He may have been born in Casper, Wyoming, but Tom Browning, after stints at Le Moyne College in Syracuse and Tennessee Wesleyan, found a home here in Northern Kentucky.
And we all found a friend and neighbor. Which is why it’s so tough to be talking about his much-too-early leaving us Monday at the age of 62 after the former Cincinnati Reds pitcher was found unresponsive at his Union home.
For his four decades as our Northern Kentucky guy, the one whose photo with him you treasure, or whose autograph you have tucked away, or the guy who spent a half-hour talking with you at a RedsFest or an old-timers day. Or maybe a Hall of Fame moment – at either the Reds Hall of Fame or the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame where not a month goes by without an autographed Tom Browning prize given away.
Everybody has a story, from those Cubs fans that day in 1993 when Tom hoofed it across the street from Wrigley Field to hang out with them in his full Reds uniform just to pick up the team’s morale – and win a $200 bet from a teammate. Reds manager Davey Johnson, who fined him $500, or $1,000, there are differing stories, for the caper, didn’t get it. All the rest of us did.
Browning more so than anyone. He may have lost money that day but got a whole different glimpse of the game from Cubs fans who at first didn’t believe he was a ballplayer.
Tom Browning was that and more – he was one of us more than anything. His teammates, to a man, called him their “best teammate.”
Here’s former Reds GM Jim Bowden’s take in a Monday tweet: “Tom Browning . . . had the best 84-86 mph high spin rate 4-seam fastball at the top of the zone of any LH pitcher of his era. He threw a perfect game, won a World Championship, sat in the Wrigley Field stands during a Reds game & took part himself during his own contract negotiations.”
Not only did Tom look a little bit like us, with familiar nicknames “Pug” and “Otis” for the character on the Andy Griffith TV show, he was one of us. No 100-mile-an-hour fastball for Tom. More of a Warren Spahn or Harvey Haddix change-of-speed, change-of-location craftsman with an unhittable screwball. Tom Browning was a pitcher.
But so much more. You couldn’t go to a Reds parade or Opening Day or a golf outing or maybe a high school baseball tournament where Tom pitched batting practice to the coaches, and not have your own memory.
Here’s mine.
As a former high school baseball coach at Covington Catholic as well as onetime night crew superintendent at Riverfront Stadium for the Reds, I’d always felt a little connected. But as sports editor/columnist for The Kentucky Post when Tom came along in 1984, there was just something about him that was more connecting.
I remember heading down to Nashville when Tom was rehabbing an arm injury and he allowed me to not only write about what it was like for a young guy – a young Northern Kentucky guy by now — working his way back from a career-threatening injury. But he also permitted the ex-baseball coach in me to talk to him about things like his release point and whether the injury had changed it. Tom was probably just being polite but that was Tom being Tom.
So that Friday night, Sept. 16, 1988, when he would pitch his perfect game against the Dodgers, only the third in 108 years in the National League and 12th overall in all of major league baseball, here I was driving back to Cincinnati from Pennsylvania. I had been working on putting together the first Traveling College Football Hall of Fame for the next year and transitioning to doing a Sunday Kentucky sports column for The Cincinnati Enquirer.
And despite the more than two-hour rain delay, I didn’t make it to town in time, listening to the Marty Brennaman call all the way, of course, on WLW Radio. I remember making it to the stadium a half-hour after the 1-0 game ended.
And yet not thinking it was too late to talk to Tom for my Sunday column. No problem, I’d just head out to his home in Edgewood Saturday morning, knock on the door and catch up with him then. Which is exactly what I did.
Now that I think about it, it sounds crazy. Who does that? I never had. Not before or after in more than 40 years of sports writing. You don’t just go to the home of a guy who did something so unprecedented and knock on his door. And have him answer. And he tells you to come on in, sit down and we’ll talk about it.
But Tom Browning did. We talked about how he’d thrown 70 strikes in his 102 pitches, didn’t once get to three balls on a batter, threw first-strike pitches to 21 of 27 Dodger batters, and how this was almost a Northern Kentucky thing. His congressman at the time, Jim Bunning, had done it first in the National League in 1964. Even the third NL person to do it, Dodger great Sandy Koufax, 23 years before Browning, had been a University of Cincinnati basketball player.
“A perfect perfect game,” Reds manager Pete Rose called that game in one of the rare moments in all of baseball history a team that would go on to win the World Series, as the Dodgers did, would have a perfect game pitched against it.
And not bad company for our “Everyman” Tom Browning, who would win 20 games as a rookie, first to do so in more than three decades, become an All-Star, help the Reds win a World Series the night after an all-points bulletin for Tom went out on WLW during a rain-delayed, possible extra-innings Game 2 of the World Series.
Tom had headed off to St. E’s South in the seventh inning when his wife, Debbie, had gone into labor with son Tucker and knocked on the clubhouse door to tell him she’d need a ride to the hospital.
Tom would make it back to airport the next day for the trip to Oakland and pitch the underdog Reds to a Game 3 win that pretty much guaranteed the World Series and cement Tom’s Reds’ Hall of Fame standing for his 11-year career here as the Reds’ 12th-all-time winningest pitcher. Just a year after his perfect game, Tom came within an inning of becoming the only pitcher to throw two of them.
He was special. And he was ours. Tom would go on to become the first-ever Florence Freedom manager and a Reds’ pitching adviser in recent years.
It hadn’t been an easy year for Tom, having lost Debbie to a long illness last March, but what memories he’s left for all of us – and with so many of us.
His grandson Nick, a senior baseball player at St. Henry District High School, will carry on the family tradition for the Crusaders this spring.
Marty Brennaman, as he has so often in his Hall of Fame career calling Reds baseball, said it best with this description of Tom in The Enquirer: “He was just a plain old good guy.”
Indeed.
Long-time sport writer and editor Dan Weber is a sports reporter for the NKyTribune.