Lenny Dykstra’s professional sports career was stellar. His life after that became so disreputable that a legal ruling has been named after him.
Dykstra played Major League Baseball for the New York Mets (1985-89) and the Philadelphia Phillies (1989-1996). He won a championship with the Mets in 1986 and was named to 3 All-Star teams.
Teammates gave him the nickname Nails. No one called him a business genius.
1993: Dykstra had more walks than any other player, he was runner-up for the National League MVP, and his team went to the World Series (but lost to Toronto).
After retiring from baseball, Dykstra owned and operated a car wash in his native Southern California. Charges were filed against him, and later dropped, for sexually harassing a teenage employee. When the car wash failed to due Dykstra’s mismanagement, his investors - including many family members - wanted nothing more to do with him.
2005: Dykstra got involved in stock trading thanks to CNBC star Jim Cramer. He let Dykstra write a stock-picking column for his website, and subscribers coughed up nearly $1,000 each annually for his predictions, even though Dykstra had no expertise in such matters.
He published a magazine called The Players Club aimed at the promoting the glamorous lives of professional athletes. He owned a jet chartering company. The sky was the limit for Lenny Dykstra.
Then everything unraveled.
2007: He purchased the mansion of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky for $18.5 million with the goal of flipping it for a profit. Nobody bought it. Two years later, Dykstra filed for bankruptcy, and the mansion sold at auction.
2009: News reports detailed Dykstra’s business mismanagement. He compiled massive debts and failed to pay for rent or services. His finances were in shambles.
2010: A prostitute accused him of paying for her services with a bounced check.
2011: Dykstra was arrested in California for drug possession, car theft, and identity theft.
2012: He pleaded guilty to federal charges of bankruptcy fraud. He bilked ten creditors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and served six months in prison.
2015: Dykstra publicly revealed that he spent half a million dollars in 1993 on private detectives to find dirty laundry about Major League umpires. With that secret knowledge, he intimidated umpires into giving him a favorably wider strike zone.
2016: Dykstra appeared twice on Howard Stern’s radio show to promote his personal memoir, and he bragged about being a paid male companion for older women. On the second appearance, he brought two such older women to back him up.
2018: He was arrested in New Jersey after threatening an Uber driver with a gun.
The litany of illegal and disreputable occurrences goes on and on.
In 2019, Dykstra filed a defamation lawsuit against his former Mets teammate Ron Darling, now a TV baseball analyst. Darling had published his own memoir and cited an incident during the 1986 World Series in which Dykstra hollered racial epithets at a black Red Sox pitcher.
Darling’s legal counsel told the court that it was laughable to suggest that anyone could defame Lenny Dykstra given terrible reputation.
The judge agreed and stated in his ruling: “Dykstra was infamous for being, among other things, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay, as well as a sexual predator, a drug-abuser, a thief, and an embezzler. Further, Dykstra had a reputation—largely due to his autobiography—of being willing to do anything to benefit himself and his team, including using steroids and blackmailing umpires…”
The judge threw out the lawsuit.
Some in the news media called it the Lenny Dykstra Rule: You can’t claim defamation of character if your character is already shitty.
Today, Dykstra is in his 60s and lives in Los Angeles. According to reports in November 2023, he owed his landlord over $50,000 in back-due rent.
Comentarios