Friday, February 19, 2010

This Day in Baseball History (Ace Denny McLain Suspended for Gambling)


February 19, 1970—Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s suspension of Denny McLain for involvement in a bookmaking operation began a downward spiral in which the two-time Cy Young Award winner ended up suspended two more times that season, out of baseball within three, and in a seemingly unending circuit of bankruptcy, divorce and criminal courts over the next three decades.

At first glance, the title of the autobiography of later raucous pitcher David Wells, Perfect I’m Not, sounds like an echo of one by the Detroit Tiger’s righthanded ace, Nobody’s Perfect. But listen more closely: Wells’ is flatly declarative about his night-owl escapades, whereas McLain’s is the last refuge of amoral people worldwide: Everybody does it.

Wells’ halfhearted exercise regimen resulted in a bad back and an early departure from his scheduled start—and the Yankees’ pivotal loss--in the 2003 World Series against the Florida Marlins. But McLain’s association with bookies not only sidelined him for most of the 1970 season, but, more crucially, put him out of commission for many of the last frenetic weeks of 1967, when the Tigers were locked in a four-way, down-to-the-wire pennant race.

McLain’s three-month suspension coincided with my first serious interest in the national pastime. All I knew at the time was that he had won a combined 56 games in the last two seasons, and that he was as bright a star as the game had.

I didn’t understand until much later how necessary his suspension was for the integrity of the game, or how his career came to constitute one of the worst cases of wasted talents multiplied by absolute amorality in the entire annals of a sport far gamier than we’d care to admit. (As far back as 1865, members of the New York Mutuals had been involved in betting on a game.)

Even the slightest baseball trivia fan knows that McLain became the last winner of 30 victories in a season in 1968.

Unfortunately, many will also know that what should have been his Hall of Fame trajectory was considerably shortened through no fault but his own, and that during his post-career he would be convicted of offenses whose seriousness—racketeering, loan-sharking, extortion, cocaine possession, and stealing from his company’s pension fund—and redundancy sorely strained Americans’ natural wish to forgive and forget someone who commits a mistake.

Most baseball fans didn’t have a clue what was going on in the weeks after September 18, 1967. As if the first-place Tigers hadn’t suffered enough of a blow earlier that day—a 10th-inning, come-from-behind win by the hot Boston Red Sox—word got out that they’d be without McLain’s services for the most crucial stretch of the season. The talented 23-year-old, still with a chance to secure 20 wins and a pennant for his team, was suddenly, and mysteriously, injured.

What happened? Hard to tell, especially because McLain changed his story a few times. (Story A: he’d stubbed two toes while he woke up after watching TV. Story B: he injured them when he ran after raccoons rummaging in his garbage. Story C: he kicked something--a water cooler? a locker?--after a heart-breaking loss.)

But sometimes the simplest story makes sense, and in February 1970 Sports Illustrated provided one: he’d become involved in a bookmaking operation as a partner, then had his toes stepped on and dislocated by a mobster who told him he’d better pay a $46,000 gambling debt.

Unlike Pete Rose or the infamous “Black Sox” of decades earlier, McLain had not bet on his own team. Bowie Kuhn could only establish that McLain thought he was a partner in the bookmaking operation and was probably the victim of a confidence scheme.

Still, several teammates thought their ace was gone for one, maybe two, seasons. Kuhn’s three-month ban, then, was something of a relief.

McLain’s return came on July 1, against the New York Yankees. As a Bronx Bomber fan, I can remember watching the game on TV, as well as the intense interest in the contest (71 writers and nearly 54,000 fans—the most in nine years--showed up at Tiger Stadium) and the announcers who observed that the pitcher, for all his greatness, tended to serve up “gopher balls.”

And that’s what happened then, too, as McLain was forced to leave the game in the sixth inning behind 5-3, having served up homers to Jerry Kenney, Bobby Murcer and Thurman Munson. It was a portent of the fastball that had suddenly gone AWOL.

It would take me all day to tell all of the strange, sad things that happened to this once-great pitcher thereafter, but here’s just a few of them, besides the ones I’ve already mentioned:

* After baseball, his weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds;


* In 1992, a beloved daughter died in a tragic car crash;


* In the late 1990s, while in prison for financial hanky-panky with his company’s pension fund, he came to share a cellblock with John Gotti Jr.; and


* In his third autobiography, this felon—who continually let down his teammates, his fans, and especially his family—had the nerve to write that his teammate, Hall of Famer Al Kaline, was guilty of dogging it at times in the field.

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