Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball [Hardcover]

David Wells (Author), Chris Kreski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 2003

Forget the perfect game. Forget the World Series rings. Forget the legendary carousing, the barroom brawling, the heavy-metal head-banging, and the endless supply of uncensored, often havoc-wreaking quotes. Forget the feuds with dumb-assed fans, wrong-headed managers and the entire city of Cleveland. Even if Perfect, I'm Not was to blindly (and insanely) ignore all those amazing aspects of David Wells' life as a major leaguer, his story would still bounce off these pages as a wildly entertaining and jaw-droppingly honest look at the game of baseball. Nothing less would be possible. Wells simply isn't wired for spin-doctoring. He has no "delete" button. He pulls no punches.In a sport that's now largely populated by a bland collection of well-dressed, personality-free, cliché -- spouting Stepford jocks, Wells clearly holds the title of "baseball's most beloved bad-ass".

From rookie ball amid the beer-soaked, frozen tundra of the Great White North, through Winter Ball amid the easy women and explosive diarrhea of Venezuela, Perfect I'm Not explores Boomer's long, strange, often insane climb through the minors. And from the Siberia of the Blue Jays' bullpen, through intensive training with a brilliant little Yoda known as Sparky Anderson, the book also examines how Boomer grew from a mediocre reliever, into a solid, reliable, hugely successful starter. From there, after tortured dealings with Marge Schott in Cincinatti, and Pat Gillick in Baltimore, the book follows Boomer deep inside the New York Yankees' dugout, right through the teams' fairy-tale seasons of '97 and '98. It stands with David on the mound through his legendary perfect game.

It documents his high-profile love affair with the night-life of New York City, and then explores just how devastating it felt to be unceremoniously dumped for Roger Clemens. Perfect I'm Not also follows Boomer through his chronic back pain of 2001, then surgery, rehab, uncertainty, and one pinstriped Christmas miracle, courtesy of Boss Steinbrenner. And though the 2002 season may have enjoyed a less than perfect climax, it nonetheless rounds out the book with a Yankees reunion that kept Boomer smiling from February, right into October.

Perfect I'm Not gives readers an unprecedented, all-access pass to every major league stadium in the country, providing a first-person perspective of life on the diamond, as well as an uncensored, warts-and-all, insider's guide to life inside locker-rooms, hotel rooms, planes, dugouts, buses, bedrooms, restaurants, titty-bars, and more. It's great fun. It's real. It's as close as you're ever gonna get to making the show.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perfect I'm Not is, indeed, not a perfect book, but as in baseball, literary imperfection can make for a thrilling ride. Part Horatio Alger, part libertine, Wells peppers the narrative of his rise from poverty in Ocean Beach, California to baseball fame and fortune with numerous prurient tales from behind the locker room door. He is frank about the use of steroids among his fellow players and he's not afraid to burn major bridges (one must assume they were already on fire) in his ferocious attacks on such baseball luminaries as veteran general manager Pat Gillick. And the story behind his woozy perfect game is legend. All this is entertaining stuff and worth the price of admission.

The book, however, falls too often into a pattern of explication and justification for Wells’s "entertaining" run-ins with the law, baseball management, players, and even his own family. We learn that young Dave Wells once punched his sister and broke her jaw, but, he explains, this was because his sister had scraped his sunburned back with her fingernails. This childhood story is then repeated--in a grown up form--several times. In many cases, it does seem that he is justified in claiming innocence--or at least in claiming he got an eye for an eye. But repetition of these explications--which even include bad pitching performances caused, we learn, by nascent physical problems (elbow, shoulder, bone chips, gout, back)--take away his agency in his own story. The hero is always a victim. In the end, then, the book is as flawed as its author, offering entertaining insight--some perhaps unintentional--into the man and his game.

--Patrick O’Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

Wells's rollicking memoir of his unlikely journey to the top of the hill at Yankee Stadium reads like Bull Durham rewritten by Ozzy Osbourne and Howard Stern. After a juicy setup that recounts his in-drag appearance on Saturday Night Live with teammates Derek Jeter and David Cone, Wells and Kreski settle into a three-up, three-down pace, chronicling Boomer's rise from Hells Angels mascot through the minors in barren Medicine Hat, Canada, down to winter ball in Venezuela, where he gets dysentery and is almost killed and on up to his crowning achievement: the perfect game he threw for the Yanks while hungover in 1998. The pitcher's life often resembles one of Kreski's credits, Beavis and Butt-head, resulting in a look-back-in-laughter that earns on average more than a chuckle per page. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen Wells interviewed; what's unexpected are his painstaking accounts of such turns in his life as the career-threatening back surgery he faced in 2001, to say nothing of the scrape he got into in a Manhattan diner last year with a drunken heckler. Fans will applaud because Wells's inside baseball divulges numbers as well as names, and it sketches as uncensored a portrait of today's money-and-media-saturated pro sports as they come.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (March 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060508248
• ISBN-13: 978-0060508241
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,194,521 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A surprisingly funny and candid read. I loved it., September 10, 2003

