#RememberThatCub: Mordecai Brown
By: Alex Patt
What if I told you that the greatest Cubs pitcher of all time only had three fingers on his pitching hand?! Time to get back into Doc. Brown’s delorean and travel a century into the past and look at our latest #RememberThatCub feature, Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown.
Brown holds a lot of records in the Cubs all time record book as he spent 10 seasons in a Cubs uniform. The right handed Hall of Fame pitcher got his name “Three-Finger” because he lost his index finger in a farming accident as a young kid. He was working with a farm feed chopper when his finger got caught in the blades which mangled his index finger and hurt his middle one. He completely lost his index finger and his middle finger suffered damage to the point where it was permanently crooked. They say he was dared to stick his had in the corn chopper by one of his brothers. Not to mention that after that incident, Brown broke his middle finger again after he fell on it.
Brown did the amazing and overcame the injury on the diamond and used his grip with his middle finger to create a devastating curve ball. The slow and deceptive break he created with his middle finger leading the spin caused all sorts of problems for batters and helped make him so effective.
“It didn’t only curve, it curved and dropped at the same time, it made it extremely hard to hit and if you did hit it, you hit it into the ground [because you] couldn’t get under it.” — Fred Massey, the great Nephew of Brown quoted by David Haugh
He made his way into baseball and made his MLB debut with the St. Louis Cardinals at the age of 26 on April 19th, 1903. In December of that year he was traded to the Cubs along with Jack O’Neill in exchange for Larry McLean and Jack Taylor.
In 10 years as a Cub, he won two World Series championships in 1907 and 1908 and won 188 games. Stats wise, he had a 1.80 ERA, 1043 strikeouts, 0.998 WHIP, 45.3 bWAR, 2.21 FIP in 346 games (2,329 innings pitched). He leads all time Cubs pitchers in: wins, WHIP and ERA. There were no all star or Cy Young awards back in the first two decades of the 20th century but the stats speak for themselves.
As for his actual tenure with the Cubs, he was in a Cub uniform from 1904–12 and came back in 1916. He was originally released after 1912 and played 1913 with the Reds and played 1914–1915 in the Federal League. In fact he played in Wrigley Field before the Cubs even played there in 1915 when he played for Charlie Weeghman’s Chicago Wales. When the Federal League folded after 1915, the Whales and Cubs merged together and Brown was once again a Cub. He pitched his final season in the majors in 1916 at the age of 39.
Brown went on to do various things inside and outside baseball. He still pitched in minor league games through his 50s and even ran a filling station. He died on February 14th, 1948 at the age of 71 due to complications of diabetes. He was elected into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1949.
Do you #RememberThatCub? (I would be shocked if you actually remembered watching him)
Alex Patt is a contributor for Wrigley Rapport and other sports podcasts and publications. You can follow him on twitter @chifanpatt1
