HOUSTON – Dana Brown did something most local scouts wouldn’t do. He spent the spring of 2000 scouting amateur players in the Northeast as the scouting area for the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Princeton pitcher piqued his interest, but proved to be a difficult acquisition for the entire organization.
Chris Young was 6’10” tall and split his time between two sports. As a basketball player, he patrolled the zone as a center and twice set the Princeton single-season record for blocked shots. He owned three assists on the diamond. None exceeded 92 mph. The opponents still could not hit them.
Young mastered stretching before baseball became a part of it. Brown noticed how quickly the pitcher’s velocity dropped sharply among hitters, but others in the Pittsburgh organization didn’t seem to understand his feelings. Brown summoned Mickey White, Pittsburgh’s scouting director, to Princeton to meet with him personally.
“Not many (area) scouts invited their scouting director, but I invited my scouting director,” Brown said. “I thought, ‘Hey, this guy doesn’t throw hard, but he has strikeouts and hitters aren’t lining him up.’ I think some of the local scouts said, “Dude, did you bring your scouting director to look at this guy?”
White watched as the wiry pitcher performed exactly as Brown advertised. That June, the Pirates selected Young 89th overall.
“We got him in the third round,” Brown said, “and I signed him.”
Before becoming the Astros’ general manager, Brown scouted and drafted future major league players. Now this man stands between his team and a trip to the World Series.
Twenty-three years after their first meeting, Brown and Young are the architects of both entries into the American League Championship Series, creating a circuitous revolution throughout the baseball world.
“Of course, I was a bit of a big fish in a small pond,” Young said this week. “The Ivy League may not be the traditional place to find major league players. But obviously Dana saw what he believed in, and I thank him for that.”
After being drafted by the Pirates in 2000, Young spent 13 major league seasons with five different teams. He was preceded by a commissioner stint as general manager of the Texas Rangers, during which he orchestrated a complete rebuild.
“I have great respect for him. He’s come in and he’s not afraid to make moves. He started signing guys right away and we knew Texas would be competitive. I know how Chris is doing. I knew he was competitive and these guys weren’t going to give up,” Brown said.
“I knew they were going to do everything they could to try to win because that’s who Chris Young is.”
Young stayed at Princeton for only two seasons. He was unanimously named Ivy League Rookie of the Year in both baseball and basketball. As a sophomore, he was also all-conference in both sports, but baseball offered a brighter future.
Brown, then 33 years old, defended the entire northeast from pirates. He lived in New Jersey, which made Princeton an ideal location for scouts, even though the school rarely produces major league talent. Young is one of six Ivy League major leaguers. According to Baseball-Reference, no former Tiger has more major league wins than his replacements.
“I just knew he was releasing the ball so far forward that it was hitting the hitters. I never used the word expansion, I just said he was coming forward,” Brown said. “He was pitching mostly around 89-92 (mph), had a little slider and a pretty good changeup. He really was a three-pitch guy and they just couldn’t hit him.”
In those days, signing players required scouts to go to homes, Brown said. Brown recalled going to Young’s in Highland Park, a Dallas suburb, to resolve a difficult contract situation.
Young did not sign his first contract until September of that year, when the Pirates wrote assurances that he could complete his education at Princeton before becoming a full-time baseball player.
“It’s non-negotiable,” Young said of earning a degree. “I was two years away from finishing my degree at Princeton, and I wasn’t going to give it up. We had to make arrangements for me to come to spring training over spring break, report in six weeks, start the season a little late, finish the minor league season because school starts late. , but then I was going to go back to school in the fall and come to spring training next year.
“It was a difficult signing. It wasn’t an easy decision.”
Young received a $1.65 million signing bonus, the same as Pittsburgh’s first-round pick that year.
“We got creative. He received a lot of money. It wasn’t third-round money,” Brown said. “We overpaid him and let him finish school. We overpaid him based on the recommendations they gave at the time.”
Young’s tenure in Pittsburgh lasted two seasons. The team traded him to the Montreal Expos in December 2002. The Expos used the services of their new director of scouting – Brown – to complete the deal.
“I just thought he would end up being a pretty good pitcher and have a decent career, but of course when he left baseball and ended up in the commissioner’s office, I wasn’t surprised,” Brown said. “This guy is a very good person, very smart. I wasn’t surprised he stayed in the game.
Young was traded two more times before making his major league debut with the Rangers in 2004. He threw 1,279 2/3 major league innings with a 3.95 ERA. After leaving Montreal, Brown took two more jobs with the Toronto Blue Jays and Atlanta Braves before Houston hired him as general manager in January.
Both have won the World Series: Brown with the Atlanta Braves in 2021 and Young with the Kansas City Royals in 2015. Another one may be on the horizon if one can defeat the other.
“It’s a proud moment for me because I signed him,” Brown said. “But it’s kind of intriguing, like life in baseball, how you cross paths and then end up competing against each other.”
(Top photo by Dana Brown: Troy Taormina/USA Today)