Bookmarked: Nailed!
Is it possible to write a baseball book without cliché? Nailed! stays true to the genre.
Before I was eight, I’d probably read half a dozen biographies of Willie Mays. I was hungry for baseball books and the Say Hey Kid was my father’s favorite player. Of course there were other stars to read about: Ruth and Ty Cobb and DiMaggio most of all. Cobb, a notorious hardballer of the early 20th century, was a baseball archetype: gambler, stock trader, and fighter. Something about baseball, indeed, attracted aggressive cheats, and reading about Cobb a boy learned this early.
Little did I know, of course, about the drug use, gambling, and sexual abuse committed by the players of my childhood era—Jim Bounton’s revelatory Ball Four was up on my parents’ bookshelf but as of then unread by me. But when I was about ten, my uncle was part of the Bloomingdale’s corporate team that was opening a new store at Willow Grove. Phillies first baseman Pete Rose was invited to sign autographs and having helped stuff the fixtures with underwear and socks, my cousin and I were allowed to be first in line. Rose, as we well know, was a stone-faced coarse kind of Cobb of the modern era—and on that day he was abusive and angry and mean.
And now we have the latest version of the baseball shyster Lenny Dykstra, the former Mets and Phillies center fielder who played with an oil man’s zeal and who was arrested two years ago for grand theft and fraud. Dykstra’s Rose-like fall was recorded by his former writer and webman Christopher Frankie and organized into the expose Nailed! published yesterday by Philadelphia’s Running Press.
But Dykstra was no Cobb or Rose on the field. He helped the Mets to a World Series championship in 1986 and willed the Phillies to the 1993 Series, but much of his ten year career was spent on the bench or the disabled list. He used steroids, partied hard, and cursed incessantly. Frankie traces the origins of Dykstra’s character to three uncles who played in the National Hockey League—a nice insight into Dykstra’s playing style—and to a 1970s suburban Southern California, where Dykstra was raised, that rewarded aggression and bravado over earnestness or goodwill. And Lenny was a terror seemingly every second of the day.
Post baseball, when his body had worn out from hard play, long nights, and steroids, Dykstra opened a chain of California car washes—the Taj Majal of the car washes, as Lenny liked to say (without having any idea what the Taj Majal was)—and after charming Phillies fan and rising television stock shiller Jim Cramer, he went into the financial advice e-mail newsletter business, picking winning stocks most of the time. It isn’t hard to predict the fall of a bull-headed bully and that’s one problem with this book: Unless you must know the content of every e-mail, hear every abusive shout down, and watch every boneheaded maneuver, there’s nothing new or interesting here. The stock analysis industry, like baseball, is shot through with banality, greed, and poor behavior—and incessant cliché.
Combine the two and you have Nailed!, a book that’s too close to the action and strangled by its reliance on cliché and soft writing: “the Mets were once again staring down the barrel of a loaded shotgun,” “It didn’t get much better than listening to Nails tell war stories about the Game 6,” “Dykstra was one of the many people caught in the twister’s path, unable to find shelter from the massive storm,” “There were plenty of red flags that would have sent many running for the hills, but there were equal reasons for me to believe that success was right around the corner…” There is hardly a paragraph in what is otherwise a pretty well researched book that isn’t soaked in this sort of prose. The very real effect is to distance the reader from the tragedy of Dykstra’s life.
Or is the real tragedy our inability to write a book of this nature without reverting to soft language and cliché? But then I was reminded of James S. Hirch’s magisterial 2010 Willie Mays: The Life and Legend (Scribner), which takes on the complexities and contradictions implicit in Mays’ story with directness and care, illuminating the life of a baseball great I’d thought I already knew. Perhaps Dykstra’s story isn’t worthy of this sort of treatment.
