"Nailed!: The Improbable Rise and Spectacular Fall of Lenny Dykstra" by Chris Frankie

Lenny Dykstra is a huckster that not even Mark Twain could have invented.

Yet like many who watched baseball in the late 1980's and early 1990's, my recollection of Lenny "Nails" Dykstra was almost universally positive.  He was easy to root for--the little guy who played with reckless abandon, who squeezed every ounce out of his talent, and who seemed to possess a bottomless desire to win.  But after he faded away following the 1993 Phillies World Series run, I hadn't thought much about him.

Then I watched Bernard Goldberg's 2008 Real Sports HBO special.

Perhaps the most riveting and mesmerizing piece of sports documentary work I've ever seen, Goldberg chronicled Dykstra's rise from ex-ballplayer, to Southern California car wash magnate, to rising star in the world of finance.  Having taught himself about the stock market through a one-year self-training session using newsletters, CD's, and DVD's, and then being anointed by CNBC's Jim Cramer as "one of the great ones" in the investing world, the plump, mumbling, and profane Dykstra was a sight to behold on HBO as he outlined his vision for "The Players Club"--a magazine, lifestyle, and annuity company seeking to serve the needs of current and former professional athletes.

Now Dykstra is in jail, serving a three-year sentence for financial fraud and grand theft auto.

Dykstra's fall has been chronicled by a multitude of media outlets, including Bernard Goldberg's HBO "retraction episode", where a delirious, incoherent, (and most likely drug-addled) Lenny Dykstra is found to be inhabiting his foreclosed house, the $17 million mansion he purchased from Wayne Gretzky.  Now we have Chris Frankie's book Nailed!: The Improbable Rise and Spectacular Fall of Lenny Dykstra (Running Press, 2013).

Although no book can capture Dykstra's essence with the same force as HBO's cameras, the strength of Frankie's tale is his proximity to Dykstra throughout his meteoric rise and fall.  Formerly a managing editor at Money Media, a unit of the Financial Times, Frankie was hired by Dykstra (says Nails, "It's all about accountability, bro") to assist him with the development of subscription-based financial newsletters ('Nails on the Numbers' and 'The Dykstra Report'), until he ultimately grew to become the primary coordinator of The Players Club, finding himself at the center of Dykstra's vortex of deceit.

Experience tells us that athletes should not be worshiped, and we know that an athlete's human foibles will almost always bring about disappointment and disillusion to those who believe too ardently in their transcendence beyond the playing field.  Indeed, a frequent aim of baseball biographies (though not autobiographies, one might add) is the attempt to humanize the subject through a close up exposé.  Frankie's Nailed! presents perhaps the most extreme example of this technique, and I can think of no baseball player where the "hero gap" is so pronounced, and I can think of no player--save perhaps Ty Cobb--who is Dykstra's equal in nefarious off-field conduct.

A true a "rise and fall" tale, we are introduced through Frankie's interview with Lenny Dykstra's oddball sister to the Southern California-born Leonard Kyle Keswick.  Lenny's father abandoned the family at an early age, and he changed his last name to Dykstra upon his mother's second marriage to Dennis Dykstra, the man who helped to fuel Lenny's passion for baseball.  Among the boyhood antics recounted by his sister of young "Weird Leonard" (Dennis Dykstra's nickname for Lenny), we see him throwing feces at a local boy who he was bullying, using clever strategies for "borrowing" the lunch money of classmates, stealing baby formula and diapers for his economically-distressed sister, riding around town spraying "bikers" and "transgender hookers" with a fire extinguisher, and earning the nickname "apple core" for his successful throwing of an apple at his school principal's head.  We also learn, quite amazingly, that the high school Dykstra's obsession with Rod Carew became so involved that Carew contacted the police about a stalker.

Dykstra after hitting the game winning homer
in Game 3 of the 1986 NLCS

Of course, Frankie's book covers the territory that most readers know best: Dykstra's time as a scrappy platooning outfielder with the Mets who had a penchant for getting big hits in big spots, and who morphed into an MVP candidate and near-World Series hero with the Phillies.  During his career, we see how Dykstra justifiably inspired admiration from fans and teammates as the archetype of the overachieving little guy.  "Guys want to win," said former teammate Barry Lyons, "but Lenny had a passion that was off the charts.  He proved himself every day."

We are also given insight into Dykstra's conflicted and tabloid-juicy relationship with Davey Johnson, who never truly believed Dykstra could be an effective everyday player.  Once Dykstra was traded to the Phillies in what turned out to be a lopsided and unpopular swap that brought Juan Samuel to the Mets, he blossomed into brief superstardom with the Phillies and became a vocal critic of Johnson.  To Mike Francesca of WFAN, he said, "Me and Davey didn't really get along.  Davey was a good manager because he had good players."

Yet beneath the "Nails" persona, with its combination of passion and grit, Frankie makes it abundantly clear that Dykstra's success with the Mets and Phillies was augmented by anabolic steriods.  In one of his later years with the Mets, Frankie notes that Dykstra showed up to spring training twenty pounds stronger, and looking like "Popeye," and Kirk Radomski, one of the central sources for the Mitchell Report on steroids, said about Dykstra:  "He was one of my clients.  I helped him get anabolic steroids."

