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LEGENDARY: Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown got his nickname after a farm accident left him with a deformed hand. This photo is on display in the Vigo County Historical Museum at Sixth and Washington Streets. (Photo courtesy of Vigo County Historical Society)

"Three Finger"

Book to tell how Parke County boy didn't let a disability keep him from excelling in Major League Baseball

Mark.Bennett/Tribune-Star

November 28, 2004

It could just be irony. Or perhaps, even as a mere 4-year-old, little Mort gave some unsuspecting photographer an amazingly prophetic gesture.

The picture shows Mort pointing the index finger of his right hand toward the camera. He's smiling.

More than a century later, two of Mort's descendants uncovered that rare image as they compiled a book about this Parke County boy who grew into a pretty good pitcher named Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown.

Major League Baseball fans remember him as "Three Finger" Brown.

The book's co-author, Cindy Thomson, knew she had something special when she first saw the photo of Brown, taken when he actually had all five of his fingers. Approximately three years later, a fabled farm accident changed Brown's destiny and baseball history.

The kid got his right hand stuck in a corn shredder on his uncle's farm.

His index finger was torn off, and his middle and pinky fingers were mangled.

A short time later, Brown and his sister were "making a rabbit swim in a washtub," when he fell in and compounded the injury to his healing hand.

Instead of a tragedy, the mishaps became a blessing. Brown learned to throw a baseball so well with his misshapen hand that he wound up pitching 16 seasons in the majors, winning 239 games with a baffling curveball. "Three Finger" was a hero of the last Chicago Cubs team to win a World Series in 1907 and 1908.

And his legacy as a clean-living, down-to-earth country-boy-who-made-it-big led Thomson and her cousin, Scott Brown, to write "Three Finger: The Mordecai Brown Story," the working title of their biography. They expect the book, published by the University of Nebraska Press, to be released in spring 2006.

"It's not just a biography; It's a life lesson," said Scott, a 38-year-old minister from Pensacola, Fla. "It shows you can be famous and you can live in the limelight, and yet you can still live a straight-and-narrow life that's an example to others."

The inspiration for their project came a decade ago. That's when Three Finger's great-nephew, Fred Massey, led a successful fund-raising drive to erect a granite memorial at the pitcher's birthplace in the tiny town of Nyesville, a few miles northwest of Rockville. Scott had just discovered that he was related to Mordecai and attended the dedication ceremony for that monument July 9, 1994.

"Fred made a field of dreams for all of us in the family," Scott said of Massey, who lives in West Terre Haute.

Scott's own interest in the national pastime can be traced to family gatherings, where Cindy's mother -- a diehard Cincinnati Reds fan named Golden (Brown) Peters -- talked about baseball and her favorite team. Scott's great-grandfather (Cindy's grandfather) was Mordecai's cousin.

And because Cindy is a writer, she was a natural choice for Scott as a co-author when he hatched the idea for a book.

Until then, though, Cindy knew little about her famous ancestor. "I'm embarrassed to say, I did not," she said last week.

That's not the case now.

Through a 1996 column in the Tribune-Star, Scott solicited stories and photos from people who actually knew Three Finger, and he got a vivid response. They scoured newspaper accounts from around the country of his games. They studied records kept by the Society of American Baseball Research (commonly known as SABR) and even attended a couple of that historical group's meetings. They talked with Massey and other relatives who were old enough to have known Mordecai personally. And they studied pictures from a variety of sources, especially those that revealed what Three Finger was like away from baseball.

"As we really got deep into it, what really got interesting was that we felt like we came to know him personally," Cindy said.

"We have found so many interesting nuances about the man," Scott added. "We're so honored to be related to him, but we feel like we know him now."

They discovered a lively man who loved to hunt and fish around Parke County, to joke around with old friends as well as teammates, and to teach youngsters how to play ball.

"His sense of humor, mostly, stood out," Cindy said, "and the fact that he liked kids."

Mordecai, who died at age 71 in 1948, and his wife, Sarah, had no children. But Mordecai wrote a book about pitching for kids, which included his training tips which are now considered to be years ahead of his time. And several of the photos Scott and Cindy located show him surrounded by boys and girls. "You can see the preciousness in his eyes," Scott said. "He just loved kids."

