Denny McLain
Dennis Dale "Denny" McLain (born March 29, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois) is a former American professional baseball player who also played organ. He is the last major league pitcher to win 30 or more games during a season.
In 1973, McLain again tried to make a comeback, pitching in the minor leagues with Des Moines and Shreveport. The following year, he played a season for the London Majors of the Intercounty Baseball League at Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario, Canada. Given his arm problems, McLain only pitched nine innings for the Majors, but he did play in 14 games at either shortstop, first base, or catcher, and batted .380, including hitting two homers in one game in London.
McLain continued to earn side money at clubs playing the organ, which his father taught him to play. (He was also a pop performer on the organ before and during his baseball career, recording two albums for Captiol Records —and he sometimes played the organ during Tiger games while he was still an active player.) McLain also earned quite a bit of money hustling golf, easily attracting 'marks' due to his past baseball fame. Additionally, he reportedly once accepted over $100,000 to fly a wanted felon out of the country.
In his post-baseball career, his weight ballooned to 330 pounds. He was imprisoned for drug trafficking, embezzlement, and racketeering with Anthony Spilotro and later John Gotti Jr.. Attorney Lawrence R. Greene represented McLain before the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, where his RICO conviction obtained in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida at Tampa was reversed. Between his stints in prison and rehabilitation in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, McLain could be found on various sports shows on talk radio and occasionally on panel-format sports shows on network television in the Detroit area. He could also be found signing autographs at a metro Detroit 7-Eleven store at the corner of Mound Road and Metro Parkway in Sterling Heights, Michigan, where he was employed on work-release.[1] During the Detroit Tigers 2006 playoff run, McLain was the baseball analyst for Drew and Mike on WRIF radio in Detroit. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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