Just in the past two years, Dykstra has been the subject of at least 24 legal actions, including 18 since November. Three suits hit the courts on Jan. 29. He's been sued by publishers and print companies, by three different groups of pilots and by a Maryland-based financial and litigation consulting firm that offered expert testimony on his behalf in an earlier lawsuit. He's even been sued by a die-hard Mets fan who was the best man at his wedding 20-some years ago, though that New York investor claims there is no bad blood.

In 2005, long before the drama and the lawsuits, CNBC's Jim Cramer, host of "Mad Money," gave the budding stock-picking wizard a "Nails on the Numbers" column on Cramer's financial Web site, TheStreet.com. Cramer has his own Philly roots -- he worked as a vendor in the early '70s at Veterans Stadium, where the Phillies played. He liked Dykstra's celebrity and his options tips -- which by Dykstra's estimate generated $3 million in subscriber fees last year for TheStreet.com -- so much that he promoted him as "one of the great ones in this business." Last year, a Forbes Magazine article questioned whether Dykstra has always been the brains behind his selections. It suggested that Dykstra borrowed picks from one of his former mentors, market strategist Richard Suttmeier, who at the time offered his own selections via a subscription newsletter. The article revealed that among Dykstra's 17 buys last April, 11 had appeared days earlier in Suttmeier's newsletter.

"Suttmeier is a good guy," Dykstra says when his name is brought up.

Yet Suttmeier hasn't spoken to Dykstra since the Forbes article appeared, which coincided with the New York launch party for The Players Club magazine. The Forbes story factors into that silence, but Suttmeier also told ESPN.com that Dykstra owes $6,000 to his 35-year-old son. Jason Suttmeier was being paid $2,000 a month to provide Dykstra with stock-related spreadsheets, but Suttmeier's father says Dykstra had fallen three months behind in those payments.

That's a service that Dykstra describes this way: "The kid hit 'go,' hit 'print' on the machine."

"I taught him how to pick stocks," Richard Suttmeier says about Dykstra. "I told him what moving averages to use. Jason, my son, created the spreadsheets to track them every day. He sent them to me. I would look at them and then I would send them on to Lenny. And then he would have a subscription to my newsletter and that is what the Forbes article picked up. They tracked his picks versus mine, and made the claim he was getting the picks from me. But he was getting the picks from my newsletter that picks stocks, just like any other subscriber would. And Lenny also subscribed to about every newsletter known to man.