Oo-la-la, Lenny

Dykstra's good friend and business manager, Lindsay Jones, said, "Save the table for us," as the doors closed in the face of the maître d'.

Someone in the elevator asked Dykstra how he had been able to keep his cap. "I got Bob to tell the waiter I have a serious baseball injury," Dykstra said. "I told him I can't expose my head to the air."

So what was Major League Baseball thinking when it exposed Dykstra to an unsuspecting audience in Europe, dispatching the rollicking Philadelphia Phillie centerfielder as its goodwill ambassador on a tour of Düsseldorf, Paris and Amsterdam from Nov. 19 to 23? Less than three years ago Dykstra was placed on one year's probation by then commissioner Fay Vincent for losing $78,000 to a Mississippi gambler. Two months later, in May 1991, he was nearly killed in an accident while driving legally drunk in Radnor Township, Pa. The resulting injuries—he broke a cheekbone, a collarbone and three ribs—caused him to miss 99 games in '91, then he sat out 77 more in '92 with three separate on-field injuries.

But last season he stayed healthy and overcame a miserable start at the plate, winding up with a .305 batting average and becoming the first player to lead the National League in at bats, hits, walks and runs. If the Phillies had had a better bullpen, Dykstra would have been a world champion, and with a .348 average and four home runs against the Toronto Blue Jays, he would have been Most Valuable Player of the World Series.

A more likely overseas spokesman might have been Toronto's Paul Molitor, who was the Series MVP, or even Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who beat out Dykstra as National League MVP. Any number of players might have seemed a more logical first choice to represent the game on the Continent rather than the stubby leader of the alley-cat Phillies, his mouth stuffed with chewing tobacco during games.

But who better to handle the indifference, the anonymity any player was sure to face in Europe? Who would make people laugh regardless of the language barrier? The personality traits and mannerisms that have made Dykstra both laughable and lovable—the bluntness, the almost childlike charm—were universal qualities, making him seem approachable to people who knew nothing about his game. Dykstra was always going to be more than a high batting average and lots of stolen bases. This is baseball, shake his hand, his name is Lenny Dykstra.

Hard to believe, but Europe knew less about Dykstra than he knew about Europe. ("Now, Paris is France," Dykstra was heard to reason on the flight from Paris to Amsterdam. "But London, that's just London, right? It's just London?") While in the last decade the NBA, the NFL and even professional beach volleyball have established marketing footholds in Europe by playing exhibitions or setting up overseas leagues, and creating a following through televised events, baseball has been arguing with its own shadow. The adversarial relationship between baseball owners and players ruined plans to stage major league exhibitions in Barcelona prior to the '92 Olympics and last October at the famous Lord's cricket ground in London, which, by the way, is in England.

But baseball was able to muster this one-man tour, which officially began on Saturday morning, Nov. 20, in Düsseldorf, where Dykstra signed autographs for two hours at Karstadt, reputedly the largest sporting goods store in Europe. At the entrance to the store Dykstra looked up to find Shaquille O'Neal dunking over him. It seemed fitting enough that a basketball poster two stories tall would greet a 5'10" baseball player. Michael Jordan is the world's most popular athlete and O'Neal is already a global celebrity in his second pro season, but the World Series was not even televised in Germany.

Dykstra's job was to show Europe what it had missed, to give baseball a face. A steady line of Karstadt customers wanted his signature, although in many cases they had no idea who he was. Yet Dykstra did not appear disappointed as he left for Paris that night.

Things picked up the next morning over breakfast at the Ritz, where Dykstra was interviewed by two journalists from Strike, a quarterly French baseball magazine. He put on his Phillie uniform for photographs at the Eiffel Tower, and then he was taken to the French national sports institute, where he awarded medals to a group of 8- to 12-year-olds who had won the local baseball championship. Also four players from the French national baseball team, all in their 20's, were waiting to take batting practice in his presence. They didn't show Dykstra anything to write home to Phillie general manager Lee Thomas about, but he delivered his lecture on hitting as promised.