House of Nails

by Lenny Dykstra

  When I was in high school, I played on a Mets scout team that consisted of all the top baseball prospects in Southern California. A player had to be invited to join this team. I remember being told that the Mets’ big boss, Joe McIlvaine, then their scouting director, was coming into town and wanted to watch all the prospects run, throw, and hit.

  I was all pumped up; I couldn’t wait to put on a show. I later read an article in which Joe McIlvaine talked about my performance in that workout. “I remember one of the scouts at the check-in table looking over Dykstra’s small build and mistaking him for a batboy,” McIlvaine said. “Dykstra responded by staring down the scouts and sternly telling them, ‘I’m Lenny Dykstra, and I’m the best player you’re going to see here today!’ So we put him out there to run, and he outran and outthrew every kid on the field that day.”

  McIlvaine went on to say, “I was impressed by Dykstra’s bravado—and even more by his skills. I wanted to take Dykstra as high as the third round of the draft, but my scouts assured me there wasn’t much interest in him in the early rounds because of his size. So we waited and still got him.”

  The day after I was drafted by the New York Mets in the thirteenth round, three scouts—Roger and Dean Jongewaard and Myron Pines—showed up at my house in Garden Grove to try to get me to sign a contract and turn pro.

  The Jongewaard brothers, especially Roger, were highly respected, as they had earned a solid reputation for drafting players who made it to the big leagues. But it was the third scout, Myron Pines, who had pushed the Mets so hard to draft me. Myron was a very quiet, studious-looking man with glasses. He was a high school teacher and baseball coach. But his passion was running the Mets’ scout team. Myron had coached and watched me play in a lot of games. Over time, he knew that I was a special player; he knew that I wasn’t going to be denied. But most important, he understood that I loved playing baseball. Myron once told a reporter, “We used to kid Lenny if he ever drove by a baseball field he would stop and play no matter who was playing.”

  In 2014, my youngest son, Luke, was a senior at Westlake High School. Luke was considered one of the top high school baseball prospects in the country. Luke is the perfect height, six foot one, and weight, 195 pounds, for a professional baseball player. There were always a bunch of scouts at the games to watch him play. At one of the games I looked up and saw Myron Pines. It had been about twenty years since I’d last seen him. I couldn’t believe how great he looked. He had on the same bad costume he always wore when I played for him, as well as the goofy goggles he used to wear when he coached me. We gave each other a hug, exchanged some happy rap, and then sat down in the bleachers.

  With the June MLB draft just a few weeks away for Luke, it reminded me of something very important that Myron said to me before the 1981 MLB draft in which I was selected. We were working out on the field and he pulled me off to the side with a very serious look on his face and said, “Lenny, I know you’re excited about the upcoming draft in June, and you should be—you worked harder than anyone else and proved to everyone that you were the best player on the field. But I want you to know, the draft isn’t always fair and it definitely isn’t always right.”

  I remember asking, “What does that mean, Coach Pines?” I have never forgotten the answer he gave me. He looked me in the eyes and said to me, “It’s the old story. The little guy has to prove he can play, while the bigger guy has to prove that he can’t. If a guy can play, he can play anywhere. It doesn’t matter where you get drafted, Lenny, because you can play. Everything will take care of itself; all you have to do is play.”

  The Mets were stocking up on young outfield prospects. The year before, in the 1980 MLB draft, the Mets were in the rare position of having three first-round picks. Two of those picks were used on the most sought-after outfield prospects in the country. They were both from Southern California and both had storybook names.

  Darryl Strawberry was the first overall pick in the country; Billy Beane was the twenty-third overall pick that the New York Mets also had the luxury of drafting in the first round. The Mets had visions of both Strawberry and Beane manning the outfield for the next World Series championship team to come out of Flushing.

  In total, there were five other outfielders drafted ahead of me by the Mets in 1981. I was offered several full-ride scholarships from the best baseball schools in the country. One was USC, with their legendary coach Rod Dedeaux. Even though it was an honor to be offered a full ride to USC, at that time Arizona State was the college baseball powerhouse—they were the big swinging dicks of NCAA baseball. When they offered me a full ride, I accepted. I wanted to play on the best team, with the best players. And that’s exactly what Arizona State had. The outfield that next season would have been Barry Bonds, the best baseball player of all time; Oddibe McDowell, who went on to star for the Texas Rangers; and me.

  Talk about a college pitcher’s nightmare? Ouch!

  The Mets offered me $7,000 to sign and told me I would be sent to play rookie ball, which was pretty standard, especially if a player was drafted out of high school. The organizations wanted to let a young player adjust and not feel overwhelmed, as this would be the first time a player drafted out of high school would be away from home.

  I responded by saying, What the hell kind of offer is that?

  “No thank you,” I said. “I have a full ride to Arizona State, and I’m going.”

  After I turned down the offer from the Mets, I called Ben Hines, who at the time was the ASU hitting coach and the person who recruited me. I told him I wanted to play in one of the top summer college-baseball leagues everybody talked about. There were three leagues at that time where the country’s best college baseball players would get invited to play. One was the Cape Cod League. There was another in Alaska, and the third was called the Jayhawk League, in Kansas.

