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. 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 the first pitch of the 1969 All-Star Game in Washington, D.C. By 1972 the pain and inflammation of a torn rotator cuff in his pitching shoulder became overwhelming, and at age 28 Denny McLain was washed up as a major league pitcher. It was then that McLain's bravado and notion of invincibility led him squarely into the jaws of disaster. In I Told You I Wasn't Perfect, McLain colorfully 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 would be a challenge to invent a character that soars to such dizzying heights and then plunges to such depths of despair as McLain did. And it is McLain's ability to finally reflect on his mistakes and self-indulgences that makes his story one of the most compelling baseball memoirs to come along in a generation.