BOB GARFIELD: If you seek a respite from scandal this coming week, you might take in baseball's All Star Game, where the boys of summer toil in the purity of the national pastime. Or not. The Los Angeles Dodgers are in bankruptcy, the New York Mets are trying to save the franchise after its principal owner lost a fortune in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens is in federal court fighting perjury charges related to his alleged performance-enhancing drug use, and former all star Lenny Dykstra of the 1993 National League Champion Philadelphia Phillies is in jail for an ever-growing list of theft, drug and fraud charges.

That development is pathetic but unsurprising to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Frank Fitzpatrick who saw it all coming. He covered the colorful but erratic player in his heyday, and recently wrote a column regretting what may have been too much journalistic indulgence. Fitzpatrick says that Dykstra was an irresistible subject.

FRANK FITZPATRICK: You know, when I think about Lenny, I think he embodies both versions of the word “dirtball.” In a good sense, he was a baseball dirtball, which meant he hustled and he dug and he tried to beat you in any way that he could. But in the negative sense of that word, he was rude and crude and astonishingly boorish. He would have been a - you know, a great character for a novelist, let alone a baseball beat writer.

BOB GARFIELD: And Dykstra kind of chose you as much as you chose him as a subject. How so?

FRANK FITZPATRICK: Well, he was a great journalism junkie. He knew where every sports writer in every town was, who could write, who couldn't write, who might help them. And he identified me pretty quickly as a guy who could help him. And I, you know, being a new baseball beat writer, was, was sort of enamored that the star of the team and taken to me in a certain warm – if Lenny could ever be considered warm – sort of way. And he knew what I wanted. I mean, he could be funny and, you know, he could be irascible and he could be “The Dude” which, you know, was a character he sort of created for himself.

BOB GARFIELD: That's what he called everybody, right? He could never remember anybody's name, so he called everybody Dude and came to be called The Dude himself, right?

FRANK FITZPATRICK: That’s right, and The Dude became sort of a caricature of who Lenny Dykstra was. I mean this was a train wreck waiting to happen. And, and we knew this back then and – and, you know, you can't help but looking back thinking, you know, why didn’t I do a little more in portraying this side of Dykstra instead of, you know going out of my way to portray the other, the more appealing to me side of him.

BOB GARFIELD: What kind of stuff did you choose not to share with your readers?

FRANK FITZPATRICK: Did we all suspect that he was doing storage? Yes. Did we all suspect that that he was taking greenies, you know, the amphetamines that were omnipresent in the baseball clubhouse in those days? Yes. Did we know he cheated on his wife on the road? Yes.

We knew all these things, and yet behind everything a baseball beat writer does there’s this fear of severing a good relationship because without them in a competitive news environment, you're dead. So I think we're probably all guilty of hiding the true character of Lenny Dykstra for all those years.

BOB GARFIELD: The notion of a gentleman's agreement is not novel to journalism. White House reporters in the sixties, for example, were widely aware of President John F Kennedy's sexual transgressions but chose not to report them, I guess, on the grounds of what they deemed then to be irrelevance.

But the gentleman's agreement about political peccadilloes has more or less dissolved over the decades. Does it still exist in professional sports writing?

FRANK FITZPATRICK: These players and these teams are so much more savvy now about hiding people from the media, about training players how to deal with the media.

I know when I interview athletes now it's shocking to get anything - anything out of the ordinary from them. They're so cautious and so careful; they have so much to lose.

So whether that gentleman's agreement exists or that is, is difficult to say because there isn't that same kind of closeness, that intimacy almost that we had with these guys. I mean, we were living with these guys for six, seven months a year. And, you know, they didn't have as many places to hide is they do now.

BOB GARFIELD: The thrust of your column was that you harbor a sense of culpability, that you, in so cherishing this intimacy with Lenny Dykstra, became an enabler. If this were 1993, and you could do it all over again, the Phillies were on the way to the World Series, and Dykstra was a candidate for the Most Valuable Player Award, and you had written candidly about all of his excesses, what would have happened?

FRANK FITZPATRICK:  There would have been very few players who would have talked to me. You know, and the manager would have been [LAUGHS] even more difficult to deal with. You would have been able to do your job, but only in the most routine uninteresting fashion imaginable. In terms of inside information, you would have been lost.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so this is now 2011. This is an age when Brett Favre essentially puts his genitals up on [LAUGHING] eBay, and it shows up everywhere. There seems to be no shyness about reporting the most crude, the most vulgar, the most licentious of behavior. Do you think that it's actually had an effect on the players? Does this change in journalistic culture actually force them to suppress their let's say, bassist tendencies?

FRANK FITZPATRICK: No, I don’t. But I do think they’re more cautious about it. If you’re using drugs, you got drug tests. If you’re - if you’re going to a nightclub you've got a hundred people there was cell phones and they know who you are. So this is a strange new world we live in and, and I wouldn’t want to be a player or a beat writer [LAUGHS] in it, to be honest with you.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Fitz. Thanks so much.

FRANK FITZPATRICK: Thank you, Bob. It was fun.

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BOB GARFIELD:  Frank Fitzpatrick is a columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.