Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (13 page)

Brown tears up clubhouses in fits of rage so regularly that his teams have kept running tabs. He has smashed at least two televisions, ripped an oversized wooden Padres logo from a wall, left scores of divots in clubhouse drywall, put his fist through one glass door and kicked in another. After one of those tantrums, when someone asked Brown what he had been trying to do, he replied icily, “Cut my tendon.” Just two weeks ago at Dodgertown he pulverized a toilet with a baseball bat after he was scalded in the shower when someone flushed the commode.

Toronto assistant G.M. Dave Stewart, who was San Diego’s pitching coach last year, has compared Brown’s game-day visage to that of a serial killer. Brown still gets so agitated on the mound when he makes a mistake or is stung by a bit of bad fortune that Candace can see from the stands that he’s about to explode. She says, “He gets this look in his eyes, and he starts twitching, and it’s like, Uh-oh.” No one dares to sit near him or talk to him between innings. He has been heard to curse himself after throwing a 1-2-3 inning.

He has also been known to shoot dagger-sharp looks at fielders who have dared to make mistakes behind him. “When he played here,” says a Rangers official, “the infielders were uptight because he had this way of looking right through them.” (Texas wanted no part of the pitcher this winter when he was a free agent.)

Brown has been equally hostile to coaches who have visited him on the mound. “There were a couple of cases when he said things I didn’t like,” says Stewart. “In a different situation I would have settled it in a different way.”

Says House, “You could not have programmed someone to say the absolute wrong thing at the absolute wrong time any better than Kevin did it.” There is still truth in that. Before Brown decided on his place in Beverly Hills, he complained about the “sticker shock” he suffered when shopping for Southern California real estate—this from a man who will be paid $105 million over the next seven years. And when he is asked about the Padres’ being swept in the ’98 World Series by the Yankees, the winningest team in the history of baseball, he asserts that the outcome would have been different if a 2–2 pitch by San Diego reliever Mark Langston to Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez in the seventh inning of Game 1 had been called a strike. “That stands out as a big turning point,” says Brown, who couldn’t hold a 5–2 lead earlier in the same inning. Martinez hit Langston’s 3–2 pitch for a grand slam. “They had the talent
and
the breaks,” Brown says of the Yankees. “The Series looked bad on paper, but we really should have won three of those games.” Brown spent at least an hour before Game 1 covered in blankets on a training table, warding off chills from the flu. He didn’t tell Stewart or Padres manager Bruce Bochy about his condition. Stewart still seethes over that.

Brown is disbelieving when told of his reputation among teammates, foes and the media as a spring-loaded pitcher ready to go off at any moment. “No one’s ever told me that,” he says. “I think [the reputation in the media] started because a beat writer in Texas continually took shots at me, and I wouldn’t let him get away with it. I got in his face several times. But since then—with Baltimore, Florida, San Diego—I haven’t had any problems. Listen, I’m my own worst critic, but sometimes guys try to tell me what I’m thinking without asking me. I hate that. And I won’t kiss anybody’s ass.”

“I’m one of the guys who gets along with him,” says Mets pitcher Al Leiter, who played with Brown in Florida. “He’s so stressed out that it’s real tough to get Kevin to have a belly laugh. But sometimes I think his tough-guy facade is just that—a facade. He’s actually hiding a dweeby, nerdy kind of guy. What I tried to do with him, like I do with [Mets catcher Mike] Piazza, was get in his face. They take themselves way too seriously, and I tell them to lighten up.

“Kevin’s the most dominant pitcher I’ve ever played with. But is he the kind of guy to have an influence in the clubhouse and make [everyone else] play better? No, Brownie can’t do that.”

“YOU CAN hear the ball as soon as it leaves his hand,” says Devil Rays manager Larry Rothschild, Brown’s pitching coach with the ’97 Marlins. Brown’s ball spins so fast that it hisses as the seams cut through the air. No other active pitcher—maybe none ever—can make the ball sink as viciously as Brown can while throwing it so hard. He is unique: a power sinkerball pitcher. One of his first catchers in Texas, Mike Stanley, called him Chainsaw because of the way his pitches chewed up bats and hitters’ and catchers’ hands. Another Texas catcher, former Gold Glove winner Jim Sundberg, spent most of 1989, his last year in the big leagues, with a pack of ice on his left thumb; Brown’s dancing bricks repeatedly bent the thumb back.

