M. Brown Portrait

Mordecai Peter Centennial "Three Finger" Brown (1876–1948) anchored the Chicago Cubs pitching staff during the most successful four-year run in franchise history, and his portrait card in the T206 White Border tobacco set captures him at the apex of that dynasty. The right-handed pitcher — a switch-hitter at the plate — had reshaped his grip after a childhood farm-machinery accident left him with a mangled pitching hand, and the resulting unorthodox grip imparted the kind of break on a curveball that contemporaries spent years trying to copy. By the 1909 issue date, Brown was already a multi-time twenty-game winner for the Cubs and the staff ace who had outdueled Christy Mathewson in the famous Merkle replay game the previous fall. T206 honored him with multiple variations, of which the portrait is the cleanest studio composition — a head-and-shoulders treatment that lets the lithographer focus on the face rather than any field action. Brown stayed in the National League into the Federal League experiment of 1914–1915, then pitched briefly back in the majors before retiring. He died February 14, 1948, and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1949 by the Old Timers Committee, the year after his death — Cooperstown catching up at last with one of the deadball era's defining arms.