Nails in the Coffin

Lenny Dykstra has filed for bankruptcy.

Whether this comes as a surprise is hard to say. Before March 24, 2008, the notoriously foul-mouthed, tobacco-stained former outfielder may have seemed, had any of us paused to consider the matter, a likely candidate for post-career financial distress. That date, however, saw the publication of a certain New Yorker profile piece that, to all but the most avid Dykstra followers, likely came off as about as astonishing as would be, say, a revelation that Sarah Palin had secretly published several well-regarded scholarly works on Proust: Dykstra, it turned out, had in the years since his playing career ended become a magnate. A magnate of what was a little unclear, or at least is hard to recall--but definitely a capitalist success, owing to something having to do with car washes, or day-trading, or lifestyle magazines, or maybe all of the above.

He had bought Wayne Gretzky's four-house, seven-acre property in Thousand Oaks. He wore fancy hotel robes and ordered room service. He wrote a column about investing strategies for Jim Cramer's monthly newsletter. As Ben McGrath wrote in the piece (titled "Nails Never Fails"), "[i]t takes some getting used to, the idea that Nails, of all people, could end up serving as an exemplar of the transition from professional athletics to respectable civilian life."

And yet, it seems, the "exemple" that Nails represented was that of the quintessential mid-2000s era gazillionaire-for-nothing. The most revealing line in the profile, in retrospect: Dykstra at one point "was wearing a maroon baseball cap that advertised the insurance company A.I.G., his intended partner in the Players Club annuity program." At least Nails' venture didn't get bailout money.

There are definitely some things that make no sense but that are nevertheless true. Nails' apparent life success seems, however, not to have been one of those. After all that laudatory attention, Lenny Dykstra was a human credit default swap.