[Image: GQ Magazine]

by Michael Takasaki

There’s an amusing article in this month’s GQ about what it’s like to work for former pro-baseball player Lenny Dykstra and his near-bankrupt The Player’s Club magazine. The article’s called “You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working For Lenny Dykstra”. You can probably guess what it’s like for yourself.

It’s not a flattering portrait of Dykstra. He’s chronically hours late. He’s a braggart who’s comically obsessed with status symbols. He lashes out at anything he perceives as a threat to his position or a slight to his intellect. He gobbles ice cream sundaes and Twizzlers, stays up for days on end and talks a game very long on promises and very short on substance. In other words, he seems wholly unfit to run any kind of business.

But what’s most amusing is that a very similar description appeared in  “Nails Never Fails”, an article that ran around this time last year in The New Yorker. Only in that piece, Dkystra’s personality and behavior just seem like the odd quirks of a brilliant financial mind and, “Baseball’s most improbable post-career success story.”

In hindsight, several things in The New Yorker story should’ve tipped us off to the fact that perhaps Dykstra’s success wasn’t being evaluated very critically. The glowing endorsement from Jim Cramer.  The fact that AIG was Dykstra’s partner in annuities he hoped to sell to pro athletes.

But what stands out most is that we really shouldn’t have needed hindsight to tell us that Lenny Dykstra had not, in fact, suddenly become a genius.  Here are a couple of descriptions of Dykstra from The New Yorker:

“He is lumpy now… His hands tremble, his back hurts, and his speech, like that of an insomniac or a stroke victim, lags slightly behind his mind. He winks without obvious intent.”

“Dykstra’s laptop stalled. Like many latecomers to computing, his instinctive reaction, when faced with a balky Web page or a frozen screen, is to click furiously and open more windows, thereby exacerbating the problem.”

Other articles mention his “83-0 record” at picking stocks in his column “Nails on the Numbers” for thestreet.com but none stops to consider that picking one rising stock a week, particularly in a booming market, really isn’t all that hard. Never mind that it’s since come out that he might not have been doing much picking himself.

But until the market crashed, everyone seemed to overlook that it was still Lenny Dykstra we were talking about. He was successful, we believed, not because he was lucky, but because he was smart, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

And for every story I’ve heard or read recently that includes a quote like “We should’ve known there was going to be trouble when consumer debt in the US exceeded the GDP,” I can’t help but think there’s an easier indicator: when this man

is being held up a as a financial genius and no one is questioning it, well, you’re probably in for a bumpy ride.

The willingness of the press to ignore the fact that Lenny-fucking-Dykstra is suddenly a financial genius has a nice echo in the willingness of the press during his playing days to ignore his thirty-pound weight gain—mostly muscle—and accept his explanation of “real good vitamins.”