Assuming the rain clears, tonight I’ll be going to my second game of the Red Sox so-far-so-not-so-good season. My first game, on Patriots Day, was a complete fiasco. Things have turned up a bit since then, but still, things have been lackluster. There still my boys, however, and I’m hoping for something better this evening.
Anyway, in honor of my coming trip to Fenway Park, I had planned on writing about just how costly taking oneself out to the ballgame, taking oneself out to the crowd, has become.
No surprise that, when it comes to paying for a seat and buying some peanuts and Cracker Jack, it costs more for a family of four to watch the Red Sox (average price: $351) than anywhere else in baseball-dom. (Runners up: Yankees at Yankee Stadium at $337, and $300 for the Cubs at Wrigley.)
In my post, I was going to lament the high cost of baseballing, and compare and contrast today’s fees with the good old days, when my father could cram a bunch of kids in the car and a trip into Fenway (including gas, Mass Pike tolls, parking, bleacher tickets, and peanuts all around) might have cost $20.
Ah, the good old days.
And then, thanks to Carolyn Ryan (@carolynryan) on Twitter, I found a quite wonderful baseball-related (tangentially) article by Anthony Attrino on NJ.com.
The article is about Lenny Dykstra, a former major league baseball player, most notably – from the perspective of a Red Sox fan – with the 1986 NY Mets who screwed the Olde Town Team out of a much-deserved World Series win, causing us to wait an additional 18 years to reverse the curse.
So, pitooey on Lenny Dykstra.
Since retiring from baseball, Dykstra has had quite a career for himself – a career that included trying unsuccessfully to flip a mansion he’d bought from Wayne Gretzky; running car washes; and spending time in prison for bankruptcy fraud.
Anyway, because the article is so wild and interesting, even if you’ve never heard of Lenny Dykstra, I’m presenting the NJ.com article in full:
In the long list of bizarre Lenny Dykstra stories, spending 9 hours dumpster diving outside a Jersey Mike’s Subs shop may not even rank in the top 10.
But that’s what happened over the weekend. And, of course, the former Phillies and Mets star chronicled his latest misadventure on Twitter after a trip for a sub in Linden turned into a denture debacle.
“The bread is so hard on those subs,” Dykstra told NJ Advance Media on Tuesday. “I took my teeth out and put them in a napkin, folded it up and forget them there.”
Dykstra left the restaurant which is about two miles from his home and later realized he’d forgotten his teeth in the napkin.
“When I went back, the workers said they threw all the napkins in the garbage,” Dykstra said. “I told them there was no f---- way I was leaving without my f---- teeth.”
The dentures are specially made with bone marrow and valued at $80,000, he said.
Dentures “specially made with bone marrow”? Huh? Not porcelain? Not resin? Not plastic? Bone marrow? I can’t imagine what this means, but I guess if you’re talking about dentures that cost $80K – now that’s a mouthful – anything goes. Luckily, I haven’t had the need for dentures, but as it turns out, this morning I’m having appointment number one for a new crown for a cracked tooth. It will cost plenty, but nowhere near $80K. I will be asking my dentist about that bone marrow thing. (In a baseball-denture related side note, my father had a partial denture, a “bridge” between two teeth to replace a missing tooth. The tooth had been knocked out when my father, as a 10 year old kid, was coming home with his buddies from a Holy Cross baseball game, and was imitating a great catch that Chick Gagnon had made when he ran into a hydrant. And lost a tooth. (Chick Gagnon was a Holy Cross great who had a modest pro career with the Tigers and Senators.)
For the next nine hours, Dykstra said he and a friend – a tag-team wrestler who goes by Sprinkles the Clown – dug through the dumpster behind Jersey Mike’s.
I’m quite certain that if I had lost $80K worth of dentures, I’d be willing to spend a few bucks to get Task Rabbit to do some dumpster diving for me. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have a tag-team wrestler friend I can call on to join my search party. (Bonus points for a tag-team wrestler called Sprinkles the Clown. I don’t even want to think about where that name came from. Being a clown is quite terrible enough, let along being a clown with a creepy-even-by-clown-standards moniker.)
Shortly after 11 p.m., the friend took to Twitter to ask for help. “You want to come help me and Lenny Dykstra look for his dentures tonight? Or does anyone? This is a serious question...”
Dykstra said he found his teeth early Sunday, Father’s Day.
Happy Belated Father’s Day, Lenny. And here’s a point of interest: one of his sons is married to Jamie Lynn Sigler, who played Tony Soprano’s daughter, Meadow. Is this a New Jersey story or what?
“I was there for nine hours. I thought the cops were going to arrest me for trespassing,” Dykstra said. “I wasn’t leaving my teeth there in the dumpster. No way was I leaving them.”
Dykstra, as it turns out, has a bit of experience with cops. And it’s experience that seems far worse than what a normal, run-of-the-mill white collar bankruptcy fraud ex-con would have run in.
In his autobiography, “House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge,” Dykstra wrote that he lost his real teeth after jail guards in Los Angeles beat him in his cell and again in a hospital. The damage was so severe that his remaining teeth had to be removed, Dykstra has said.
Huh?
Kearny-based Perfect Pawn owner Dan Risis, who is Dykstra’s close New Jersey friend, said he arranged for a dentist and a baseball fan in Minnesota to make Dykstra’s dentures – free of charge – about a year ago.
“When he loses these teeth (for good) I’ll arrange for him to get more dentures,” Risis said. “I love the guy, but he’s Lenny Dykstra. He’s from another planet.”
So, they were actually free $80K dentures, not $80K $80K dentures. Plus Dykstra has a friend who (of course) owns a pawn shop who would have replaced those dentures if something were to happen to them. And not with dentures that had been pawned. Bless him…
Too bad The Sopranos is over and done with. If ever there were a plot that’s Sopranos-worthy. Lenny Dykstra. The dentures…The dumpster. The wrestling clown. The pawn shop guy. Not to mention New Jersey.
Bada-bing.
Thanks, Anthony Attrino for sharing.
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