Forgotten stars of the current NL East teams
Kevin Brown, Marlins
Kevin Brown, you’re likely saying, didn’t he pitch for the Rangers? He did indeed, for eight years, as well as for the Dodgers for five. However, between those two long stays making up the majority of Brown’s 19-year career were two stellar years in Miami.
And in the second of those two years, the right-hander won a World Series ring with the cobbled-together, veteran Marlins team.
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Brown was a pitcher for whom the phrase “nasty stuff” might have been coined had it not already existed. He was a guy who threw hard, and his 91-96 mph fastball tailed downwards sharply. He backed up that pitch with a slider in the high-80s and a split-finger offering.
When he arrived in Florida after one year with Baltimore, he was at the peak of his career at age 31. Then, going 17-11 in 1996, he led baseball with a 1.89 ERA and 0.944 WHIP, an impressive piece of recent MLB history indeed.
In the Marlins world championship year, his ERA slipped – all the way to 2.69. He went 16-8, throwing a one-hitter and a no-hitter during the campaign. In game six of the NLCS, he threw a complete game while suffering from the flu to defeat the Braves.
And after the season, he became the first $100 million-dollar man, signing a contract with Los Angeles reportedly worth $20 million more than any other team was offering. The deal included air travel allowing his family to follow him in person.
He continued to force batters to pound the ball into the dirt if they managed to hit his pitches at all until he was 40.
At retirement, the two-year Marlins star posted a 211-144 record. He had appeared in six All-Star games. Unfortunately, he was a one-and-done Hall of Fame candidate, getting only 2.1 percent of available votes in 2011.
He was likely held back by having been named in the Mitchell report as allegedly buying HGH once, and many consider his one of the worst snubs in Hall voting history.
No one, however, can say he took any time off for the Marlins. And no one can say he wasn’t one of the dominant pitchers in recent MLB history. I wonder how many casual fans would name him either fifth or sixth on the 1997 Marlins, though.