Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown won 211 games, threw a no-hitter, and once carried a wild-card team to a World Series title on a torn stomach lining. None of that is why Yankees fans remember him. They remember him for a clubhouse wall in Baltimore, a broken left hand, and Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS lasting all of 1.1 innings. Sometimes two years is all it takes to overwrite seventeen.

The Résumé Before New York

By the time the Yankees got him, Brown was already one of the best sinkerball pitchers of his generation -- just not in pinstripes. He broke in with Texas in 1986, led the AL in wins in 1992, and reinvented himself with Florida in 1996 by leading the National League in ERA at 1.89. In 1997 he threw a no-hitter against San Francisco (one hit-by-pitch away from perfect) and then, while reportedly fighting a stomach virus, threw a 142-pitch complete game to close out the NLCS against Atlanta and send the wild-card Marlins to the World Series. Florida won it in seven. Brown lost both his starts in that Series anyway -- the first of several times his postseason line wouldn't match his regular-season one.

San Diego got a Cy Young-caliber year out of him in 1998 (18-7, 2.38 ERA) before the Dodgers made him the sport's first $100 million man -- seven years, $105 million, signed in December 1998. Nobody had ever been paid like that to throw a baseball. He led the NL in ERA again in 2000. He also, per the 2007 Mitchell Report, received human growth hormone and Deca-Durabolin from Kirk Radomski for two or three years starting around 2000 -- a shipping receipt with his name on it dated June 2004 was part of the evidence. Brown declined to talk to Mitchell's investigators. He was 39 years old and five years into that contract when the Yankees traded for him in December 2003, sending Jeff Weaver, Yhency Brazoban, cash, and a minor-league arm named Brandon Weeden back to Los Angeles. (Yes, that Brandon Weeden -- the Yankees' 2002 second-round pick who later became an NFL quarterback. Baseball's loss was Oklahoma State's gain.)

2004: The Sinker, the Wall, and Game 7

Brown gave the 2004 Yankees a legitimate 10-6 record and a 4.09 ERA -- solid, unspectacular, exactly what a rotation icing a 101-win team needed from its fourth or fifth starter. Then, on September 3, in a 3-1 loss to Baltimore, he got pulled after six innings and punched a clubhouse wall. He broke two bones in his left hand -- his glove hand, not the one he threw with -- and needed surgery with pins to fix it. At the time, nobody knew if he'd pitch again that season at all.

He did. Brown made it back for the playoffs, and the Yankees needed every start they could get out of him. He threw six innings of one-run ball in Game 3 of the ALDS against Minnesota to help close out that series. Then came the ALCS against Boston, and Brown started two of the seven games -- including Game 3, the 19-8 demolition at Fenway that put the Yankees up 3-0 and had everyone measuring for rings before the roof caved in. He didn't factor into that decision. He factored heavily into the next one.

Game 7, October 20, at the Stadium. The Yankees' historic collapse needed a final chapter, and Brown wrote the opening scene of it -- 1.1 innings, five earned runs, a two-run homer to David Ortiz, and Joe Torre coming to get him with the bases loaded before the second inning was even finished. The still-recovering hand didn't help his stuff. Neither did the moment. Javier Vazquez came in and made things worse. By the time it was over, Boston had completed the only 3-0 comeback in postseason history, and Brown's name was permanently welded to the worst month in the century-plus history of the franchise.

2005: The Quiet Ending

There was no redemption arc. Brown pitched through back trouble in 2005, finishing 4-7 with a 6.50 ERA in 13 starts before a lumbar strain ended his season -- and his career -- on July 28. His last big-league appearance came five days earlier in Anaheim. He never pitched in the 2005 playoffs; he wasn't around for them. He simply stopped pitching, at 40, and that was that.

The Hall of Fame ballot in 2011 gave its verdict fast: 2.1% of the vote, gone after one try, nowhere near the 5% mark needed to stick around for a second look. A pitcher with 211 wins, 2,397 strikeouts, and a 3.28 career ERA got dismissed in a single afternoon -- the PED cloud and the Yankees ending did that kind of damage to a resume that, on paper, has a real Cooperstown case buried in it somewhere.

I've never been able to decide if that's fair. What I do know is this: nineteen years in the big leagues, and Yankees fans mostly just remember the wall.