“This” was Len Dykstra, baseball’s bad boy and best leadoff hitter. He approached the plate with his slightly rolling gait, like a sailor on the heaving deck of a sloop in choppy seas, which is the way the world is for him. He is one of those high-strung bantam roosters who can strut sitting down and can’t sit still. But he knows how to make pitchers work; he knows how to wait.
He did not swing at any of the first five pitches: strike, ball, ball, strike, ball. The Braves bench vociferously editorialized that the third ball should have been called the third strike, and the pitcher must have been thinking: Air traffic controller, principal of an inner city high school-anything would be nicer work than this.
What was Dykstra waiting for? What most hitters wait for-a mistake. On the next pitch the pitcher made one: fast ball up and in. And out of there, over the wall in right-center.
The Rolling Stones’ song “Start Me Up” begins with an electrifying three-chord crash. Dykstra is that crash made flesh and decked out in scarlet pinstripes. Last year the sound system at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium blared that song when Dykstra approached the plate to wear out another pitcher during the finest season by a National League leadoff hitter, ever. This year he probably again will be a terror on the field if he isn’t off it.
No one in baseball history ever came to the plate more times in a season than Dykstra did-773. He led the league in at bats, hits (194), runs (143, the most since the Phillies’ Chuck Klein got 152 in 1932) and, astonishingly, walks (129). Since 1900 only three other players have led their league in both hits and walks-Carl Yastrzemski in 1963, Richie Ashburn in 1958 and the greatest right-handed hitter in his greatest season-Rogers Hornsby in 1924, when he hit .424, the highest average in this century. Hornsby got 227 hits and 89 walks, so he reached base 316 times either by putting the ball in play or by patience. Dykstra did that 323 times.
He is one of the main reasons why between Sept. 20,1992, and Sept. 29,1993, the Phillies set a National League record by going 174 games without being shut out. Bill James, Kansas’s gift to baseball scholarship, became a fan during the 1960s profusion of power hitters-Maris, Mantle, Mays, McCovey, Mathews, Cepeda, Killebrew and Frank Robinson, among others-and no one warned him that baseball is not always like that. Someone, he says, should alert today’s fans to the fact that they are living in the golden age of leadoff hitters. Almost as good as Dykstra’s 1993 was Tim Raines’s 1983 for the Expos-.298, 97 walks, 90 stolen bases. The best leadoff season ever? Probably Rickey Henderson’s 1985 year for the Yankees-.314, 99 walks, 80 stolen bases, 146 runs.
If only all of Dykstra’s life were like the part recorded in box scores. A few years ago he received from baseball a year’s probation for losing $78,000 to a Mississippi gambler; he nearly killed himself and teammate Darren Daulton when, driving with a blood alcohol level above Pennsylvania’s legal limit, he totaled his $92,000 Mercedes convertible; he spent a well-reported night of boorishness dropping $50,000 in an Atlantic City casino, and Sports Illustrated covered his dining out in Paris, when he wore a cap during dinner at La Tour d’Argent and enjoyed an almost $3,000 bottle of wine so much he ordered a second “to go.” He chews tobacco and smokes and the Surgeon General should not waste her breath.
One wishes he would be just a bit more like those paragons in John Tunis’s boys’ books about baseball. But asking him to behave is like asking Hamlet to lighten up. What he (Dykstra, not Hamlet) is between the foul lines is a function of a boiling intensity (“I like to compete. That’s why I gamble.”) that is never all expended between the lines.
Like lots of modern players, he is, shall we say, present oriented, uninterested in baseball history. Henry Aaron, Henry Clay-couple of dudes from the past, right? But Dykstra hates what Philadelphia’s baseball past is full of. losing. Before Philadelphia’s Athletics headed west in 1955, they set the American League record for total (18) and consecutive (7) last place finishes. There were eight seasons when both the Athletics and Phillies finished last. The Phillies hold the National League record for last place finishes (26), and would need 1,203 consecutive victories-a winning streak from now until the 69th game of the 2001 season-just to get to .500 as a franchise.
Today Dykstra packs at least 185 pounds on his 5-foot-10 frame, but he weighed just 150 pounds when the Mets drafted him out of high school in southern California. (Arizona State wanted him to play football as well as baseball. Imagine the manic abandon with which he must have played defensive back at 150 pounds.) During the last three seasons, when he was in the lineup, the Phillies were a.560 club (173-135). When he was out of the lineup they were a .408 club (73-106). It is his patience that grinds down pitchers and makes him a primal force.
Surely no one ever saw as many pitches in a season as Dykstra did last year, not only because he came to the plate so often, but also because of what he did when he got there: wait. Leading off, working deep into the count, fouling off pitches, it was common for him to start a game with a 10-or-more pitch at bat. Even if the opposing pitcher put the Phillies down in order, he may have had a 20 pitch first inning. For many starters, 100 pitches is almost a day’s work. And so the pitcher trudged to the bench thinking: Mr. Start-Me-Up is coming up at least three more times.
What a thing to face. Dykstra’s face (“gargoylish,” says Roger Angell of The New Yorker) is full of menace and Red Man tobacco, his body language radiates bravado. And the opposing pitcher sits in the dugout lost in dark thoughts: Lobbyist for the tobacco industry, paramedic with a trauma unit, border patrol around El Paso-any job would be nicer than this.
