It’s Better to Be Nasty Than Nice

The doubt Kevin Brown harbored is gone. He has clearly overcome the arm and back injuries of the last two years. He is on top of his game again -- intimidating hitters, busting up clubhouses, insisting he is who he is and has no reason for apologies or excuses.

What does that mean?

Well, Brown suggested in an unusually candid and extended interview at his Dodger Stadium locker, it means he is long past the point of trying to win friends and influence people.

It means, he said, that if reporters have created a public image that can best be described as being fit to a T -- Testy, Tenacious and Tightly Wound -- he has been burned so often that he is wary of letting anyone see anything else, letting anyone penetrate the wall.

It means, he said, that he feeds off his intensity and competitiveness and if that leads to an occasional clubhouse demolition, it would be cause for concern only if he were endangering others.

It means, he said, that “friendship and respect are two different things” and his primary hope is that he has the respect of his teammates.

“A long time ago I got beyond the point of trying to please everybody,” Brown said. “You’re never going to do that, and if you try, you’re probably selling yourself short of who you really are and what you really are.

“I can stand up and look myself in the mirror. I can look [my teammates] in the eye. If somebody really wants to know what’s going on off the field with me, who I really am, it comes down to a matter of trust, and that takes time to develop.”

Time, Brown said, better spent preparing to pitch than making small talk with reporters, healing a wariness that doesn’t go back to any one place or incident.

“No one city has a patent on it,” Brown said of the frequency with which, he perceives, he has been burned.

Addressing it another way, he said:

“I’ve always been my own worst critic. I’m as tough on myself as anybody as far as my performance on the field. What people want to write as far as critiquing the pitcher or person, if they walk in and see what they think they want to see, I have no control over that.

“I’m not one to kiss anyone’s rear to try to make them think one way or the other about me. If they don’t like the way I am, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I’m competitive on the mound, tend to carry my intensity and focus on my sleeve, and as long as I have the respect of my teammates, that’s all I worry about.”

No worry. At least in the context of his performance.

“The man commands a level of respect with what he does and the way he carries himself, and that’s exactly what he should get,” said Darren Dreifort, whose game face is almost as perpetual as that of Brown’s and whose performance in this season of pitching comebacks for the Dodgers is comparably impressive.

For the 38-year-old Brown, coming off elbow and back surgeries in the last two years, his current roll may be the most impressive of a distinguished career. He faces the Milwaukee Brewers today with a 5-1 record and 2.38 earned-run average, the National League’s third best. He has held opponents to a .206 batting average, given up only seven runs in the 42 innings of his last six starts, given up only one run in each of the last five and gone seven innings or more in five of the last six (he went six innings in the other).

It has been a tone-setting display for the best rotation in baseball, challenging fodder for the other starters.

“He’s fun to watch, but he’s hard to watch,” Dreifort said. “As a fellow pitcher you try to get a read on the other team by watching how he pitches, but you can’t do that because every pitch he throws is different. You don’t know if he’s throwing a splitter or a sinker or a cutter or a slider or a curveball or a changeup. He’s so good because he’s got all that to keep a team off balance.

“Besides, the intensity he brings to the day he pitches is incredible. If you can’t get fired up watching him pitch a game, you’ve got problems. I mean, you certainly try to feed off that intensity because you can’t match his stuff.”

Coming back the way he has, Brown said, is a relief more than anything.

The low point, he said, discounting the times before the back surgery when he couldn’t even stand or dress, came last September when he tried to pitch out of the bullpen after Dr. Michael Watkins had operated on June 11, experienced discomfort and “I had to really start questioning whether I would ever be right again.”

A promising spring lessened his anxiety, restored his optimism, and now he says, “I feel like at times I’ve been as good as I’ve ever been, but the key is doing it for the whole season. That will be a big steppingstone. At this point I’m not saying ‘OK, I’m back,’ because I’m not satisfied yet where I’m at and still can improve. It’s a good feeling, however, to be able to go out there healthy and focus on making pitches instead of worrying about how I’m going to feel when I do.”

Brown has been making so many good ones that pitching coach Jim Colborn said he recently “apologized to him for having patronized him in the past by telling him he was making nice pitches as a way of encouraging him [amid injuries]. I didn’t realize his ceiling was as high as it is. You can’t pitch much better than he’s been.”

Nor can a rotation pitch much better, but Brown doesn’t think he has been the igniter. He thinks he has simply rejoined a group that pitched effectively last year as well.

“It’s not me or any specific guy,” he said. “It’s nice to be part of it, but I think what happens is that the team looks on it as every day you have an ace on the mound, and that’s the way it should be. I mean, there’s only one starter each day and he has to look on himself as the man. It’s an attitude as much as anything, and it feeds on itself.”

Perhaps, but no one has the attitudinal edge or sends off the sparks that Brown does.

If there are times the Dodgers duck for cover or shake their heads, wondering why a 38-year-old man is still punching holes in clubhouse walls, as Brown did in Cincinnati this year, or demolishing a clubhouse table, as he did in Montreal, Brown said, “Some guys can be almost nonchalant about it and contain their intensity. That doesn’t work for me. I have to use my intensity, let myself go, blow off steam. If I was endangering anyone, it would be cause for concern, but it’s never in a situation where I’m going to hurt anybody else. It’s the way I have to be. I pay my repair bill and move on.”

Pitching the way he is, of course, makes it easier for the Dodgers to accept the way he is. Still, there’s a sense that Brown may intimidate more than opposing hitters.

Manager Jim Tracy said he believes that he has “a very good relationship [with Brown] that is built on trust.” He left it at that, however.

Colborn, asked about his relationship, said: “All veteran pitchers, to one degree or another, are their own functioning entity, and all you’re really doing to an extent is providing feedback.”

Colborn added, however, that any image of Brown as strictly self-contained, isolated or charting his own course (as he seemed to be doing in his accelerated recovery from elbow surgery) would be incorrect. Colborn said that in his meetings with the pitching staff on the mental aspect, Brown is “forthright and eloquent, providing a definite essence of leadership,” and “he was so open this spring about his own anxieties that I think it helped the other guys relax and cope with their own.”

There is a sense in the Dodger clubhouse that Brown has been on a high with his successful recovery from the injuries, that his intensity is less evident at times, but it would be foolish to go overboard.

“Kevin is a real person, trust me,” Dreifort said. “He’s got another side that a lot of people don’t see, a lot of people in [this clubhouse] don’t even see. It’s just that there’s not a lot of times, even on days he isn’t pitching, that he doesn’t have that focus going.

“A lot of people fault him for not being Mr. Social, but his job is to go out and win ballgames, and he does that very effectively. If you want to socialize with him, catch him in the off-season. That’s pretty much the way it is, but it think that’s pretty much, as I understand it, the way it’s been with a lot of pitchers who are on that level, guys like Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan.”

Kevin Brown is back on a level to which he’s accustomed. For the Dodgers and his public, what more does anyone need to know?