FORMER New York Mets out fielder Lenny Dykstra appears to be striking out with his magazine, Players Club.
Dykstra, who helped the 1986 Mets capture the World Series before landing with the Philadelphia Phillies, is leaving behind a string of unpaid bills and a constant parade of shifting editors and office addresses.
In the latest upheaval, Chris Frankie, the acting editor, resigned Dec. 4 along with two other staffers. Now Loren Feldman, former editor-in-chief of Philadelphia magazine, is said to be ready to join as the new chief editor.
“Loren Feldman is the new editor,” said Dykstra.
Meanwhile, Frankie says he’s owed back pay.
But Dykstra sees things differently: “That’s not true. Frankie owes me money. Whatever he’s talking about is delusional.”
Counters Frankie, “That’s beyond ridiculous. How could an employee owe an employer money?”
Beyond three months’ back pay, Frankie said he’s also owed for business expenses.
Frankie, who had originally helped Dykstra write the TheStreet.com’s “Nails on the Numbers” column, got the editor job in August after Dykstra’s talks with Neil Amdur, a former sports editor at The New York Times, collapsed at the last minute after a fight over Amdur’s ability to hire deputies.
“I did fly out there for a meeting with Dykstra about the editor’s job,” Amdur confirmed. “I spent a couple of days with him. He did offer me the job.”
The last issue of Players Club was published in October, and the November issue will now be combined into a year-end double issue that has yet to appear.
His aim with the magazine was to help professional athletes make sensible investments with the money they earn from sports to ensure they don’t go broke when their pro careers end.
But present and former staffers say that Dykstra, who during his days with Major League Baseball had the nickname “Nails,” is tough as nails when it comes to paying his staff or vendors.
Frequently, sources said, he got staff to use their own credit cards to pay for ex penses related to the maga zine, and took months to re imburse the employees.
Although the magazine is less than a year old, it has al ready had four different printers and three different editors. Several vendors have also stopped doing business with the magazine.
The latest vendor to suspend business is Getty Images, which sources say is owed around $40,000.
Dykstra claims that’s not true. “I have a great relationship with them,” he said of Getty.
One source who’s worked closely with Dykstra said he “has a haphazard way of paying – he just wires you money.”
“It’s always that the money is just about to come in and everyone will be paid,” this person said, adding that if someone demands payment, then Dykstra turns on them. “If you demand payment, then you are the enemy.
“He always feels abandoned by people, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s the reason people abandon him.”
Book deal
The New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick is penning a book on President-elect Barack Obama for Sonny Mehta‘s Knopf imprint at Random House Inc., and the overarching theme of the book is race.
For the Pulitzer Prize-winning Remnick, the book marks the first he’s written since his Muhammad Ali bio in 1998, shortly after he took the editor-in-chief job at The New Yorker.
News of Remnick’s book was first broken on politico.com.
Remnick stirred controversy in this year’s presidential campaign with a magazine cover that showed Obama as a Muslim and wife Michelle as a fist-pumping terrorist.
He had his one and only interview with Obama three years ago when Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” was hitting the shelves and the then- senator had been invited to speak to the American Maga zine Conference.
“That was the only time I interviewed him,” said Remnick, who said he is not ex pecting wide access will be granted to any authors writing about the president-elect.
Remnick said that while race has been discussed at various moments in the presidential campaign, it has never been fully fleshed out.
“To form a big narrative, to research it deeply and tell it well is another matter,” said Remnick.
In many ways, Remnick will be picking up the themes of America and race that he also explored in his Ali biography.
It will also seem to put him into something of a competitive mode with one of The New Yorker political writers, Ryan Lizza, who also has snagged a deal to write about Obama. But the two insist there are no hurt feelings.
Lizza’s book, from Penguin, is to be devoted to the first year of Obama’s presidency for Ann Godoff‘s Penguin Press imprint of Penguin.
He said that reports that Remnick dissuaded him from writing a book about the campaign were overblown.
“My book is about the first year of the new administration, while David’s book is about race, so obvi ously there’s no overlap,” said Lizza.
“David, in fact, will be the first person to whom I show each chapter for feedback.”
Lizza said he rejected the idea of a “Making of the President”-type campaign book.
“Two years ago, I was considering doing a book about the presidential campaign [but] I was always lukewarm about the campaign book – the genre seems dead – while covering the ’08 presidential race for David seemed absolutely thrilling – frankly, a dream come true.”
Remnick said he has no due date for his book. keith.kelly@nypost.com