By 

Joseph M. Siegler (Garland, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball (Hardcover)

I never liked David Wells, mostly because I only knew him as a Yankee player. That alone is generally enough to get me not to like someone. :) I wanted to check this out solely because of the "hype" surrounding the book. And after having read the book, I have to wonder if the negative press surrounding the book and some of it's "expositions" weren't self inflicted. Read the book. It's a wonderfully entertaining read. He talks about all the problems he had in his life early on, from his time in the minors, to the boredom in the bullpen (although his story about getting women in the stands to flash them is awesome) to his battles with team management, and lots on the Yankees. I also got a charge out of his comments on former Reds owner Marge Schott, and her dog.

I have to admit that this book goes on my recommend list. It was a funny read, and for a baseball fan like myself, gives me some insight into the mind of a baseball player. I really enjoyed it. The link here is for the hardback edition of the book. There is a paperback version scheduled for release, but it's not currently slated until Mar 1, 2004. The hardback is available now.

Oh, BTW, if you're someone who isn't into the liberal use of foul language, you might want to stay away from the book. It's not like every third word is f this or f that, but there is definitely more than a smattering of f-bombs and the like in the book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't believe the hype, April 15, 2003

By 

Jason A. Miller (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball (Hardcover)

I'm not sure why David Wells was slapped with a six-figure fine over this book. Most of the "controversy" appears to be caused by out-of-context quotes randomly selected by the press. The supposed negative statements about teammates Mike Mussina and Roger Clemens are spoken in the larger context of praising their baseball skills. The much-criticized "25 to 40 percent" statistic of ballplayers who use illegal steroids and performance-enhancing drugs ("10 to 25%" is the number in the edited book) is part of an enlightening discussion of how Jose Canseco went from being a minor-league toothpick, to a tree trunk with 462 career home runs (and a book deal of his own).

Anyway, this book is just plain funny. Most sports biographies are written by sportswriters: half of them by Dick Schaap, half by Peter Golenbock, and Catfish Hunter for some reason chose Armen Keteyian. Wells goes with comedy writer Chris Kreski, best known for William Shatner's non-fiction epics, and "Growing Up Brady". Kreski's also a lifelong Mets fan, which makes the book easier for me to read, certainly. His ability to recap baseball games is only adequate -- he makes some minor factual errors, misspells some of the player names Wells dictated into the tape recorder, and gives Wells an impossibly specific memory about old games ("Two hours and forty-eight minutes later, 49,328 screaming fans watched me ...") -- but gives Boomer plenty of jokes and cutting insights into the many peaks and valleys of his career.

Wells decries the corporate naming of Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, saying that to him, it'll always be the Jack Murphy Stadium of his youth. Which is a wonderful sentiment... and wrong, since it was actually called San Diego Stadium until Wells was 17.

Boomer doesn't use the space to get on a soapbox and preach about baseball. No diatribes about interleague play, or the wild card. Wells is more interested in topless girls in the stands during spring training. He's clearly having too much fun in the major leagues to worry about salary caps and the fate of small market teams. Who would you rather read, Wells meeting Metallica's Lars Ulrich and describing Joe Torre's shock at AC/DC lyrics, or Whitey Herzog's whining about salary arbitration.

For a quick spring-training read, it's hard to get more entertaining than "Perfect I'm Not". If nothing else, hopefully Boomer will get his penalty money back in additional sales. And then lose twice to the Mets this summer.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keep Crying, Sox Fans, March 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball (Hardcover)

3 reviews, 2 from people who obviously have not read the book and are Yankee-haters. The simple fact is, David Wells is a flake, but he's also a winner. He's the kind of guy that many a baseball fan would like to share a beer with, and I mean the regular fans, not the luxury box-sitting, shrimp cocktail-eating and leave in the 7th inning to beat the traffic "fans". The stories are about Wells' experiences, not what the media has spun to represent their own points of view and axes to grind. I applaud him for speaking his mind. There is going to be fallout from it, from people who object to the way that he portrays events, to the players and fans of cities and teams he has lit into, and he'll have to live with that. I appreciate his candor. He's no role model, certainly. And reading about his experiences, a sane, rational and sober person will conclude that it is not the way to make it to the major leagues. But it is how he chooses to live his life and as long as he's not hurting anyone I say "hoist another one, Boomer".