Brown has won 20 games only once—for the Rangers in 1992, the season after he began seeing a sports psychologist (with whom he still talks)—and has never won the Cy Young Award. He is pitching for his fifth team in six years. He has fewer World Series wins than Jay Powell, having failed to win any of his four starts. His career record (139–99, for a .584 winning percentage) approximates that of the Cubs’ unspectacular Kevin Tapani (120–87, .580). So why did the Dodgers give Brown baseball’s first nine-figure contract? That’s easy: Brown is one of the rare players who, by himself, can make the difference in getting a team to the World Series. And at 34, an age at which Hall of Famer Don Drysdale, another Dodgers righthander with a mean streak, was retired, Brown confoundingly is in his prime.

Brown was examined by Dr. Frank Jobe, the renowned orthopedic surgeon, before his contract with the Dodgers was made official. At the end of the exam Jobe shook his head and told Brown, “Well, I think the Dodgers got themselves a bargain.”

“What do you mean?” Brown asked.

“I mean,” Jobe said, “they should have signed you for 10 years, not seven. With the shape your arm is in, I don’t see any reason why you can’t pitch that long.”

Over the past three seasons Brown has gone 51–26 with a 2.33 ERA—little more than half the ERA of all National League pitchers combined in that span (4.22). Last year he threw the ball harder than he ever had (97 mph tops) while striking out 257 batters, 25% more than he had in any other season. In 452 at bats with any count that included two strikes, batters got only 62 hits off him (.137) and not a single home run.

There are physiological reasons that Brown is such a pitching oddity. At 6′4″ and 200 pounds, he has the wingspan and wiry strength of a basketball player. “He can scratch his knees without bending over,” House says. Though Brown’s windup is unorthodox—he has an exaggerated hip turn, leading with his butt, and can throw any pitch from any arm angle—he maintains flawless balance, and his amazing extension maximizes the whip effect of his long arm. Other pitchers “reach back” for something extra; Brown reaches forward. “The first time I saw him up close,” Rothschild says, “was his first day throwing in spring training. After a long winter he gets up on the mound and just starts airing it out. It looked like the middle of the season. I couldn’t believe it.”

Most pitchers throw once between starts, usually at three-quarters speed, just to maintain the feel of their pitches. Brown throws twice between starts, going full bore. Stewart says such a workload alarmed him. “Not just how much he throws, but the intensity,” Stewart says. “Your arm only has so many throws in it. We talked a little bit about it. You know what he told me? ‘I’ll taper it
if
I can.’”

Brown never has mastered a finesse pitch, nor has he needed one. Everything about him is hard. “He’s such a maximum-effort guy without a real nice, fluid delivery, and he’s wound so tight, that you wonder if one day his elbow is just going to go,” says one American League general manager. Of course, Brown has heard that sort of talk, heard it for years. Mechanics be damned, he knows what is best for him. “If you listen to your body, it will tell you whether you are doing too much or not enough,” Brown says. “I don’t believe you have only so many throws. This is how I stay sharp: The more time my hand is on the ball, the more comfortable I am.”

Outside of his 21–11 breakout year in Texas, Brown was 57–53 with the Rangers, not including a 1–11 nightmare for three minor league teams in 1987. In what would be a recurring struggle in his nine years in the Rangers organization, Brown could not synchronize his natural ability with the mechanics being taught him. Carolyn says, “One day Gerald and I went to have breakfast with Kevin in Mississippi [where he was with the Double A Tulsa Drillers]. We knew he was trying so hard to please them with his mechanics. Gerald said, ‘Well, you’ve tried their way, now maybe you should go back to pitching the way you did at Georgia Tech.’ Kevin was probably thinking that anyway. All he needed was his daddy to give him permission to do it. That night he just threw so hard and so well.” The battle over mechanics, however, continued throughout Brown’s tenure with the Rangers. Brown thinks the team’s emphasis on technique stymied his progress, but he says, “Tom House is such a nice guy that I was willing to try anything. If he was a jerk, it would have been easy not to listen to him.”

In ’95 Brown signed with the Orioles as a free agent without so much as a phone call from the Rangers, who were pleased to be rid of him. He went 10–9 that season despite a 3.60 ERA. “Mike Mussina won 19 games with almost the same ERA [3.29],” Brown says of his Baltimore teammate. Brown was miserable. Mixing the incendiary Georgian with the cool, cliquish veterans on the Orioles went over about as well as a heavy-metal band at a Republican fund-raiser. “It was a quiet team, just put it that way,” Brown says.

