Mordecai Brown Chicago-N 12/09/09

Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown (1876–1948) lost the better part of his right index finger to a childhood farm accident in Indiana, kept pitching, and rode the resulting freakish curveball into the National League's elite. A switch-hitter who threw right, Brown anchored the Chicago Cubs rotation during the franchise's only championship dynasty, posting six straight twenty-win seasons from 1906 through 1911 and helping the team to back-to-back World Series titles in 1907 and 1908. This card is a Sporting News supplement dated December 9, 1909 — one of the oversized photographic premiums that the trade weekly distributed to subscribers loose between 1909 and 1913, prized for their portrait quality and large format compared with the contemporary tobacco issues. Brown died February 14, 1948 in Terre Haute, Indiana, near where he had grown up. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1949.