“Three-Fingered Brown, gee, he
was one of the wonders of baseball.”
~ Al Bridwell, quoted in Lawrence Ritter’s book
The Glory of Their Times
Amputees have
performed heroically throughout the history of professional
baseball, including Hugh Daily, Dave Keefe, Pete Gray, Monty
Stratton, and Bert Shepard, among others. Even the
entrepreneurial owner Bill Veeck lost a leg as a result of a
World War II injury. But no amputee had as much success on the
playing field as Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown, nicknamed
“Three Finger,” who was one of baseball’s most dominating
pitchers during the first two decades of the century. He gained
his unusual nickname from two childhood accidents. When he was
seven years old, he caught the index finger on his right hand in
his uncle’s corn shredder and had to have it amputated above the
knuckle; just weeks after the first mishap, he broke his third
and fourth fingers chasing a hog, and they never grew straight.
Brown’s misfortune would prove a blessing to him —
the mangled fingers gave an eccentric movement to his pitches
(Casey Stengel said that “he could make that baseball do the
damndest things”), thus allowing him to win 239 games during a
14-year career, mostly with the Chicago Cubs. His pitching duels
against fellow right-hander Christy Mathewson were among the
legendary games of the early 20th century.
At the height of Brown’s popularity, the corn
shredder which took his right index finger was put on display as
the centerpiece of a tourist attraction in his hometown of
Nyesville, Indiana, perhaps the earliest example of a baseball
reliquary. Next to the shredder was a case filled with detailed
photographs of Brown’s right hand and a number of curiosities
from his youth, including this crude attempt by an anonymous
farmer and friend of the Brown family to recreate the amputated
finger out of rubber. |