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Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown (October 19, 1876 – February 14, 1948) was a Major League baseball pitcher, one of the dominant pitchers of the early 20th century. He played from 1903 to 1916, playing mostly for the Chicago Cubs, with whom he won the World Series twice. Over his career he went 239-130, a .648 winning percentage. His career ERA was a very low 2.06. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame, posthumously, in 1949.
Due to a farm-machinery accident in his youth, Brown lost parts of two fingers on his right hand.
Mordecai Brown in Southern Victory[]
Mordecai (or Mordechai)[1] was a U.S. Naval veteran of the Great War. He helped a half dozen men repair the secondary armament on the USS Dakota after the Battle of the Three Navies. Their foreman, Lou Stein, introduced each man to Sam Carsten, who knew he'd only remember Mordecai because of his missing fingers. When Carsten discovered a shell fragment lodged in the armored hydraulic line to a gun mount, Mordecai neatly removed it with a cutting torch.[2]
After the war, he served as a foreman for construction projects in southern California. When two of his men fought on a worksite, Mordechai docked their pay--as well as the pay of the co-workers who watched them fight. The latter was seen as unfair by builder Chester Martin, a Socialist who had been involved in strikes in the Toledo steel mills in 1918. In response to Mordechai's move, Martin organized a series of strikes that forced the building magnates of Southern California into labor talks with Martin's union.
Literary Comment[]
The Southern Victory character is never given a last name, so it isn't absolutely certain he is the historical figure. The fact that the spelling of the name changes from "Mordecai" in Walk in Hell to "Mordechai" in The Victorious Opposition further obscures the issue.
References[]
- ↑ See Inconsistencies (Southern Victory).
- ↑ Walk in Hell, pgs. 288-289, hc, 359-360, mmp.
