Afternoon Baseball

Baseball Toaster : The Griddle
The Griddle links to Murray Chass in the NYTimes, where Brown's agent says that although the arm is still good, the 41-year-old's back just can't take it anymore. The unspoken truth, also, is that it's unlikely any team would have taken the attitude without the results.

Still, Brown came from nothing to win 211 games, and that alone makes him one of the best pitchers of his generation -- a Dazzy Vance of the 1990s; late-starting, but a remarkably low-ERA pitcher better known in the shadow of other greats than in his own right. Of course, Vance was on atrocious teams and didn't win a game until he was 31, whereas Brown won a World Series and made the playoffs multiple times, and his slow start was more of not being well-known until his 30s. But Vance is Brown's 6th most similar pitcher on Baseball-Reference, and Brown is Vance's 4th most similar.

Brown, for all the bashing I gave him (rightly -- he went 14-13 with 4.09 and 6.50 ERAs in a paltry 205.3 innings for the Pinstripes), had a 3.28 ERA and 127 ERA+, good for 45th all time. He also won 2 ERA titles, led the league in wins in 1992, and in the 12-year span of 1992 to 2003, won 172 games while posting ERAs under 3.60 10 times.