  Coach Hines told me, “Those leagues aren’t for high school players; they are for the best college players in the country.” I would not take no for an answer. I pushed and pushed until I finally got what I wanted and was sent to the Jayhawk League. I was assigned to play for a team in Rapid City, South Dakota.

  The day after I graduated high school, I boarded a plane destined for a city I’d never heard of and a state I had never visited before. I didn’t know what to expect. When I arrived in Rapid City it felt like I’d gone back in time. It’s sandwiched between the Black Hills and the Badlands; the Wild West town of Deadwood is nearby. And yes, people really do live there, I promise.

  The team set up the players’ living arrangements with host families, who would feed us and were very nice people. The only problem was that my host family lived on a working farm. So if I needed to go into town, as they called it, to pick something up, I was always stuck. It was much too far to walk, and they didn’t have an extra car. So one day I asked them, “Would you mind if I used your tractor to drive into town to pick up a few things?”

  They said, “Sure, son, no problem. Are you sure you know how to drive it?”

  I answered, “Of course, thank you.”

  I have to admit, it was one of the coolest things I had ever experienced in my eighteen years on the planet.

  Because I was from Southern California, the closest I’d been to a tractor was when I’d seen construction workers dig up something alongside the road. This SoCal kid was definitely a fish out of water. I remember the wind blowing in my face as I was driving the tractor down the road. For some reason I felt so cool, so free, almost like, Look at me, everyone, I know how to drive a tractor.

  My roommate at the farmhouse was Mike Pagel, who would later play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. He was a journeyman in the NFL, bouncing around from team to team, who had tried to make it in baseball. Tried was the operative word here.

  From day one I was hitting line drives all over the yard. I was tearing up the Jayhawk League. I was batting .380 after the first three weeks. It didn’t take long for the Mets to get word about how well I was playing, so they
sent a couple of scouts to watch me play. I continued raking, stealing bases, the whole deal, when the Mets called and offered me an additional $5,000, upping their offer to a whopping $12,000.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  Even though I knew the Mets’ offer was short a few zeroes, at the end of the day, deep down, I didn’t want to go to college, even with a full ride. I’d worked my fucking ass off since I was a young boy to get into this position. More important, I was ready to play pro baseball. I’d been ready since the day I was born.

  I called up the Mets and told them I was ready to sign. They put me on the phone with one of their bean counters in the front office. I told him, “I want to get something straight before I sign: if you want me, I’m not going to rookie ball like the rest of the players that get drafted out of high school.” I went on to say, “For the last four years, I proved that I can dominate high school players. I want to play A ball.”

  I could tell the front-office guy thought I was crazy when he fired back, “No one goes to Class A ball out of high school.”

  “Then I’m not signing,” I snapped back.

  “You have balls, kid, I’ll give you that. But I can’t make that decision; it’s above my pay grade. I’ll have the scouting director, Joe McIlvaine, call you.”

  When McIlvaine called, I told him that I wanted to start at Class A, one level higher than everyone else.

  “Some people may call it cockiness, but it was a good kind of cockiness because he one hundred percent believed in his ability . . . Lenny could never fail in his own mind,” McIlvaine later said.

  And like that, they agreed to send me to the South Atlantic League, where the Mets’ Class A team played in Shelby, North Carolina.

  When the wheels touched down in Charlotte, North Carolina, the closest airport to Shelby, I was not prepared for what I was about to encounter. Once off the plane, I was looking for a hotshot wearing a suit to pick me up; after all, I was a pro baseball player. What I got instead were two local boosters, a middle-aged lady full of country charm and her daughter, who had been sent to pick up the California boy who’d just made the team.

  “Y’er gonna luv Shelby,” the mother drawled in the way that could only come from the deep down South in the U.S. of A. “Y’er gonna luv our ballpark, too. It’s beautiful,” she added sweetly.

  Driving past the historic homes and farmland, I felt like I had been cast in an episode of Green Acres—without Eva Gabor. In fact, in later years a fictionalized version of Shelby would spring up as the inspiration for the HBO comedy Eastbound & Down.

  After a ways she pulled into the parking lot of a local high school. “What are we doing here?” I asked. “I’m with the New York Mets. The pro baseball Mets. Take me to the professional baseball field, please. This is a high school field.”

  “This here is y’all’s field,” she replied. “This is the home field of the Shelby Mets.”

  Oh my fucking God, I said to myself. I might as well have been in the FBI’s witness protection program, as nobody was ever going to find me or see me play down here.

  I walked into what looked like a temporary clubhouse, way down the right field line of this high school baseball field. It was around noon, and no one seemed to be around. Then I noticed the Shelby manager, Danny Monzon, sitting behind his desk smoking a cigarette and looking miserable. As I would learn soon enough, for many people stuck in the system, the minor leagues is all about misery and drinking. Lots of drinking!

  “Who are you?” asked Monzon, barely looking up.

  “Hi, sir,” I said enthusiastically. “I’m Lenny Dykstra.”

