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Now the rest of the story. The big league baseball career of Mordecai Brown was built around a single pitch, a pitch which only he could deliver with consistency. It was a sinker. It was a wide curve that dropped abruptly on its way to the plate. One sports writer claimed that it could be hit only with a shotgun. And he wasn't far off. For you see, Mordecai Brown pitched 208 wins during his major league career. Through one six season stretch alone, he averaged 24.5 victories. Today we make a big fuss about a 20 game winner, but he averaged 24 plus, never winning less than 20 games in any of his years. There was a key to Mordecai Brown's greatness, a specific something behind the ability which catapulted him into baseball's hall of Fame. Unlike the elusive athletic genius of other sports superstars, the reason for Brown's success was and is duplicable. In other words, any aspiring pitcher could gain for himself what Mordecai Brown had, but none would dare. And that brings us to the rest of the story. As I say, baseball pitcher Mordecai Brown built his entire career around this sinker. Other pitchers could manage it, but not with Brown's consistency. Mordecai, nicknamed Minor Brown, grew up when baseball itself was growing up. Born October 19, 1876, his youth was spent on an Indiana farm where he started playing baseball. Before the turn of the century, he was a third baseman. That changed during one game when the pitcher didn't show up and Brown substituted, and with such success that he never returned to third base. He became famous while working his way up through the Western League. That was around 1904. He was traded then from St. Louis to the Chicago Cubs. He won 15 games in 1904, 18 games in 1905, followed by six straight years of 20 wins or more. And these exceptional statistics are largely due to that bobbing, weaving, dipping sinker curve of Mordecai's, which drove batters crazy and made Brown one of the greatest pitchers of his. And as I say, there was a specific reason why he was able to throw it. You know, it was not that he had to become a great pitcher for a lack of talent in other defensive positions. Back there, when he was playing third base, he was described as a fielding demon. He was a scrambling spider with glue on his glove. No sir. Mordecai Brown's pitching genius was not born of necessity, nor was it solely the product of perseverance. There was something else behind that sinker pitch. Something entirely imitable, though no aspiring pitcher would dare to try. You've already heard the nickname Minor Brown. You see, Mordecai had another nickname, and that one kind of tells the rest of the story. For when Mordecai was a young boy working on that Indiana farm, something happened to his right hand for the purpose of throwing a consistent sinker curveball. You might call it an anatomical improvement. Anyway, it was a piece of farm machinery. It was a corn shredder, is what it was, which left Mordecai's right hand minus an index finger, and gave him the now famous nickname by which he is identified in baseball's hall of Fame, Three Finger Brown. And now you know the rest of the story.