I had some misgivings about reaching out to him again, in the wake of the Uber incident. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Dykstra I’d once known getting belligerent with a service worker in the middle of the night. He seldom slept, for one thing, and he had that peculiarly American ability to exhibit contempt for the working class while also resonating powerfully with it—in his case as a self-made grunt, a latter-day Pete Rose. But the prospect of his threatening someone with a deadly weapon was more alarming, of course. I’d also been following Dykstra for a while on Twitter, where he occasionally indulged in misogynistic trolling, seeming to prefer negative—or bottom-feeding—attention to no attention at all.

Dykstra said that he was “addicted to Monster,” the energy drink, and claimed never to have taken a nap. “While you’re sleeping, I’m working,” he said. Photograph by Krista Schlueter for The New Yorker

On the other hand, I’d also known Dykstra to be intermittently reflective, and, beneath the self-conscious Nails persona, capable of genuine compassion. I kept thinking of a moment, which I hadn’t written about, where Dykstra, upon learning that I was sick and in a foreign country, immediately shed the dude-bro tone and asked in earnest if I had access to adequate doctors. I sometimes thought of him as an authentic spirit who had been taken hostage by his own caricature, which he seemed increasingly powerless to escape. And then there was the broader theme—life after pro sports—that had brought us together in the first place. There was undeniable poignancy in his own story’s nightmarish turn, in light of the slogan he’d devised for The Players Club: “keep living the dream.” So I sent him an e-mail, inviting him to a ballgame.

He wrote me back an enthusiastic note—at 12:45 A.M.—and signed off, “And of course the best time to reach me is 24/7.” He then called me around lunchtime the next day, sounding as though he hadn’t touched a pillow in the interim. “You couldn’t get six fiction writers to write a better novel than this, could you?” he asked. “Everything with me is, like, I’m either flying private jets or I’m in the cooler! What other person gets kidnapped by an Uber driver?” He was contesting the charges, arguing that the driver had, in effect, held him against his will, by locking the doors and refusing to let him out after they’d agreed to disagree about his destination. The last time he held a gun, he said, was in the late eighties, when his Mets teammate Kevin McReynolds took him hunting in the backwoods of Arkansas. (In body-cam footage released by the Linden, New Jersey, police, an incredulous Dykstra can be seen telling the officers, “I’m a convicted felon! I can’t own a firearm.”) “We’re going to flip the script,” he boasted.

As we continued talking, over the next week or so, I explained that I wasn’t interested in litigating his latest case, but, rather, in talking more generally about any change in perspective that the past decade might have brought him. “We have so much to circle back on,” he agreed. “I’m a man of the people now, dude.”

I proposed that we ride the 7 train out to Citi Field together, and he seemed game, if a little flummoxed. “How long does it take?” he asked. “I know what trains are, but I don’t know that train. Maybe The New Yorker can get us an Uber?”

The first difference I noticed—other than the gray hair (“no shoe polish!”)—is that he carries two phones now, instead of three. “My doctor made me give one away,” he explained. “He said, ‘The stress will kill you.’ ” The personal and business phones have been consolidated. The “Batphone”—for assignations, or booty calls—persists. He asked me, as a joke, whether he ought to bring his “dick pills” to the ballpark—and then showed me his supply. (He also encouraged me to sample his aftershave lotion: “All my stuff’s special.”) “This is what happened since I’ve seen you last,” he continued. “This is the humiliation. There’s always a first time—it’ll happen to you, too—when you got to peel and reveal, dude, and you wait for the blood to flow.” He mused, “I don’t know if you can run out of stuff, or whatever?” Here might be a good time to mention that there was a young woman—a photographer—with us. She chuckled. “Good to see you laugh,” Dykstra said. “Good to see people laugh. That’s what life’s about, man. Got to have something to look forward to.”

Conversation with Dykstra is always free-associative, and this led into a digressive discussion of the indignities of prison—where, he said, he read a book from start to finish for the first time in his life. (It was “The King of Torts,” by John Grisham. “It’s about bankruptcy!”) Recalling his initial arrest, in 2011, he said, “You would have thought they were capturing Osama bin Laden, dude. They came out of trees.” He added, “They thought I was so dangerous I had to do state time and federal time.” While in the federal penitentiary, in Victorville, California, he met “all these, like, clean-looking white dudes. I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ They were doctors! For writing OxyContin prescriptions.” As a recovering Vicodin addict (“That’s a different kind of prison”), he could relate.

In the L.A. County jail, meanwhile, his cellmates included a member of the Mexican mafia. He is still in touch with a former member of the Lomas gang, who managed to beat a life sentence through an insufficient-evidence appeal. His name is Isaac Pedroza. He served as his own lawyer, and this afforded him daily privileges—access to the law library, with a phone—that Dykstra didn’t enjoy. Pedroza used to relay messages from Dykstra to the outside world. Dykstra repaid the favor after their respective releases. “He said, ‘I need a U-Haul.’ I got him the U-Haul. Got him money to live. That felt good! I mean, look, he doesn’t get a pass for what happened.”

“I was a gang member since I was nine years old!” Pedroza told me. He is now a married father and living straight, on the outskirts of San Diego. “Lenny lost his mom when we were in there together. I was fighting a murder case, so I had no other place to turn but to God. My main thing was letting Lenny know that nobody’s perfect. Like, ‘Look, man, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich. Most people that have money, they still end up empty.’ ”

Dykstra tried countering Pedroza’s religious messaging with the example of his pious ex-teammate Gary Carter, who died of brain cancer, in 2012. “Carter was the guy you wanted your kid to grow up to be like,” he said. “And, like, he dies first. Makes you wonder about God. Out of all of us—all of the people that partied, and all that—and he dies? The nicest guy, best husband, best father?”

Nonetheless, the subject has stuck with him, and he mentioned that he has hopes of creating a debate show called “Does God Exist?” “You have a science guy,” he explained. “Then you have the person selling the dream—the preacher. You got to sell the people out in the stands. What do they call them out there? They call it something different in church . . . . The congregation!”