[Westheim]

SPORTS ILLUMINATED

ARRIVED AT LAST
by Hank Hooter

There is a story that has made the rounds repeatedly the last few years about a pair of boys, both 13 or 14 years old and best friends, that both broke their arms in separate biking accidents only weeks apart in a warm Hawaiian spring in the early 90s. The right-handed kid broke his right arm and was grumpy about not being able to surf with the cast on until well into the summer. The left-handed kid broke his left arm a little later and was consequently sullen about missing his last year of Little League eligibility and not ever going to make it to Williamsport. Neither did his team.

By all accounts an intelligent but disaffected student, baseball was regularly all that was on the mind of Nicholas Armistead Brown, better known to fans of the game today as Nick Brown, ret., of the Portland Raccoons. He declared for the 1995 draft long before his senior year of high school was over, but received only lukewarm attention from ABL teams, some of which at that time didn’t even have a regular scout on the islands of Hawaii, where Brown was born in 1977, the year of the ABL’s inception. The young lefty went forward with his plans to get drafted and make a living with baseball anyway, over the objections of his mother, who wanted him to become a dentist.

Young Nick would get his will, eventually, although he was not selected in the first round as he had all but expected. In fact he didn’t even learn that he was drafted at all until four days after the draft. Internet connectivity being notoriously dodgy in Hawaii in the mid-90s, and only the top draft picks being listed in the papers, the Portland Raccoons, who selected Brown with their 11th-round pick, and the 293rd selection overall, would take their sweet time summoning that ‘lefty with a slider’ they had picked semi-randomly to the minor leagues. They did not call him until four days after the draft when a heart-broken Brown was already trying to get into community college to pass the next year.

When the 17-year-old boarded a plane to Los Angeles – no direct connection was available between Honolulu and Portland at the time – it was also the first time he left his native islands. He signed his contract in Portland two days later and was pitching 60 miles further south for the Raccoons’ single-A affiliate, the Aumsville Beagles, the very next day, allowing a hit, a walk, and a run in two thirds of an inning for an inauspicious beginning to his career.

By the end of his first professional season, he had made it into 14 games for the Beagles, including four starts, with an 0-4 record and 5.15 ERA, more or less all you would expect of a draftee taken in a round so low it hadn’t even existed just six years earlier. But only one year later, in his age 18 season, he went 14-8 in 30 starts, racked up 212 strikeouts in 193 innings and posted a 2.56 ERA. When exactly the Raccoons knew that they had something on their hands here has been lost to the passage of time, but Nick Brown claims he always knew he had all that it would take to excel in the sport.

While the AA level would take longer to conquer for that lefty with the slider, Brown found himself tackling AAA batters with some success by 2000, his age 22 season. While he stumbled out of the gates and had a 1-5 record and 3.96 ERA after seven games in that AAA campaign with the St. Petersburg Alley Cats, you tended to hold it against his team, given that he had also struck out 61 batters in 38.2 innings. At a time when Brown’s organization was floundering and treating water at the bottom of their division, it seemed like him being called up to the majors was imminent now. Instead, a different call arrived on May 15 of 2000. Scans for a flare of pain in his pitching elbow had come back positive – Nick Brown, on the brink to promotion to the Big Leagues, had ruptured his UCL and would require Tommy John surgery to ever pitch or hold a fork again.

Shunted to a siding for a year, Brown found himself back in Hawaii in the spring of ’90 or ’91, cursing the cast stretching the length of his left arm, and wondering if he would ever take the mound in Raccoons Ballpark. The baseball world was not holding its breath. Brown, who had ranked #12 and #17 in the two prospect rankings prior to the injury, entirely dropped off the list for the 2001 edition. Baseball seemed done with him, but Brown wasn’t yet done with baseball.

Shaking off the rust in AA and AAA ball in the summer of 2001, Nick Brown soon found his pitches to work better than ever, and pitchers struggling to hit anything he offered. In 16 AAA starts he would whiff 156 batters in 105 innings, posting a 9-5 record and 2.40 ERA before another call for him came – the Raccoons summoned him to Portland for his first career start, taking the 6-0 loss against the Milwaukee Loggers on August 7, 2001. His first career strikeout wound up being Jerry Fletcher, who was also on the 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. Brown made seven starts that season, but picked up his first career win in relief the Sunday following his debut, pitching two innings in a 15-inning effort against the Salem Wolves before emerging victorious. He ended up 2-3 with a 4.54 ERA for his abbreviated rookie season, but already hinted at exceptional talent by striking out 10.8 batters per nine innings, and while he never struck out 10 per nine innings in a qualifying season, he was a lock to get 9+ for more than a decade from then on.