In fact, Radomski is one of the more interesting characters in the book, and he plays the somewhat ironic role of the drug dealer who shakes his head at drug abuse.  Coming across like a wise grandfatherly figure, Radomski said about Dykstra: he took "everything to excess...I tried to teach the kid about something, but to him he thought more was always better with everything.  If one cup of coffee was good, he wanted ten."

Meanwhile, Frankie writes that if Dykstra's time in New York was "teetering on the brink of out of control," his time in Philadelphia was "completely and utterly unhinged."   Such excess and self-abuse worried his friends and teammates.  Frankie quotes Wally Backman (who is no stranger himself to an active night life), as saying, "There was one night before a game, Lenny had blood coming out of both of his ears.  I don't know how he played, but he did.  Obviously you knew it wasn't going to end well."  Off the field, he was summoned to meet with Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent about his gambling, and nearly killed himself and teammate Darren Daulton in a drunk driving wreck as they returned from John Kruk's bachelor party.

Despite this, Dykstra's time at the Phillies was the apex of his career.  He made three all-star teams, became the highest paid leadoff man in history (with a six-year $24 million contract), and led the Phillies within one game of the baseball summit.  Yet even at the height of his success, Frankie shows that Dykstra maintained unrealistic delusions of grandeur.  At one point towards the end of his career where he was ailing with multiple injuries, Dykstra allegedly went to GM Bill Giles, and proposed that he (Dykstra) become the manager, Darren Daulton the bench coach, and John Kruk the hitting coach.  After reading this book, one can only dream of the narrative possibilities that such a coaching combination might have produced.

When Dykstra's playing career ended, he made some savvy business investments and became an even wealthier man.  He built and then sold several car washes, including what he referred to as "The Taj Mahal of Car Washes" that had "Butterworth fixtures", "granite", and "the same shit that he had"--he, in this case, being Mumtaz Mahal, the builder of the Taj Mahal--though Dykstra admits that he'd never heard of the Taj Mahal, and only used the name as a reference because "somebody said that...I just took it and ran with it."  At the same time, since his broker had squandered Dykstra's nest egg in the stock market, Dykstra took matters into his own hands, spending a year learning about the market through CD's, DVD's, and having conversations with highly regarded investors, many of whom were willing to take his phone call because they wanted proximity to "Nails."

CNBC's Jim Cramer

As Dykstra enters his brief and fleeting success within the investment business, one of the book's central villains emerges: CNBC's Jim Cramer,  Cramer, by offering the fledgling investor Dykstra the opportunity to write a regular column for thestreet.com, legitimized Dykstra as an investing savant, and essentially served as the multiplying force that provided Lenny Dykstra a platform for his fraud and deceit.  In one infamous moment in the Goldberg HBO special, Cramer said: "People don't think of Lenny as sophisticated.  But I'm telling you, Bernie, he is not only sophisticated; he is one of the great ones in this business...Now there are only four or five people in the world who, if they sent me an e-mail telling me to learn a stock, I would actually take them seriously, He's one of them."

In the most extensive and damning part of the book, Frankie chronicles Dykstra's systematic fleecing of everyone in his path, regaling us with detail about Dykstra's unpaid bills and broken promises; his stiffing of freelancers; his misappropriation of his company's payroll; and his habit of leaving clients and "friends" with $800 dinner bills.  At one point, Dykstra even allegedly tries to get his hands on his son Cutter Dykstra's signing bonus.  As he makes his way towards the fraud and theft that ultimately lead to his imprisonment, it is no surprise that at the core of Dykstra's "genius" investment strategy is the Martingale System, a gambling theory that posits the notion that if one continues to lose, the bet continues to be doubled until the gambler is brought back to even.

At every juncture of his financial success, Dykstra spends with abandon.  Kirk Radomski reports: "In Atlantic City, I saw him lose 50K in twenty minutes on blackjack. chewing tobacco and spitting it on the floor."  We learn about Dykstra's obsession with the $400,000 Maybach car.  He only flies on private jets (which, I suspect, also ensures that he can carry illegal substances without going through security.)  During a trip to Paris, Dykstra eats at the famous La Tour d'Argent restaurant, a restaurant in Paris, and in addition to refusing to remove his hat because of a fictitous "head wound", Dykstra ordered two bottles of a $2700 wine, but left before it was delivered.

Intentionally or not, Frankie's book demonstrates the parallels between success on Wall Street and success on the baseball field.  In both professions, it is a hyper-aggressive and take-no-prisoners attitude that typically separates the successes from the failures, and it is often amoral individuals who become the fabulously wealthy heroes.  Nevertheless, if Warren Buffett can combine the investment profession with respectability and Cal Ripken can behave as a paragon of virtue, things could have turned out differently for Lenny Dykstra had he been a person worthy of trust and respect.  His idea for The Players Club is a stroke of true vision, but his personal flaws and appetites bring him down.

