The ghost of Jackie Robinson is getting dragged into a legal fight between former Met legends Lenny Dykstra and Ron Darling.
Darling’s book “108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game,’’ not only hurt Dykstra’s reputation but also diminished Robinson’s journey in breaking “baseball’s color barrier,” new court papers allege.
Dykstra claims the tome “falsely” accuses him of going on a racist rant worse than “anything Jackie Robinson might have heard.”
Darling says in the book that during the 1986 World Series, while on deck, Dykstra said racial slurs to black Red Sox pitcher Dennis Ray “Oil Can” Boyd that were “the worst collection of taunts and insults I’d ever heard – worse, I’m betting, than anything Jackie Robinson might have heard, his first couple times around the league.”
“Way worse than the Hollywood version of opposing players’ mistreatment of Jackie that was on display in The Jackie Robinson Story,” Darling and co-author Daniel Paisner wrote.
Dykstra says that since the incident never happened, “This inflammatory, and false, characterization minimizes the extreme racism Jackie Robinson endured when he broke baseball’s color barrier.”
And one of Darling’s publishers, St. Martin’s Press, should especially know this since it published a 2014 book, “Jackie Robinson and Race in America: A Brief History with Document,” which details some of the bigotry the player endured as the first black man playing in Major League Baseball in the 1940s.
The deplorable treatment described in the book included Phillies players once yelling from the bench “‘Hey, n***er, why don’t you go back to the cotton fields where you belong?’ and ‘Snowflake, which one of those white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?’” according to the court papers.
Another incident in the book detailed how Robinson was barricaded in a clubhouse in Baltimore while white spectators shouted, “‘Come out here Robinson, you son of a bitch. We’re gonna get you,’” according to the court documents.
“Defendants not only have harmed Mr. Dykstra’s reputation, but also have called into question both the legitimacy of 1986 New York Mets’ World Series championship and, incredibly, the racism faced by Jackie Robinson, the legendary figure who broke baseball’s color barrier,” the court filings charge.
In an amended version of the lawsuit, first filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in April against Darling and the publishers, Dykstra added Paisner as a defendant.
In July, Darling’s camp argued that he couldn’t have defamed Dykstra because his reputation couldn’t get any worse, noting that Dykstra is a convicted felon who has also faced slew of other allegations including sex harassment and drug possession.
Paisner declined to comment.
Publishers St. Martin’s Press LLC and Macmillan Publishing Group LLC did not immediately return requests for comment.
A lawyer for Darling, Michael Berger, said the case “has nothing to do with anyone other than Lenny Dykstra.”