It did not take long for the kid from Hawaii to become immensely popular in his new hometown of Portland, and he soon was one of the best players on his team, and one of the premier pitchers in the league. After pitching to losing records for losing teams in 2002 and 2003, Brown broke out with a 20-win season in 2004, going 20-7 with a 2.84 ERA and 240 strikeouts. The 200+ strikeouts would be a regular thing for him. In his first 11 full seasons in the major leagues, Brown would put up 212 or more strikeouts ten times, the only exception being an injury-shortened 2006 campaign. Sticking cardboard K’s to the facing of the upper deck at Raccoons Ballpark became a real ceremony during his starts at home.

His arsenal came a long way from being a mere ‘lefty with a slider’. At his peak, Brown could tick 100mph with the fastball, which moved well, and added that slider and sinker for variety as well as an outright heinous screwball with movement down and in to right-handers to knot them up good. They stood almost as little a chance against him as left-handed batters, with Brown posting almost negligible career splits. Left-handers batted .200 against him, right-handers .227;

People have held against him that he never led the Continental League in any triple crown category, that is he never had the best ERA, never had the most wins, and never had the most strikeouts. Those designations were usually picked up by Martin Garcia, Curtis Tobitt, Kelvin Yates, Pancho Trevino, and later Jonathan Toner especially. But Nick Brown also finished either second or third in a pitching triple crown category a stunning 20 times, including making the top 3 in all three categories in the same year twice.

While the ultimate triumph to win a championship would always be denied to the lifelong Raccoon, who only managed to get to the World Series with his team once in his career, in 2010, where he won both of his starts against the Cyclones as the Raccoons lost the series in six games, Brown racked up his share of accolades. He was an All Star eight times in a 13-year span (that included two seasons mostly wiped out by injuries), and won the Pitcher of the Year award in 2009. That season, Nick Brown went 17-6 with a 2.39 ERA and 243 strikeouts for Portland, leading the league in WHIP for the second and final time, but saw his team eliminated from contention on the final day of the season in an extra-inning thriller with the New York Crusaders, where the Raccoons came within inches of forcing a tie-breaker game in the 14th inning, only to have Keith Ayers thrown out at home plate and to lose two innings later. They made the playoffs the following year; their only postseason appearance while Nick Brown was effective, and he remains the only Raccoons pitcher to have won a World Series game in the 30 years after Miguel Lopez’ W in Game 7 of the 1993 World Series.

While he played until his age 40 season in 2018, Brown appeared in only 27 games between the last two seasons, and no longer had strikeout stuff; in 153.2 innings, he struck out only 39 batters in those final two years, and was on and off the DL all the time, and posted his first 4+ ERA’s since that rookie year in 2001. He did however not go out without a bang; 38 years old, on September 9, 2016, Brown threw 129 pitches as he no-hit the Vancouver Canadiens in a 1-0 squeezer. He walked four and struck out nine, and retired dreaded Ray Gilbert on a fly to shallow rightfield and Ron Richards for the final out. Four years earlier, Ray Gilbert had extinguished the Raccoons from playoff contention on the final weekend of the season.

Still unforgotten are also Nick Brown’s frequent quarrels with his own third basemen, especially if they were rookies, and his commitment towards the Willamette Institute for the Limbless and the Blind, which he would regularly visit during the offseason to play catch with any kid that could. Always more approachable than his reclusive predecessor as left-handed ace in Portland, fellow Hall of Famer Kisho Saito, during 24 years in professional baseball this kid from Hawaii that couldn’t help his Little League team get to Williamsport for a pesky broken arm created a lasting legacy on and off the field, and will remain in the minds and possibly hearts of baseball enthusiasts forever.

Last August, Nick Brown eventually did make it to Williamsport after all, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in Game 29 of the International Bracket, which saw Israel defeat Uruguay by the mercy rule.

And this week, he also made it into the Hall of Fame, the chairman of the board of the ABL Hall of Fame in Unadilla, New York, announced on Tuesday. Elected along with fellow former starting pitcher Curtis Tobitt and infielder Dennis Berman, Brown received 89.3% of the vote, the highest tally in the 2024 balloting.