In December he moved on to Florida as a free agent and figured on a long career there, until owner Wayne Huizenga gutted the Marlins after their world championship. Brown was traded to the Padres in the purge. After helping San Diego get to the World Series—he went 18–7 with a 2.38 ERA and finished third in the Cy Young voting—he turned away offers from the Padres, Orioles and Rockies to take the Dodgers’ dough. “It blew my mind,” Carolyn says of the $105 million, “and I believe it blew Kevin’s mind. I always told him no athlete was worth $1 million a year. But I said, ‘If they’re going to give it to somebody, I’m glad they gave it to you.’”

KEVIN BROWN was finished with baseball in 1983, of that he was fairly certain. At 6′2″ and 160 pounds, he hadn’t even been the top starting pitcher at Wilkinson County High. It’s unlikely, Brown says, that any scout saw him play. “It’s a remote place,” he says, “and my junior and senior years were the first years my coach ever coached. He didn’t know much of anything about baseball.”

As a boy he had dreamed of being a marine biologist, but later, when he learned that the profession would take him far from Wilkinson County, for low pay, he decided on being an engineer like Candace’s dad, Roy Ethridge. Gerald Brown never wanted Kevin to follow him into the mines. Kevin was a brilliant student who enrolled at Georgia Tech to study chemical engineering. The summer before college began he took a job in a lab of Engelhard Corporation, the kaolin-mining company for which his father worked. Kaolin is so important to central Georgia that
The Wilkinson County News
proudly declares each week atop Page One, CIRCULATING IN THE HEART OF THE RICHEST KAOLIN TERRITORY IN THE WHOLE WORLD. Processed kaolin looks like flour and is used in the manufacture of porcelain, brick cement and high-grade white paper, and it is also a filler in paints, plastics and rubber. “That’s all there is around here,” says Danny Williams, who worked in the lab with Brown. “If the kaolin ever dried up, McIntyre would dry up with it.”

During lunch breaks Brown, Williams and the other guys in the lab would play baseball with a wad of aluminum foil and a spatula. It was the only sort of baseball Brown was playing that summer when Kenny Walters, who worked in the same plant in McIntyre, came to visit him in the lab. Walters was the captain of a mostly black semipro team from a nearby town that was playing in a Labor Day weekend tournament in Valdosta, Ga. He needed a pitcher and had heard about Brown from Williams. Brown said no thanks, he wasn’t interested. Walters came back “three or four times,” Williams says, “until we all said, ‘Why don’t you just go play ball with that guy?’ Kevin finally said yes.”

In Valdosta, Brown relieved Walters, who also pitched, in the Saturday game, and on Labor Day he threw a complete-game victory. Brown went back to work on Tuesday. The phone rang in the lab. Someone answered it and shouted to Kevin, “It’s a scout for the New York Mets!”

After Brown hung up, Williams asked, “What did they want?”

“Well, they want
me
,” Brown said.

“Want you for
what
?”

Until that call, Candace says, Kevin “never thought he was that good.” Kevin told the scout, Julian Morgan—who had been in Valdosta and had seen some of Brown’s performance—that he was committed to attending Georgia Tech. Morgan telephoned the Tech baseball coach, Jim Morris, to tell him about the kid and make sure he went out for the team. So Brown tried out. He was so raw that he had never pitched in a pair of metal spikes, and had always put his right foot on top of the rubber instead of pushing off the side of the slab from a hole in front of it. “After the first day I pitched, they brought me inside, gave me a locker and said, ‘Congratulations. You’re on the team,’” Brown says. Three years later, having added 8 mph to his fastball, he was the fourth player picked in the draft, by the Rangers.

“If he hadn’t gone to Valdosta, he’d probably still be here,” says Williams, who still works for Engelhard as a lab technician in nearby Gordon. “And he’d probably be my boss.”

MCINTYRE IS such a nondescript spot that it used to be known simply as Station No. 16. The town’s most famous product—other than kaolin, of course—is not celebrated as a hero. At his old high school, with its rusting backstop out back, a secretary answers a knock on the front door after classes have ended. The visitor asks if there is an acknowledgment in the school of its famous alumnus. A plaque? A trophy? A picture?

“Kevin Brown?” the secretary says warily. “No, there’s nothing. Nothing at all.” Then she closes the door and turns away.