Nailed

If you were drawing up a blueprint for a ballplayer likely to struggle once his playing career ended, there would be several obvious elements to include. Obviously, you'd throw in the star athlete's sense of entitlement, the expectation of life on easy street. It's a cousin to the George Bush-style, "Born on Third Base, Thinks He Hit a Triple" Syndrome, more along the lines of anticipating great things because they've always come before.

You'd throw in the jock's trademark obliviousness, the mask of the locker room boor, the mark of the proudly uneducated man. You'd stir in a heaping helping of uncouth, of low and untoward manners, just because. The chaw chewin'. The spittin'. The crotch grabbin'. Not that there's anything wrong with these things in and of themselves -- they're just not something that successful people in the real world tend to appreciate.

You'd include a predilection for risk-taking, if not outright recklessness. Another quality that often pays off in the world of sports only to backfire in the real world. In business, in life ... the shot that you don't take is often the best one. Whereas we all know that, pace Miguel Tejada, you don't walk your way off the island. This is a lifestyle/constitution-level mindset. It can be difficult to adjust.

You'd choose a guy who felt like the rules didn't apply to him. Any of the rules. Is this beginning to sound like anyone in particular? It should be.

Basically, our portrait of the post-athletic-career disaster should look a lot like this guy.

That's right. Nails. Dykstra. The least likely to succeed on paper. And yet, against all sorts of odds, Lenny Dykstra has turned into a massive, overwhelming success. He has turned himself into a mogul and a tycoon and a magazine publisher, with his signature publication set to debut next month. He lives in Wayne Gretzky's old mansion, has two baseball-stud children, calls CEOs from his Maybach and dallies with economic royalty.

Yeah. WTF?

The New Yorker's Ben McGrath tells the tale in a fabulous article that came out this past week. Every reader of this site should take time to read it, if not this instant. It is a singularly revealing portrait of a man many of us feel affection towards, a man who put a smile on many a Shea face. And you'll laugh out loud at Nails' foibles again, as they're on full display in the piece. Without ruining any of the best lines from the article, I'll just say that Lenny hasn't changed much, when it comes to attitude. McGrath actually discusses this in an audio companion to the piece that's available on the New Yorker Web site, saying that he's never met someone as comfortable in his own skin as Dykstra.

We knew that from "Moneyball," though, kind of. What Dykstra didn't elicit there, or certainly before, is what derives from McGrath's article.

Respect. Admiration. Envy, even.

Seriously, there's a whole lot of stuff going on in this piece. I'm having trouble processing my emotions, to be honest, and I'm still not sure what to think. I know that the interactions in the piece are fascinating and hilarious, and I know that Dykstra's kid sounds like he's going to light the world on fire at UCLA.

The best part of the article, though, is how it confounds all the assumptions up at the top of this entry. Not to say that they don't still hold, of course. It's just that Dykstra, who embodies everything you'd want in a post-jock failure, has flipped his own personal script entirely, and screwed with a lot of notions of how one gets ahead. He's been lucky, to be sure, and he's still no role model, but as an example of how people can never fail to surprise you -- and moreover, as an example of how much we need to be surprised from time to time, if only to keep us on our toes -- you can't do better than Nails.

-----

Major, major shout-outs to the Red Sox (and Athletics) on their payment solidarity push. If MLB wants to send its teams to Japan or China or East Timor on elaborate, time-consuming money-making, er, international ventures, the least it can do is amply compensate everyone for their time. Calling out Selig on his bullshit is something that needs to happen more often, not less.

For a truly moronic counterpoint, check out Wally Matthews, friend to ownership and scourge of organized labor everywhere. So much for Newsday being a working-class rag.