Nails in the Coffin

I recently read an account chronicling the latest chapter in the Lenny Dykstra saga. It was an ugly, bizarre, almost comical footnote to the life and times of a formerly feisty, tobacco-chawing, scrappy professional baseball player who traded in his romp through the green fields of America's pastime for a bull-headed charge through the green streets of Wall Street.

Just one year after the swaggering New York Mets of 1986 won 108 regular season games and a World Championship, I devoured a spate of memoirs about that crazy and wondrous baseball season authored by various players and their quirky manager, Davey Johnson, too. But there was only one tome among this library of anti-literature that stood apart from the pack, and it was Lenny Dykstra's NAILS: The Inside Story of an Amazin' Season. The "with" guy, who actually wrote the book in Dykstra's incomparable voice, was sportswriter Marty Noble. NAILS was in a class by itself, as Noble nobly channeled the memories, observations, and opinions of this short, lean, and gritty centerfielder affectionately known as "Nails." "Today we played the fucking Cardinals" was the kind of stuff interspersed throughout the book's narrative, as well as Dykstra's dismissing all things with which he disagreed with a pithy "I call bullshit on that."

Flash forward more than twenty years and this very same man is apparently broke, bankrupt, and living in the back of his van or something only slightly better than that. It is reported that he owes tens of millions of dollars to a whole host of people and entities who bought lock, stock, and barrel into the mega-hype that he, a former baseball player, was a financial whiz kid. Frequently wrong guru in the world of high finance, Jim Cramer, even sang Dykstra's praises on his CNBC program.

Once upon a time Lenny Dykstra hit a walk-off homerun against the Houston Astros in the 1986 NLCS. It was an extraordinary baseball moment and a Met fan memory of mega-import that we will not soon forget. In all of professional sports, there are few happenings more dramatic than walk-off, game-winning home runs, particularly in critical games and during the post-season. It's too bad Dykstra didn't walk-off into the sunset of positive memories that October day....

Instead, life went on, and Dykstra has since been fingered in the Mitchell Report as a steroid user—no big surprise here considering that he morphed into a major muscle head and power hitter, which he certainly wasn't with the Mets, in the later years of his career. And recently, of course, this celebrated financial genius inaugurated a magazine called The Players Club for a readership of well-compensated professional athletes, which embodied investment and brokerage counsel among its myriad services. And as they are so often wont to do, the moneyed lemmings came out of the woodwork and poured millions upon millions of dollars into what turned out to be a black hole with no there there. I, for one, just wish I could turn the clock back to 1986—for Lenny's sake.

R.I.P. Jane Jarvis and the American Pastime

On January 25th of this year, accomplished jazz pianist Jane Jarvis passed away at the age of ninety-four. Although she was tickling the ivories in Manhattan hot spots almost until the day she died, I never heard her play in jazz clubs. Jazz rhythms and sounds just don’t electrify my synapses the way they do aficionados of the genre. For me, Jarvis’s genius was on display while serving as the New York Mets organist. With genuine aplomb, the "Queen of Melody" played her "Thomas organ" at Shea Stadium from 1964 through 1979.

While I wouldn’t walk a mile for a Camel; I would walk five miles, up hill, for a “Best of Jane Jarvis Organ Hits" CD. Jarvis's Big Shea organ repertoire included a few jazz tunes, like "Scrapple from the Apple," along with many familiar standards. But she also composed original music, including a memorable melody she played before the Mets took the field for the first time at each home game. Its impeccable timing met the moment, if you will, as did her select tunes for individual players. When reliever Skip Lockwood entered a game, both he and the fans at the ballpark, as well as those watching on television and listening on the radio, were serenaded with the maestro’s "Skip to My Lou." Her seventh inning stretch favorite was a unique version of the "Mexican Hat Dance."

Being a rare and devoted little boy Met fan on the mean streets of the Bronx, surrounded and hounded by Yankee fans—inside the family and out—earned me the childhood nickname of “Mr. Met,” or “Met” for short. Mr. Met, by the way, is the team's baseball-headed mascot. It’s a moniker that has stuck with me to this day, even as my fanaticism for the Mets and the game of baseball—as performed today by self-absorbed, disloyal, greedy multi-millionaires—has been wholly exorcised.

Both Jarvis and her organ playing personify a time lost—a better time for professional baseball, when it was still a game and not overwhelmed by the color of money, din, and gossip-column celebrity unrelated to the goings-on between the white lines.