As for his sense of humor, Mordecai was so uninhibited by the strange look of his pitching hand that he put the corn shredder that gnarled it on display in a Terre Haute service station he operated after his retirement from baseball. And then there's the time in 1908, when Three Finger and the Cubs played the Detroit Tigers in an exhibition game at Terre Haute, shortly after the two teams had faced off in the World Series. Afterward, he and buddies from both teams went deer hunting. Scott and Cindy found a photo of the players -- still in their uniform tops -- standing around a felled deer.

And, of course, Mordecai's exploits on the diamond make for fascinating stuff, too. That 1908 season -- the last of back-to-back Cubs world championships -- included Chicago's 4-2 victory over the New York Giants in a one-game, tie-breaker playoff for the National League pennant Oct. 8. In it, Three Finger pitched eight and one-third innings of four-hit baseball, outdueling Giants legend Christy Mathewson, something Brown did 13 times in 24 meetings with the New York hurler.

Afterward, Brown said, "I was about as good that day as I ever was in my life."

That says a lot. Brown began working the coal fields of Parke County as a teenager, playing semi-pro ball along the way. He didn't get a crack at pro ball until age 24, when the Terre Haute Tots of the old Three-I League signed him. Two years later he made his big-league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals. He spent 14 seasons in the majors, including 1904-12 and 1916 with the Cubs. By the time he retired, Mordecai compiled a record of 239 victories and 129 losses, with a spectacular 2.06 earned-run average and 57 shutouts. He won five World Series games for the Cubs. And his stingy 1.04 ERA in 1906 remains a NL record.

Cindy heard a lot of those details when she joined SABR and attended a meeting.

"There were people who came up to me afterward and said, 'Are you really related to Three Finger Brown?' " she recalled, with a laugh.

The reverence for Mordecai's skill extends to former greats of the Cubs, who haven't won a championship since. That includes another Cubs Hall of Fame pitcher, Ferguson Jenkins, who wrote the forward for the book. When Cindy arranged a meeting with Jenkins, who starred with Chicago in the 1960s and '70s, his agent forewarned her Fergie was on a tight schedule and had limited time. But once she got face to face with him and he realized she was writing a book about Three Finger, Jenkins held up his hand and said, "Ma'am, you have my time. Take however long you need."

"He carries a legacy that has lasted a hundred years," Scott said. "How many people can say that?"

Still, part of the co-author cousins' mission is to spread Mordecai's memory beyond baseball insiders.

Of course, the mystery of Mordecai centers around his curveball, labeled by Ty Cobb as "the most devastating pitch I ever faced," and his ability to throw it. "We wanted to find out how was he able to be a Hall of Fame pitcher with a hand that looked like that," Cindy said.

So she talked with big-league pitchers and coaches and pitching experts, and their theories are shared in the book.

And as Scott and Cindy began the two-year process of writing it all into a book, she shared their work -- chapter by chapter -- with the fellow members of her reading group in her hometown of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. They were all women, and only one was a baseball fan. The ladies couldn't get enough of it.

"They wanted me to keep bringing it in, because they wanted to know what happens next," Cindy said, "because there were things that happened in his life that didn't happen to normal people. The obvious one is his overcoming his adversity."

As they researched Mordecai's life, they agreed not to candy-coat or overlook anything.

"We determined that if something came up that we maybe didn't like, we were going to write about it anyway," Scott said. "But everything kept coming back the same -- he was such a wonderful man."

Even the surly and cantankerous Cobb spoke no ill of Mordecai. "And Ty Cobb was not one to give out compliments," Scott said.

The only "dirt" they found was one reporter calling Three Finger "shy," some criticism of his decisions as a manager and his mildly controversial holdout over a salary dispute.

The project "was really a good fit for me, because I like baseball history and family history," Cindy said.

The 44-year-old and her husband, Tom, have three teen-age boys -- Dan, Jeff and Kyle. Scott and his wife, Dawn, also have three children -- sons Zachary and Aaron, and daughter Katie. And though Mordecai never considered his three-fingered hand a handicap, his success in spite of it (or better yet, because of it) offers an important moral for kids, Scott said.

"I think people are looking for heroes, as we as a society always are," Scott said. "And he was one."

Mark Bennett can be reached by telephone at 1-800-783-8742, Option 6, Ext. 377, by e-mail at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or by fax at (812) 231-4321.

Story created Nov 29, 2004 - 09:44:49 CST.