore Orioles on two World Series-winning teams of 1966 and 1970. Johnson also managed the Orioles for a brief period, along with four other MLB teams. One of those teams was the New York Mets, where he crossed paths with Dykstra.

When Johnson was managing the Mets, in 1986, they won the World Series against the Boston Red Sox. The pushy Dykstra starred on that celebrated team and had a darn good World Series to boot. He was the lead-off batter when he started a game during the season, and his batting average was a respectable .304.

Johnson, during that season and in the World Series, too, would platoon Dykstra in centerfield with the switch-hitting “Mookie” Wilson. This just might have been the source of the friction in their relationship. Dykstra batted from the left side of the plate.

For whatever reason, the tobacco-chewing Dykstra claimed that, during that championship 1986 year, “Johnson was drunk every night and frequently hungover just enough to not always know what was going on.” I don’t believe a word of this. It all sounds like sour grapes to me.

Keep in mind, Dykstra was voted “the most hated player in the league by opposing teams five years in a row!”

On chronicling his rise up the baseball ladder, Dykstra is on stronger ground. He tells you what it was like for him playing baseball in the Little League; then in high school; along with minor league stops at Shelby, NC; Lynchburg, VA; Jackson, MI; and Tidewater, VA, and finally, in 1985, on to the New York Mets. Bottom line: Life in the minor league isn’t for the weak of heart.

What you get from Dykstra’s recollections – some are rather compelling – whether it’s his drug use, starting with steroids and then cocaine; stock market dabbling, ending with the Wall Street Market’s collapse in 2008; his days with the Mets and Phillies, paying a private eye to spy on MLB umpires; his inflated role as a multimillionaire stock market guru, his complex legal troubles with the State & the Feds; his conviction on fraud charges and time in the slammer; and his reckless sex life, it’s always someone else’s fault, never his.

There’s a lot of self-promotion also going on in Dykstra’s memoir. Even so, his dramatic story does make for a good summer read. It’s all here, his sharp rise to the top, and then descent into a dirty hole of a prison cell, with plenty of crazy details for the reader to absorb. I’m giving it three out of five stars.