Word: mclain
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...insurance adjuster who picked up extra cash by giving electric-organ lessons on the side, the heavy-handed elder McLain was a semipro shortstop in his youth. He started Denny on his lessons early?both at the keyboard and on the diamond. Denny had trouble deciding which he liked best, the organ or baseball. "He'd be having a game in the park across the street," his mother remembers, "and he'd call Time!' and run into the house and play a couple of songs on the organ. Everybody would have to wait for him, and he'd play...
Although his arsenal includes a slider, a medium-speed curve and a jug-handle changeup as well as a fastball?all of which he can deliver either overhand, three-quarter-arm or sidearm?McLain's main assets are speed and control. Cuteness and cunning are foreign to him: he rarely wastes a pitch, and he does not try to sucker batters into swinging at bad balls. "Control is God-given," Denny claims. "Like a good arm. You don't develop it, and I thank God He gave me both." Last month, in a typical McLain display of power and accuracy...
More often than not, Denny's second pitch is identical to the first. So is the third. He delights in tweaking danger by the nose just for the sheer, perverse fun of it. An opponent who hits a home run off McLain's fastball will probably get another hummer the next time he comes to bat. Denny is always anxious to prove that any hit was a fluke...
Keyboard and Diamond. On and off the field, McLain has been tackling all comers with careless abandon ever since he was an eighth-grader in suburban Markham, Ill., and refused to wear the blue uniform tie prescribed by the Roman Catholic sisters at Ascension grade school. As Denny tells it: "Ten days or so before graduation, I decided I wasn't going to wear that goddam blue bow tie any more. So I ripped it off, and Sister said, 'Put that tie back on,' and I said, "I'll be damned if I'll put it on.' Well, she called...
After graduating from Ascension (with bow tie firmly in place), McLain went on to Mt. Carmel High, Chicago's "Little Notre Dame." Father Ben Hogan, a former English teacher at Mt. Carmel, remembers Denny well: "He had a lot of trouble keeping his mouth shut." And he was no whiz in the classroom, although he managed to maintain a C average. Denny insists that he was really better than that. "I went to school like I pitch," he says. "I am as good as I want to be. I could study 20 minutes and pass a test. Or I could...