It was an improbable success story. Lenny Dykstra was never considered a cerebral athlete. Gutsy and iron-willed, sure. However, no one ever confused him for an intellectual or a savvy leader with street smarts. But more than a decade after his retirement in 1996, HBO and The New Yorker are describing how Lenny is a successful small business owner who has also gotten into financial advising. You might expect this kind of post-retirement success from Shane Battier, Andrew Luck, or Ryan Fitzpatrick, but Dykstra, the reckless player who never spent a second in college and didn’t even know how to use a computer until he was 40 years old? Was there any logical way to explain his success?
Of course not. But first, for anyone who enjoys unintentional comedy, here’s a trailer for a documentary posted in 2008, explaining what Dykstra had already accomplished and what was next for the budding business mogul.
And now, here is a more complete and accurate picture, extending the timeline by a few years.
2008: Lenny Dykstra’s living the dream life according to HBO, The New Yorker, Jim Cramer, and most of all, Lenny himself.
January 2009: Just a few months after most of the fawning press reports were published, The Player’s Club, Dykstra’s financial and lifestyle magazine geared towards athletes has already ceased publication. According to Kevin Coughlin, a photo editor at the New York Post who took the same position at The Player’s Club, Dykstra had failed to pay Getty Images on time for almost $40,000 worth of images used in the magazine.
July 2009: Dykstra declares bankruptcy, with debts of 10-50 million dollars.
July 2010: Dykstra faces accusations that he committed perjury and tried to hide assets during bankruptcy proceedings.
December 2010: Dykstra writes a $1,000 check to an Monica Foster, a porn star and escort. The check bounces.
April 2011: Dykstra is charged with bankruptcy fraud.
June 2011: Dysktra faces additional charges of grand theft auto, filing false financial statements, and possession of cocaine, ecstasy, and human growth hormone
March 2012: Dykstra is sentenced to 3 years in prison for grand theft auto and using falsified bank statements after pleading no contest.
June 2012: Dykstra’s trial for bankruptcy fraud will begin.
No one comes out worse in all of this than Lenny Dysktra, but if there’s a runner-up, it’s much-maligned CNBC stockpicker, Jim Cramer. Cramer, who was neutered by Jon Stewart in 2009 for his complicity in the financial crisis, had employed Dykstra as a columnist for his financial news website TheStreet.com.
In the Youtube clip, you hear Cramer say at the 1:41 mark that Dykstra could be regarded as “one of the great ones in this business”, but his attachment to Dykstra, a high school graduate with no formal training in finance, doesn’t seem to be just a publicity stunt for a friend’s puff piece documentary. In Ben McGrath’s New Yorker article, Cramer takes it a step further when he proudly proclaims that he has “yet to meet anyone other than Lenny from the world of sports who was able to make the transfer so that they have something to say that has value added. Many sports figures have been successful salesmen, but I would most likely have hired Lenny at my hedge fund, back when I was doing that.”
There’s more than a hint of fan worship in Cramer’s words, when he mentions that he asked Dykstra to sign some memorabilia for his sister upon learning of his interest in financial markets. And there’s no other logical reason why an intelligent, experienced stockpicker could possibly have fallen for the myth of Dykstra’s brilliance.
For all of his on-field charisma, diving for fly balls and sacrificing his body for the good of the team, Dykstra doesn’t have much charm off the field. He speaks in the drowsy mumble of someone on painkillers, and he speaks almost entirely in baseball metaphors and Southern California slang befitting a teenager. Also, his attempts at humor fall painfully flat. Consider this anecdote from Coughlin in the GQ piece:
“”At one meeting, Lenny goes off on how a particular layout looks “faggy”—despite the presence of a gay page designer in the room. (Later, Lenny says to me: “Did you see the look on that fag’s face?”) On another occasion, I field a call from Lenny about potential cover subjects while I’m at home; Lenny’s on speaker when he proudly states, for both my wife and me, that “nobody can call me a racist—I put three darkies and a bitch on my first four covers.”
The first four Players Club covers featured Derek Jeter, Chris Paul, Tiger Woods, and Danica Patrick.
“What was that, Lenny?” I ask.
“I said I put three spearchuckers on the cover!” he replies.”
And perhaps, most importantly, Dykstra had never shown any inclination in his life that he knew how to do anything well besides play baseball. Lenny was considered one of the more irresponsible guys on two of the most reckless teams of all time: the cocaine-fueled New York Mets of the late 1980s led by Daryl Strawberry and Doc Gooden and the early 1990s Philadelphia Phillies which featured hard-partying stars like John Kruk and Darren Daulton, which Kruk christened 24 morons and a Mormon (clean-living Dale Murphy).
And it’s not as if Dykstra had ever demonstrated particularly strong financial acumen in the past. By his own account, he saved only $2 million for his entire career (which is not an impressive sum when you consider that he earned more than $22 million in the final six years of his career) and his lack of involvement led to his first broker squandering 80 percent of that sum. His car wash chains were initially successful, but they were also a product of being built at the right place, at the right time (Southern California in the mid-90s economic boom).
However, an experienced hedge fund manager like Cramer should have understood that Dykstra’s short-term success, especially in the stock market, was fool’s gold. His interest in the market coincided with the U.S. economy rebounding after the Dot-Com bubble and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Almost every investor with optimistic speculations made money. From January 1, 2003 to January 1, 2008, the Nasdaq went up 70% (from 1430 to 2280), and the Dow went up about 58% (from 8000 to 126000). Yet Cramer allowed himself to buy into Dykstra’s hype.
Outdated issues of Business Week and Fortune that touted Enron (or for that matter, Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns) as among the best places to work are undoubtedly embarrassing for the writers and publications involved, but at least there is some solace to be found in being deceived by highly educated white collar criminals with decades of business experience.
Cramer was just fooled by a moron who stumbled upon some lucky bets in the post-9/11 boom.
Machine Gun Koray 