McLain Returning to Mound as Pitcher on Prison Team

Denny McLain’s 12-year absence from the pitching mound will end next Saturday when the majors’ last 30-game winner strides up the hill for the Detroit Dennys.

Part of his audience will be armed guards who will make sure that only baseballs, and not people, go over the wall, which encircles the federal penitentiary in Atlanta where McLain is serving a 23-year sentence for gambling and drug convictions.

McLain won 31 games for the Detroit Tigers in 1968, lost six and won the American League Cy Young award. He also won the award as the league’s best pitcher the next year with a 24-9 record.

In 1973, he pitched for a minor league team in Shreveport, La., but didn’t pitch again until last week, when he began preparing for Saturday’s game between his namesake team and the Cardinals--a squad made up of mostly young inmates that was established before McLain arrived at the Atlanta prison three weeks ago.

When McLain suggested that Cardinals move a young outfielder with a strong arm to the mound, he was told they didn’t want any outside interference.

After the rejection, other inmates rallied around the 41-year-old McLain and asked him to pitch for a new team that would challenge the Cardinals.

Most of the players are between 40 and 50 and want nothing more than to beat the younger team.

“I told my wife about it, and she said it sounded like that Burt Reynolds movie, ‘The Longest Yard,’ ” McLain said in an interview published in Sunday’s Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

“I guess she’s right. . . . It’s a war. Everybody’s talking about it.”

He began throwing on Tuesday. Impressed by his initial warmup, he threw again Wednesday. “I almost died,” he said.

After a Thursday session, McLain said, “I literally died.”

But he is ready to pitch and has already looked over his new park.

“As high as the wall is, it’s not very far,” McLain said. “The field is situated so that (home runs) go over the wall.”