He could have been one of the core four, but that would have made them the core five – Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Brien Taylor.
The first four players are well known as the nucleus of the New York Yankees’ four World Series championships in five years. The fifth, Taylor, is known only to Yankees’ fans and a few others with good memories.
Taylor’s situation reminds me of the memorable Marlon Brando line from the movie “On the Waterfront,” in which, as Terry Malloy, a washed up fighter, he says, “I coulda been a contender; I coulda been somebody.”
Brien Taylor was on his way to being somebody, a teammate of Jeter and Rivera and Posada and Pettitte, but he got sidetracked and now he’s in jail in North Carolina, arrested last week on charges of selling cocaine and crack cocaine.
Taylor is one of the best examples I know of someone who squandered what he could have had. Pete Rose is the best example I know of someone who squandered what he had.
I bring up Rose and Taylor together because on the day Taylor was arrested in Beaufort, N.C., I read a column about Rose on Foxsports.com. This Rose comment in particular caught my attention:
“The only thing I don’t quite understand about the whole situation is: Why is it so difficult for me to get a second chance?”
Sadly, more than two decades later, Rose still doesn’t get it. Banished from baseball in 1989 and ineligible for the Hall of the Fame, Rose doesn’t understand that he had 15 years’ worth of second chances and wasted them.
Instead of admitting that he did what the Dowd report said he did, he lied and denied that he bet on baseball games, including some he managed, and kept denying it until he published a book in 2004 and admitted it, though even then he was less than candid. That means he continued to lie about some aspects of his hobby.
Rose, of course, has his own self-serving definition of “second chance.” He never has dealt in reality.
Lamenting that commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti died a week after banishing him, Rose said in the interview, “I am totally convinced that if he’d have lived…he’d have given me a second chance in a year. I’m totally convinced Bart would have done that. Bart was a very, very intelligent and fair man.”
Fairness was not an issue. Rose’s credibility was.
“He could send in papers after a year, but there was no understanding he would be reinstated,” said Fay Vincent, deputy commissioner at the time, who was an integral part of the Rose investigation and discipline.
Although there were no promises or guarantees, Vincent added, the view of the commissioner’s office might have been different “if Rose had immediately told the truth and said ‘I did it, it was stupid and I want to earn my way back. I’m going to behave in the best interests of baseball, tell people why gambling is dangerous, why betting on your team is wrong and at some point I’ll come to you.”
“Bart and I talked about that,” Vincent recalled. “I said it makes so much sense it will never happen. I said he’d have to swallow a lot, including his pride. He could not bring himself to do it.”
Would Giamatti have reinstated Rose? “I don’t know,” Vincent said in a telephone interview, “but he would have been tempted had Rose done the right thing.” But, Vincent added, “there was no hope he would do it.”
Rose, approaching his 71st birthday, remains exiled from baseball, a pariah, who hangs around the fringes in a look-but-don’t-touch mode. He has taken up residence in a memorabilia shop at a Las Vegas casino, signing whatever anyone puts in front of him – for money, of course. A man has to earn a living somehow, you know.
Rose played for 24 years and retired with an all-time record 4,256 hits. Brien Taylor played in no major league seasons and retired with nothing but tormented thoughts of what might have been.
“A great talent, the best talent by far,” “Gene Michael called Taylor, the 19-year-old left-handed pitcher the Yankees made the first pick in the June 1991 draft. “He had the ability to go to the top. He was an athlete. He was agile. He would have been a real good one. His first year in professional baseball in the Florida State League, though it was his first year out of high school, he averaged 95 with his fast ball. Probably no one had ever done that.”
Michael was the Yankees’ general manager, and those years in the early 1990s marked the transformation in the organization that changed the way the Yankees operated. With George Steinbrenner suspended, Michael changed the culture, retaining good young players instead of trading them for established veterans, many of whom were headed for the downside of their careers.
The Yankees gave the 6-foot-3, 195-pound Taylor a $1.55 million signing bonus, giving him the record amount under orders from the suspended owner and outraging other owners.
“These big tycoons in New York let a 19-year-old kid from North Carolina snooker them out of a million dollars,” an angry John McMullen, owner of the Houston Astros, said, alluding to Taylor’s threat to go to college instead of signing. “It’s total sheer irresponsibility. Every time you think it can’t get worse, it does. It’s a complete outrage.”
However, Taylor’s performance in his first two years in the minor leagues indicated the Yankees had not overpaid as he struck out 337 in 324 innings.
“At that time,” Michael said, “Randy Johnson was probably the best arm in baseball. Brien had the same exact arm slot as Johnson, a three-quarters delivery. He was really something. He hadn’t had a lot of baseball education. He wasn’t accustomed to catching ground balls because no one hits grounders against him. People were trying to criticize him, but there was nothing to criticize him for.”
In 1992, Taylor’s first season, Rivera was a teammate, a fellow starting pitcher in his third season.
“Brien Taylor was our No. 1 prospect with great, great aspirations, a great future,” Rivera said this week at the Yankees’ spring training camp in Tampa, adding for emphasis that Taylor had “a great, great chance to be a big league pitcher.”
Rivera saw a great career ahead for his teammate. “No doubt about it,” he said. “No doubt. He would have been there for a long time, being a lefty, a power lefty like he was, and he threw strikes. I have no doubt that he was going to be a big league pitcher.”
Taylor was headed for Triple A in 1993 and was on track to join Jeter, Rivera, Posada and Pettitte with the Yankees in 1995 or ‘96, but he encountered what turned out to be an insurmountable and an unfortunate roadblock.
“I don’t know what happened,” Rivera said, “but something happened with his shoulder in a fight or something. After that, he wasn’t the same.”
In December 1993, when he was home in Beaufort, N.C., between seasons, Taylor went to the defense of his brother, who had been in a fight. The pitcher wound up in another fight and landed on his shoulder, suffering a torn capsule and a torn labrum.
Surgery repaired the tears but didn’t restore Taylor’s ability.
“After they reconstructed his shoulder,” Michael said, “his arm slot, which had been a low three-quarters, was a high three-quarters. His fastball was getting up to 90 but never like he could throw before.”
Taylor’s command of his pitches and his control were not the same. After sitting out the 1993 season, he struggled for several years and never rose above Class A.
The only positive development that emerged from the fight was his acquittal on two misdemeanor charges stemming from the fight. He does not figure to be so fortunate with the charges against him in last week’s cocaine arrest.
Taylor, now 40, was nabbed in an undercover investigation by narcotics detectives from the Carteret County sheriff’s office and the Morehead City police department.
Taylor, who lives on a street named for him, was arrested, law enforcement officers said, after they purchased a large quantity of cocaine and crack cocaine from him over several months.
He was charged with 15 cocaine-related counts, according to the sheriff’s office: two counts each of trafficking in cocaine by possession, selling, delivering, manufacturing and transporting, three counts of felony maintaining a vehicle, one count of possession with Intent to manufacture, sell and deliver cocaine, and one count of selling and delivering cocaine.
Ken Raper, the chief deputy sheriff of Carteret County, said by telephone that Taylor made his initial court appearance last Friday morning and was being held in county jail under a $275,000 bond.
“He didn’t make bond,” Raper said. “He’s still in our jail.”
Taylor was denied a public defender and was trying to hire a lawyer.
“You hate to see someone get himself in the position where he hurts himself like that,” the deputy said. The same could be said for Taylor’s fight in 1993.