Tom Browning Devoured Innings And Tormented My Team

There are certain types of players that just are not coming back. Some of these guys have been written out of the story by changes in the game's rules; future generations will be unable to comprehend the wealth of saturnine lefty specialists whom the world once watched trudge-jogging from the league's bullpens, not just because the mind naturally reels at such beauty, but because the role no longer exists as such. An evolving set of best practices has also narrowed the field of Guys, or just refined it in a way that puts the squeeze on elite specialists and the lumpen class of ham-and-egger generalists alike. In baseball's optimized future, pinch-runners and innings eaters will both be endangered species. If you're old enough to remember a version of the game that was not like this—all those kludgy and misshapen rosters built from those kinds of irregulars—it is natural to mourn its passing. Contemporary baseball is not worse than that bygone version played by guys who looked like bartenders and bar-goers, but anyone old enough to remember all that would also be old enough to default to mourning where the past is concerned. The sport's margins have always been narrow, and basically every career teeters on a knife's edge; this is a workplace, after all. But as business-brained optimization has spread throughout the sport, the fact of all that has escaped the anxious liminality of subtext to create a new and dispiritingly contingent type of job. If baseball has created a new type of Guy during its ongoing efficiency revolution, it is the ultra-fungible bottom-of-the-roster type who changes teams three or four times per season during and after stints in DFA limbo; some of the people doing that work have been All-Stars, but most of them are pluggers whose names few fans will learn or remember. They are big-leaguers, too, but as Dreams Come True go, this one doesn't seem like much fun. There aren't many pitchers like Tom Browning in the majors in 2026. His greatest ability during 12 big-league seasons, 11 of which he spent with the Cincinnati Reds, was availability, followed closely by durability. If you want to expand the list further, you'd still hit affability before bringing up his screwball he picked up in A-ball. He pitched a lot of innings and gave up a decent amount of hits; he didn't strike many batters out and walked even fewer than that. He won 20 games in a season and the third game of the Reds' World Series sweep in 1990; he threw a perfect game at home in 1988 after waiting out a rain delay of more than two-and-a-half hours. Over the course of his career, Browning led the league in starts four times, home runs allowed three times, and earned runs allowed once.

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