He Has a Few Bad Habits, but Nails Has All the Tools

The ballplayers call him “Nails.” Probably because they think he chews them.

He’s a piece of work. He drives too fast, drinks too much, does everything on the run. Nobody ever saw him standing still. I don’t think he sleeps.

He’s the nearest thing to Pete Rose in the game today. He even bets. His specialty is winning. He doesn’t worry much about how he does it. He worries less about his image than a prowling leopard.

He plays the game on the dead run. He has crashed into more walls than A.J. Foyt. He chews tobacco for breakfast. The Surgeon General’s warnings fall on deaf ears. Lenny Dykstra doesn’t pay too much attention to anybody who doesn’t have the dice or a deck of cards in his hand. If he feels like smoking, he will.

Anything hit to center field, he will catch. If it stays in the park, it will stay in his glove.

He doesn’t look that much like a ballplayer. More like a kid on his way to the circus. He’s short. He has this tight curly blond hair, these bold eyes and a look that says, “Can’t you see I’m busy?!” He’s a ballplayer right off a Saturday Evening Post cover. It’s doubtful if he ever wants to be anything else. A card dealer, maybe.

He’s as dangerous as a loose cannon. You can’t believe the things he does for the Philadelphia Phillies.

How about leading the National League in hits (194) and walks (129) for the year? That’s a rare quinella. Also in runs--143, the most scored by a player in this league since 1932.

How about going to bat an eye-popping 773 times? How about reaching first base 300 times? Rose used to do that regularly, but only two other players have done it in 35 years in the league.

How about leading the team in stolen bases (37) for good measure? He’s not a man, he’s a gang.

So, this means he’s a Punch-and-Judy hitter who makes contact and sprints for a leg hit? Not Nails. He hit 19 homers. He hit 44 doubles and six triples.

He hit a very key homer in Game 2 of the World Series on Sunday night. He also started the winning rally by working Dave Stewart for a poise-rattling walk and scoring the first of the team’s five runs in the third inning.

“Winning ugly” is a late 20th-Century term, like “burnout” and “this point in time.” You may be sure no coach or manager invented it. Some aesthete in a press box probably coined the term, offended because a team won on a blocked punt or a walk with the bases loaded and not by a picture-book swing or a ballet-like sweep down a sideline.

The North won the Civil War ugly. Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad ugly. There’s nothing ugly about winning. Losing is ugly.

But you have a World Series this year between two teams whose specialty is winning, if not ugly, at least homely.

Game 1 was hardly classic baseball. John McGraw would have been insulted. Connie Mack would have covered his eyes.

The Toronto Blue Jays got a victory out of a starting pitcher who gave up four runs, five hits and four walks in five innings, who gave up a run on a triple and a wild pitch and ended the evening with an earned-run average of 7.20. Little Leaguers do better than that.

The Phillies didn’t do much better. Their outfield weighed in with a three-base error. The catcher threw in that most embarrassing of receiver statistics, a passed ball. Their cleanup hitter struck out with the bases loaded and the game on the line. On a scale of 1 to 10, give them a 3.

But it is the Phillies who have refined the process of winning ugly to a high and holy art. It is their stock in trade.

With torn uniforms, unshaven beards, hairy pates and tobacco-stained teeth, the Phillies’ gambit is not so much to beat you, it’s to let you beat yourself.

Accordingly, they do two things: 1) almost never swing at the first pitch--let pitchers fall behind; and 2) run the count to 3 and 2 on every at-bat and hope for a fat pitch or a walk.

To appreciate this, you have to understand the modern ballplayer. He comes out of the dugout swinging. He despises a walk almost as much as the puncher hates a clinch. He is as impatient at the plate as a guy waiting for a bus who is late for a date.

Pitchers love the modern hitter. Ted Williams never swung at a ball in his life that wasn’t a strike, but hitters today cannot be bothered waiting for a strike.

The Phillies need an edge. They do not have a legitimate cleanup hitter, their pitching staff is as anonymous as a motel registry, but they aren’t rubes in the city buying street-corner vegetable-peelers. They are as patient as Mother Teresa at the plate. They are one of the few modern lineups who seem to realize they get three strikes. They make the pitcher throw them.

On Sunday, it worked. They harassed starting pitcher Stewart, ordinarily an unflappable old pro, into three walks, one wild pitch and one balk to the point where he unleashed an uncharacteristic gopher ball to Jim Eisenreich, whose three-run homer piloted a 6-4 Philadelphia victory.

It was a typical Phillie victory, not ugly but not your basic beauty contest winner, either.

After the game, Nails Dykstra handled the questioning with the mood of a guy who is double-parked and the motor running. “When you get a pitch you can handle, he said, “you have to take advantage of it.”

He wanted to talk more about his three rally-killing catches in the outfield. “I’m not afraid to say I made a contribution with big defensive plays tonight,” he said with a burst of unaccustomed enthusiasm. “I can play defense with the best of them.”

He sure can. He leads off the batting order and he leads the team. Dykstra is the ignition to this Little Red Machine, this company of opportunists. And, if the Phillies want to win and put up the world championship banner, they already have the Nails to hammer it down. Winning ugly is OK with him. Winning pretty is for sissies.