In 1968, 24-year old Denny McLain turned the baseball world upside down by winning 31 games for the Detroit Tigers. McLain was also a musician. After he won both the MVP and Cy Young Awards in '68, he cut two albums for Capitol Records and played the Hammond organ in a three-week stint in Las Vegas. But winning games and performing on stage were never enough for McLain. He was driven by an insatiable thirst for attention and adventure and in 1969, flying back from a dental appointment in Detroit that he could have rescheduled, Denny arrived 20 minutes after he was supposed to have thrown out the first pitch of the All-Star Game in Washington, D.C. McLain recounts his fabulous success in one of baseball's most exciting eras, as well as his rapid fall from glory, two prison stints, and a horrific personal tragedy. It's one of the most compelling baseball memoirs to come along in a generation.
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.
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