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I Told You I Wasn't Perfect
I Told You I Wasn't Perfect

I Told You I Wasn't Perfect

By Denny McLain, By Eli Zaret

SPORTS & RECREATION

416 Pages, 6 x 9

Formats: Cloth, EPUB, Mobipocket, PDF

Cloth, $24.95 (US $24.95) (CA $27.95)

ISBN 9781572439573

Rights: WOR

Triumph Books (Apr 2007)

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9781572439573
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Overview

From being the only 30-game winner in more than 70 years to having the Gambino crime family order a hit for your murder, Denny McLain has surely seen it all: RICO charges from the U.S. government to touring the country as a popular musician playing on national TV and the Las Vegas strip before becoming a close jail-house friend to John Gotti Jr. I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect allows the former All-Star pitcher to share his cautionary tale with generations of baseball. In 1968, McLain set the baseball world on fire by being the first pitcher to win at least 30 games since Dizzy Dean 34 years earlier. But just two years later he was banned from the game for half a season, traded away to the laughing-stock Washington Senators where he entered into a never-ending battle with baseball icon Ted Williams. By 1972, he was a retired star, hustling games of golf. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was in and out of prison for charges including racketeering, loan-sharking, extortion, cocaine possession, and fraud before being included in wide-sweeping RICO charges that tried to connect him to Gotti and the violent underworld of the mafia. In this moving autobiography, McLain reveals how his desire for excitement and attention led directly to his downfall from being a popular public image and cost him his marriage, which has since been reconciled and remarried.

Author Biography

Denny McLain
See Author
Denny McLain is a former American professional baseball player, and the last major league pitcher to win 30 or more games during a season—a feat accomplished by only 13 players in the 20th century. Eli Zaret is a longtime sportscaster in Detroit and the author of Blue Collar Blueprint: How the Pistons Constructed Their Championship Formula and The Last of the Great Tigers: Untold Stories from an Amazing Season.

Press Releases

From being the only 30-game winner in more than 70 years to having the Gambino crime family order a hit for your murder, Denny McLain has surely seen it all: RICO charges from the U.S. government, touring the country as a popular musician playing on national TV and the Las Vegas strip before becoming a close jail-house friend to John Gotti Jr.

I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect by Denny McLain with Eli Zaret allows the former All-Star pitcher to share his cautionary tale with generations of baseball fans – older ones who witnessed his downfall and younger ones who can learn from McLain’s multitude of mistakes.
 
In 1968, McLain set the baseball world on fire by being the first pitcher to win at least 30 games since Dizzy Dean 34 years earlier.

But just two years later he was banned from the game for half a season, traded away to the laughing-stock Washington Senators where he entered into a never-ending battle with baseball icon Ted Williams. By 1972, he was a retired star, hustling games of golf. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was in and out of prison for charges including racketeering, loan-sharking, extortion, cocaine possession and fraud before being included in wide-sweeping RICO charges that tried to connect him to Gotti and the violent underworld of the mafia.

In I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect, McLain reveals that his desire for excitement and attention led directly to his downfall from being a popular public image and cost him his marriage (now reconciled and remarried). Some of the amazing stories throughout his life include:

> Learning that the Gambino crime family ordered at hit on him, despite sharing smuggled KFC and McDonald’s meals and laughs with John Gotti Jr. in prison
> How federal agents were so desperate to nail Gotti that they trumped up charges against McLain and wanted him to lie about a working relationship with Gotti
> How he retaliated against a fellow inmate who smashed his skull from behind with a fire extinguisher
> How hustling bowling games in the offseason directly helped him become a 31-game winner the next season (but fed his destructive gambling problem)
> What prompted then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to ban McLain for half a season in 1970 (and what led to two more suspensions that season)
> Why Ted Williams was one of the worst people that he ever was around in professional baseball

Always brash, always interesting, always with a story to tell – McLain was arguably the best and worst of many things in his life, but there’s no denying that he has been thoroughly mesmerizing at one job: being Denny McLain 24 hours a day, seven days a week.