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I suppose if you don't know the answers,
the two primary questions on your mind are: 1) Who is Brant Brown? and
2) Why I have devoted a page to him? Well, here are the answers. Brant
Brown is an outfielder/first baseman currently playing for the Chicago
Cubs. Why I am writing this page is simple: I wanted to. The reasons behind
that are much longer and more complicated (I'm not even going to go into
that). Although he is a natural first baseman (and a pretty good one too),
he converted to the outfield in the minor leagues because it was going
to be quite hard (and still is) to displace Mark Grace. On December 14,
1998 he was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Jon Lieber (who is currently
the Cubs number one starter). He spent 1999 with the Pirates and was traded
to the Florida Marlins for Bruce Aven early in 2000 (prior to the start
of spring training). After a rather dismal start to the season, he was
traded back to the Cubs the friday night of the first White Sox series
(that was the game that ran into 14 innings) and started on Sunday. That,
of course was when Don Baylor, the manager, was stilling willing to play
unestablished players (such as Brown and Chad Meyers) who never had been
given the chance to start for any substantial period of time and retain
the job afterwards. Many people will say, well Brant Brown was given his
chance and he blew it. Well, in 1996 he was called up to replace Mark Grace
while he was on the disabled list with a strained back, and he did better
than was to be expected (look at what Julio Zuleta did when he was called
up earlier this season). Brown spent all of 1997 and 1998 with the Cubs,
getting a chance to start when Lance Johnson was injured between May 1st
and June 26th (actually Johnson was on the DL until July 14th, but Brown
was placed on the DL 6/26 after injuring his shoulder running into the
wall at Tiger Stadium) after that he platooned with Glenallen Hill between
8/24 and 9/8 while Henry Rodriguez was on the disabled list with a sprained
ankle. He played quite well during those starts in 1998, but of course,
there was no job to be had (that's how the Cubs work; an injured player
automatically gets his job back). In 1999 he didn't get off to a very good
start with the Pirates and lost the starting job, but played exceptionally
well during the games which his did start (going 5 for 5 at least once).
The same thing happened once again in 2000, except he didn't play very
well during the spot starts with the Marlins.
