David Wells popped into ESPN studios in some mysterious and undisclosed location to chat about “The Yankee Years,” the co-authored tome by former Yankees manager Joe Torre and Sports Illustrated baseball columnist Tom Verducci. Wells, of course, has a rather personal history with controversy-generating books in the form of his “Perfect I’m Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball.” The Yankees fined Wells $100,000 for his role in an occasionally salacious autobiography that was not only ghost-written but that the pitcher claimed he never read.

Unlike Wells, I did read the book. When the pitcher joined the Red Sox for the 2005 season, I felt it made sense to perform relevant due diligence on his career, so I checked the book out of the library system at Harvard (where I had a job at the time). Though the book was two years old, I was the first to take it out on loan from Harvard’s library system. Apparently, the southpaw was not must-read material for Hist & Lit concentrators.

Sometime that spring, I informed Wells that I had checked his book out of the Harvard library, figuring that a man who never went to college might be amused to know that his little opus had made it into one of the great libraries of the world. Instead, he expressed dismay.

“You couldn’t shell out the 20 bucks to buy it?” he wondered.

One wonders whether Wells will shell out the $20 (or, more precisely, $14.82 via pre-order from amazon.com) to purchase “The Yankee Years,” or whether he’ll be content to continue to sit in studios and talk about a book that he’s never read, based on his experience of having “written” another book that he never read. Wells, who has still never retired despite not having pitched since 2007, had this to say about Torre in an interview that was excerpted on SportsCenter: “If you’re going to go out and talk smack on somebody like that, you better be able to back it up.”

Apparently, in his mid-40s, Wells has become a spokesperson for the notion on the relationship between discretion and valor. He did, after all, choose to “plead the fifth” when recently asked for his favorite Torre story:

Good grief.

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