Mordecai Brown

 

You may never have heard of this Brother but he is ranked among the greats. He stands beside the likes of Sandy Kofax, Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Lefty Grove, Roger Clemens and a handful of others whose skill at throwing a baseball seemed to be supernatural. He was so good, the annual Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in baseball might well have been named the Mordecai Brown Award.

Born in 1876 in Nyesville, Indiana, a small town about 40 miles west of Indianapolis, Brown was a member of Edward Dobbins Lodge No. 164, in Lawrenceville, Illinois. He was a standout Chicago Cubs pitcher who won 20 or more games for six straight seasons. In 1908 as a fielding pitcher he did not commit a single error and pitched a record four shutout games in a row. Against the great Christy Matthewson, considered by some to be the best pitcher in baseball, he won 13 games out of the 24 times they met. Overall he won 239 games against 130 losses and struck out 1,375 batters. His spectacular 2.06 earned run average today remains the best of any pitcher who won over 200 games.

There is more to his story as a Freemason. There was a time in the Craft in some jurisdictions when a physical deformity disqualified a man from becoming a member. As a young man, Brown lost the index finger on his right hand in a farming accident. While still healing from that injury he fell and broke several bones in his remaining fingers. Doctors reset his middle finger improperly further mangling his hand. When he petitioned to become a Freemason, he was rejected due to his mutilated hand. Only the intervention of a District Deputy Grand Master won him dispensation and allowed him to join.

Brown's disfigured pitching hand forced him to grip a baseball in an unorthodox way. There has never been any doubt that his grip made the ball travel in a way that made his pitches extremely difficult to hit, and contributed to his success as a pitcher, earning him the name by which he became famous, Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown.

He won games on two World-Series winning teams in 1907 and 1908 – the last time the Cubs won the Series for over a century. He retired from the majors in 1916 and moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, where he continued to play and coach in minor league games. In 1928, a friend asked him to play in an exhibition game as a favor. It was the last time he played and in that game the 51-year-old Brown pitched three innings, striking out all nine batters he faced.

I personally share something in common with Brother Mordecai: just before becoming a Freemason, I suffered a similar injury. I didn't lose any fingers, but the little finger on my right hand was permanently disfigured. Most people don't notice but, let's put it this way… I'll never be a hand model.

Brown passed away in 1948 at the age of 71. A year later he was posthumously elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame. If it were not for the fact that Freemasonry gave up on its barbaric, backward, Neanderthal practice of rejecting men with deformities as members, the great Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown would never have become a Freemason, along with others like him, including myself.