Throughout, we see that Dykstra's self-abuse matches his abuse of others.  Frankie writes that "Most of his teeth were gone, and the remaining ones were hanging on for dear life," and chronicles Dykstra's issues throughout his career with cocaine, heavy drinking, and "up to fifty pills of Vicodin per day," according to some of his friends.  At one point Frankie observes, "He told me that he'd been awake for five days....(he) was a drooling mess....At one point around 3 a.m., I looked over and Dykstra had whipped cream from his ice cream sundae smeared on his cheeks and a half-chewed Twizzler dangling from his mouth like a cigarette as he lay there asleep."

Lenny with Twizzlers

Yet perhaps the most vivid aspect of the book is Frankie's bracing portrayal of Dykstra's racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as his generally revolting behavior.  Says Frankie, "He used to tell his teammates that they were going into the other team's yard to 'take their money and f-ck their women."  In another incident where Dykstra is playing tennis with Richie Ashburn, Ashburn explained to other tennis players that Dykstra's poor language and behavior was a result of Tourette's Syndrome.  "Another time," Frankie reports, "right in the middle of the match, he walked right to the corner of the court and took a leak."

Dykstra also has a penchant for unapologetic descriptions of dongs and schlongs.  At one point, Dykstra was a presenter at the National Magazine Awards and according to The New Yorker's Ben McGrath, he said to the fact-checker, 'Did you remember to put in there that I have a twelve-inch schlong?"  He frequently reminds Frankie to "Keep it stiff," and another one of Dykstra's employees said, "Whenever I would bring up measurements, like that's a 42-inch TV or a 26-inch computer monitor, Lenny would be like, 'That's the size of two of Darryl Strawberry's coc-s."

Meanwhile, his racism is jaw-dropping.  In conversations with Frankie, Dykstra refers to Willie Mays as his "field nig-er"; calls Tim Brown as a "spear-chucker"; nicknames the Williams sisters "baboons"; and insists at one point that Brett Favre be featured on the cover of The Players Club, since the first few issues featured "three darkies and a bitch": Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Chris Paul and Danica Patrick.

Finally, Frankie describes Dykstra's disgusting habit of leaving large amounts of feces in hotel toilets because Dykstra enjoyed the reactions of the maid staff, as well as describes a memorable moment in the office:

...one of Dykstra's California-based assistants quit following one of his famous farting incidents.  Bending over, he asked the assistant to look and see if he had accidentally split the seam of his pants.  When she leaned in to check, he cut a smelly one.

Again, the great strength of Frankie's book is his proximity to Dykstra.  First-hand anecdotes are the strongest currency in baseball books, and throughout the book, Frankie provides with an endless number of extraordinary behavioral and quotable moments.  What is it about the 1986 Mets?  They are one of those teams, like the late 70's Yankees, that has spawned a small industry of books. (see Jeff Perlman's "The Bad Guys Won").  Yet how many teams can claim to have produced several works, like this one about Dykstra, or Darryl Strawberry's redemption tale "Finding My Way", that chronicle a player's antics AFTER they retire?

Unfortunately, this book has an unusual weakness: Frankie's own misaligned moral compass.  Perhaps not fully recovered from his shattered illusions, Frankie's moral misjudgment is most evident in the passages where he attempts to defend Dykstra's motives, his abilities, and his "genius", and in the places where he attempts to find redeeming qualities in Dykstra, though he believes they are "buried beneath severe, toxic paranoia, apparent substance abuse, reckless abandon, and a complete detachment from reality."  Certain passages are truly cringe-worthy from a moral perspective:

I had no illusions about whether he was the kind of guy I would want to date my sister, but at least I respected the way he reinvented himself, and I began to appreciate his veiled intelligence. ..The hours sucked but the chats gave me a chance to understand him better.  Sure, Dykstra could be an abrasive jerk at times but that was just one side of him.  I empathized with the guy when he felt people weren't taking him seriously.

Nails in Jail

Such passages ring hollow.  I'm not sure how much Frankie realizes how damning his book is to the reader's assessment of Lenny Dykstra, who he has convincingly painted as an unrepentant racist, misogynist, homophobe, and sociopath.  Indeed, as 'Nails' begins to unravel, where he is accused of sexual assault and indecent exposure in addition to charges of fraud and theft, one Los Angeles detective describes him as "a 'total sociopath'...among the top three most egregious criminals he's come across in twenty-four years on the force."  Thus, in the places where Frankie seeks to temper our judgment about his "childhood hero, legend Lenny 'Nails' Dykstra," he fails miserably.

Frankie, like everyone who comes into contact with Dykstra, eventually gets suckered and snookered, and eventually quits.

However, it is refreshing to come across at least one individual who sees right through Dykstra's foolishness.  It is even more refreshing when that individual is Mitch Williams, the much-maligned former Phillies relief pitcher who is widely seen as the goat of the 1993 World Series, and who endured verbal abuse from Dykstra after the loss.  Frankie's book provides Williams, who is now a well-respected commentator on the MLB Network, the final word on Dykstra:

Says Williams, "He's the most common sense-void person I've ever met in my life.  He makes no sense whatsoever...You could have a better conversation with a tree..." and he notes that he wouldn't give Lenny "$3 to walk across the street and put in the bank for me.  Lenny won't have two nickels to rub together in three years."