FanHouse Lenny Dykstra

Things aren't getting any better for Lenny Dykstra. On top of being in financial ruin and living out of his car, a collection of memorabilia he accrued throughout his career is expected to go on the auction block in the near future. That collection will include the World Series ring he won with the Mets in 1986. Making matters even worse, it's not Dykstra himself that's doing the selling; it's the pawn shop he pawned the items to, then subsequently left unclaimed.

The published reports say the auction is slated to take place on Oct. 1 and 2, but you can, in fact, see the ring up for auction right now (via Darren Rovell's Twitter) and the current bid is at $9,000 and it's been steadily raising from the $7,500 it started at earlier this morning. The auction page estimates the value of the ring at $20,000- $30,000, which is where most published reports also place the value.

Since learning how much of a misanthropic jerk Lenny Dykstra is capable of being, it's been harder and harder for the public to hold any sympathy for him, even when his plight gets worse and worse. The reluctance is completely justified.

With that said, The Dugout now undertakes the unenviable, and perhaps foolhardy, task of writing Dykstra as a sympathetic figure. Read it after the jump.

If his looming court date before a bankruptcy judge next week wasn't enough, CNBC reported earlier this week that Lenny Dykstra is apparently living in a car as he battles Fireman's Fund, the agency that's insured both of his multimillion dollar mansions.

Currently, one mansion is uninhabitable because of a mold problem while the other has been torn up to repair water damage, which Dykstra says was done at the request of Fireman's Fund, something that they're completely denying.

According to the report, Dykstra is now fighting with Fireman's both over the current condition of the mansion and to get them to provide him with a temporary residence, which they're refusing to do because they've already provided one to his estranged wife, who's name is on the joint account. This is the same reason that the house with the mold problem is sitting in disrepair; Fireman's has set the money aside but because they're no consensus on who to write the checks to, the house is just sitting there.

Jon Stewart is, without question, one of the funniest human beings on the planet. The Daily Show is consistently hilarious and his "rivalry" (it's almost too one-sided to call it that) with Jim Cramer a few months back was just ridiculous. But that was all put to bed eventually ... until Lenny Dykstra had to go and get all bankrupt and Stewart had to go and find video of CNBC's Cramer going and getting all supportive of Dykstra when he first became a financial whizkid. It's almost guaranteed to be the best five minutes of your day.

Is Lenny Dykstra the personification of the American economy?

A little more than a year ago Dykstra was being profiled in the New Yorker, sharing his stock-picking wizardry with Jim Cramer's acolytes and generally being regarded as a financial whiz whose business acumen was hidden behind a tobacco-chewing exterior. But just as our economic system wasn't as healthy as it appeared in the best of times, Dykstra's finances weren't quite as good as they appeared on the outside.

The stories went from glowing to accusatory, lawsuits and debtors started to line up at the gates and, finally, Dykstra filed for bankruptcy in California.

In the video after the jump, filmed Monday night after Game 4 of the Mavericks/Nuggets series, Kenyon Martin says some NSFW things to Mark Cuban, which may or may not be deemed a threat, but which most certainly will be talked about while Cuban skips Game 5 of the series. Specifically, he calls him a "f****t motherf***er," so, yeah, unless you work for Lenny Dykstra, you probably want to bust out your headphones to watch this epic, NSFW goodness.

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Former baseball star Lenny Dysktra recently started his own magazine, The Players' Club. Of course, Dykstra couldn't operate the magazine by himself, so he hired some people to help him. One of those people was photo editor Kevin Coughlin.

As far as I can tell, Coughlin worked for roughly 75 days at TPC, and because he did not sign a confidentiality agreement when he joined the magazine, he wrote about his time with Dykstra for GQ in an article entitled, "You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working for Lenny Dykstra."

In the midst of a coaches' teleconference about 10 years ago, Nolan Richardson proffered why the conference, the SEC, in which he coached the Arkansas basketball team, was so stout. It was located in the South, he said, ground zero for slavery, and, as a result, the many black players who were the stars of the SEC were the products of purposeful breeding by slave owners of "big black [men] with his big woman so he [slave owner] would have a big black kid."

Coach Richardson continued to coach without much criticism and any sanction for his historical hysteria. He wasn't tarred and feathered like Jimmy the Greek was so famously for making similar comments.

Coach Richardson was spared because, unlike The Greek, he is black. He was handed a pass because of the extra gravitas he carried as the second black coach to lead a team to a Final Four championship, and because we in the media -- especially commentators of color -- are particularly uncomfortable criticizing people of color for such transgressions and gaffes.

In 1991, Lenny "Nails" Dykstra hammered his Benz into a tree on a road off Philadelphia's Main Line with a Phillies teammate, Darren Daulton, as a passenger. Dykstra suffered a broken collarbone, broken ribs, broken cheekbone and punctured lung. Dalton suffered a broken bone under an eye. The pair was coming from a bachelor party for John Kruk. Dykstra was charged with driving drunk.

In 1999, three years after he last played baseball, Dykstra was cleared of sexual battery and child annoyance charges against a 17-year-old female employee at a car wash he owned. The Ventura County, Calif., district attorney's office that prosecuted him concluded: "While the district attorney believes that the defendant did engage in the conduct as originally described by the victim... the charges alleged in the complaint cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury."

Former Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra has been in the headlines quite a bit ever since he retired from the game of baseball. Unfortunately for the man they call Nails, all that publicity he gets is generally of the negative variety. I mean, he did start his own magazine, but then that magazine ran into some trouble when Dykstra didn't pay his business partners.

Of course, Lenny's business partners aren't the only people he isn't paying apparently, as he's also been sued by pilots for not paying for a flight and his accountants. Though why should you pay your accountants when you're not paying anybody? I mean, how much work can they be doing? Now Dykstra's name is mentioned in the April issue of GQ under a headline of "You Think Your Job Sucks? Try Working For Lenny Dykstra." Guess what Lenny didn't do.