I Told You I Wasn't Perfect

Book excerpt: 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.