  He looked me up and down. I could tell he was scrutinizing my size and wondering, What have they sent me this time? “Oh yeah,” he said. “I heard we were getting a new guy. What are you, a middle infielder?” Monzon didn’t even know who I was. I had just given up my whole college career to turn pro, and my first pro manager didn’t have a clue who I was.

  He didn’t give a fuck either. At that moment in time, it hit me: I was entering a whole new world, with a different set of rules.

  Monzon, who was from the Bronx, had been a utility player for the Minnesota Twins before becoming a minor league manager for the Mets. A lot of former players who end up coaching in the minor leagues are not always the happiest people on earth, and for good reason: it’s much tougher than the public perceives it to be. Basically, if you coach or manage in the minor leagues for an extended period of time, you have two choices: suffer or become a professional drinker.

  I have some compassion now that I look back, but to my younger self he was the enemy. Why? Because he wouldn’t play me. It was nothing personal, mind you, but the man was keeping me from pursuing my dream, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. Finally, after harassing him weekly, then daily, then hourly—he relented and let me play. The biggest challenge for me was making the adjustment to a wood bat. It was also difficult being away from home for the first time. As much as I wanted to play professional baseball, when you’re eighteen years old, there’s still the human factor that you can’t get away from. This was all part of the process, but I battled for the month and a half I was there.

  The next year at Shelby, I played my first full season of pro ball. I was very fortunate to have a manager, Rich Miller, who immediately took a liking to me. He was also a very good outfielder coach. Rich saw the potential I had as a player and worked with me to get the absolute most out of my size and skills. Plus it helped that he was a little fucker like me, and left-handed to boot.

  “We’re the same, except for the fact that I don’t have your talent,” he told me one day. Somehow I think this made him even more determined to make sure I succeeded.

  To describe Shelby as a small town is an insult to small towns everywhere. “Hellby” is what we called it. We were playing on a high school baseball field, for God’s sake. It was pretty damn depressing. I knew there was only one real solution to get out of Dodge: play well, put the numbers up, and move on. That’s exactly what I did.

  In Shelby, playing under Miller, I led off and had the benefit of a great number two hitter behind me, Mark Carreon. He could flat-out hit. We played together for three years, batting first and second in the lineup that whole time, and we really worked well together.

  The next two years, we dominated and won it all twice. When Mark made it to the big leagues, he changed his whole hitting approach and tried to be a home run hitter. It was very confusing to me, because I can say with 100 percent certainty that he was the best two-hole hitter I ever played with—that includes all players from both the minor and major leagues.

  John Gibbons, another teammate, was a great guy who would become the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. John and I rented a place with three other teammates in a big old country house. Gibby, as we called him, was the kind of person you wanted your kid to grow up to be like. But don’t let the fact that he was a gentleman fool you: he was one tough dude, a good old boy from Texas. I liked Gibby a lot. He kind of took me under his wing and told me what to do in certain situations so I was prepared. Thinking back to how Gibby respected the game, and how he always played hard, it makes sense that he turned out to be a big-league manager.

  Roger McDowell also lived with us. He was not only a talented pitcher, he was a great all-around athlete. I knew Roger was going to make it to the big leagues. He was like me; he wasn’t going to be denied. I could see it in his eyes, and it turned out that I was correct. He had an outstanding career before becoming the pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves.

  In 1983, my third season as a pro, I broke camp with the Lynchburg Mets; this was the high Single A ball team for the Mets. I knew that it was time to make a move, to bust out of the middle. I remember saying to myself, Lenny, the time is now. You need to do something this year that will put you on the map, open up everyone’s eyes. It was time to be extraordinary. I needed to make the general manager and the director of the minor leagues say to each other, “Where di
d this little motherfucker come from?”

  This was also my protection year. At that time, all twenty-six teams had to declare which forty players they wanted to protect and put on their forty-man roster. Players who had played three years and were left off the forty-man would be unprotected and would be exposed to the Rule 5 draft by the twenty-five other teams. The forty players the team can protect include the twenty-five players on the big-league club as well, so if you think about it, there are only fifteen open spots on a forty-man roster left, and every November, teams have to decide which of their minor league prospects deserve one of those coveted slots.

  To be put on the forty-man roster was and still is a huge deal for a player. Not only does it tell you what your organization thinks of you, it also means you will be invited to major league spring training. It’s hard to explain how far away the big leagues feel when you’re down in the minors. It almost seems as though the big leagues don’t exist. Worse for me, the Mets were loaded with a long list of outfielders who were drafted in the first and second rounds. They were referred to by other players as “bonus babies,” because the team had invested so much money in them. This meant they were going to be in the lineup every night no matter what. It’s business 101.

  My manager in Lynchburg was Sam Perlozzo. He wasn’t even on the map as far as the Mets were concerned. That is, until I led off for him two years in a row, and both years we won it all. Talk about perfect timing? Sammy only cared about himself—he defined what players cannot stand, a front-runner. He was one of the typical backstabbers that baseball is full of. Perlozzo knew how to work the front office and even convinced a couple of big-league teams to let him manage. How do you think that went? Do I even need to answer? It went bad, real bad. Every player who played for him could not stand him. Players know who the front-runners are; they know which coaches are talking about them behind their backs when things aren’t going well.