Mordecai Brown
Major League Baseball player (1876–1948)
Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown (October 19, 1876 – February 14, 1948), nicknamed "Three Finger Brown" or "Miner", was an American Major League Baseball pitcher and manager during the first two decades of the 20th century (known as the "dead-ball era"). Due to a farm-machinery accident in his youth (April 17, 1888), Brown lost part of his right index finger. He later broke his middle finger, causing it to permanently bend. In that process he gained a colorful nickname. He turned this handicap into an advantage by learning how to grip a baseball in a way that resulted in an exceptional curveball (or knuckle curve), which broke radically before reaching the plate. With this technique he became one of the elite pitchers of his era.
Brown was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1949.
Early life
Brown was born in Nyesville, Indiana, to Jane and Peter Brown. He was also known as "Miner", having worked in western Indiana coal mines for a while before beginning his professional baseball career. Nicknames like "Miner" (or misspelled as "Minor") and "Three Finger" (or sometimes "Three-Fingered") were headline writers' inventions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mordecai Brown” as major League Baseball player (1876–1948). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as major League Baseball player (1876–1948). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q933048. VIAF identifies the subject as 28953143. The Library of Congress control number is n2006004201. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1876, 1948, 1888 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mordecai Brown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.