Goldman's baseball quotables #3 Three Finger Brown's loss could be your gain

Continuing a series of words, pictures, and ruminations on what it all means. In today's entry, we contemplate the competitive advantage of self-mutilation with a pitching great of 100 years ago.

The Hall of Fame broadcaster Jack Buck made that joke about the great Cubs right-hander Mordecai Peter Centennial "Three Finger" Brown. If you're as slow at math as I can be, 3/5 is 60 percent, get it? Greedy guy, Brown: Not only did his parents give him one of the all-time great baseball names, then he went and added one of the all-time great baseball nicknames. He had yet another sobriquet, "Miner," because, obviously enough, he had worked in a mine. His teammates called him "Brownie." The Hall of Famer was a six-time twentysomething-game-winner and had a 2.06 career ERA. It was both the Deadball era and a more primitive league, so Pedro Martinez scoffs at Three Finger's record, but his park- and league-adjusted ERA still ranks as 16^th on Baseball-Reference's all-time list.

As you can see from the photo below, Brown's primary nickname was a bit of an exaggeration. He had 4.5 fingers, but two of the four whole digits wandered perversely and a third was paralyzed. There were two accidents: At seven years old, he stuck his hand into his uncle's corn-grinder, which chewed up his right index finger; it had to be amputated at the first joint. The rest of his fingers were injured as well. He hadn't fully healed when he fell on the hand (while chasing a pig, because video games hadn't been invented yet), breaking what was left and knocking the splints out of alignment.



I don't know why Brown's fingers weren't looked at until after they had set and healed improperly; living in rural Indiana in 1883, Brown might not have had regular access to a doctor. Perhaps It wouldn't have mattered; it wasn't exactly a peak time for medicine. It was just two years earlier that doctors tortured the not-quite-assassinated President James Garfield to death for lack of X-ray technology. Eighteen years later, the wounded President William McKinley would be felled by septicemia for roughly the same reason; doctors didn't think to use the primitive X-ray devices that were by then available and they couldn't find the bullet by other means. No doctor at that time could have zapped Brown's hand to see how it was coming along, so how it set was how it set.

The four fingers of Three Finger Brown (Getty)

By that time, Brown was pitching in the minor leagues at Terre Haute. The deformed hand allowed him to throw wicked breaking stuff, which is to say his handicap functioned as a competitive advantage. "Yes, that old paw served me pretty well in its time," he told The Sporting News. "It gave me a bigger dip." According to Lee Allen and Tom Meany's Kings of the Diamond, Brown's fastball was, "good but not exceptional," but his curve, which broke down and away from right-handed batters and down and in on left-handers, induced grounders. It wasn't a bad way to pitch when your double-play combo was Tinker to Evers to Chance and you yourself are (reputedly) one of the best-fielding pitchers of your day.

Brown pitched in four World Series with the Cubs -- yes, that is hard to accept nowadays -- and though he took his share of beatings he also pitched three shutouts.

Brown matched up with Giants ace Christy Mathewson 24 times and, by his own recollection, beat him 13 times, including nine consecutive times between 1905 and 1908. After one such game, Giants manager John McGraw asked to look at Brown's hand. "I'm going to have the first finger on the throwing hands of every one of my damned pitchers cut off tomorrow," he said.

This brings to mind the stories that circulated beginning roughly 10 years ago that greedy parents were lining up to have their Little Leaguers and teenagers undergo Tommy John surgery whether it was necessary or not, thereby getting the theoretically inevitable timeout over with at a time it wouldn't prevent the kiddies from getting scholarships, draft bonuses, multimillion-dollar major-league contracts. And hey, maybe they would pick up a few extra miles per hour on their fastballs in the process.

One would like to think surgeons would have had greater ethics than to consent to such an operation, but doctors are just like everybody else -- when greed and ethics clash, even the holiest, most scrupulous of men must grapple with a moment of doubt, and the vast majority of us are neither holy nor scrupulous.

Given that, it's just a small leap in logic to suggest that as long as you're signing your kid up for a voluntary ligament transplant, you might as well have a couple of fingers amputated as well. After all, why learn to throw a curve or a slider when you can just warp your hand and get a free pass into Mordecai Brown/Bert Blyleven territory?

This sounds like satire, but as we learn to select for genes in our unborn children, roughly equivalent procedures will become commonplace. "Hey, Doc... You know ACTN₃ , the fast-twitch gene? Here's $100,000. Flip it on, will ya?"

Casey Stengel, operating in his trademark bafflegab mode, once described a player this way:

"That fella runs splendid, but he needs help at the plate which coming from the country chasing rabbits all winter give him strong legs, although he broke one falling out of a tree which shows you can't tell, and when a curveball comes he waves at it, and if pitchers don't throw curves you have no pitching staff, so how is a manager going to know whether to tell boys to fall out of trees and break legs so he can run fast even if he can't hit a curveball?"

At the time, no one could have guessed what he was proposing might become a serious option in the dystopian future then headed baseball's way, one that began with pills and injections and will finish... where? Hall of Fame first baseman Bill Terry once said, "Baseball can survive anything." It has survived PEDs, it seems. Will it survive... the mutants?

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