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" Fade in here: a sweet spring sky over Florida, blue as God&amp;#039;s own iris and rich in breezes as light as thought. Pan down gently, gently, down past the fat young buzzards, down past the citrus trees, down past the raucous mockingbirds, down all the way into Dodgertown, where the Los Angeles team has practiced in the spring since the Los Angeles team was playing in Brooklyn, since Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee, and the Duke. Down to a yellow rope line strung around the periphery of a ball field. Down, finally, into the middle of a knot of people clustered thick and loud around a single, spindle-shanked pitcher.  Spring training is a time for family histories handed down, a time for fathers and sons and for daughters now, too. It is a time when family traditions ripen again like the citrus fruit swelling beneath the vast sky and all the fat young buzzards. Old stories and tender memories. Gentle familiarity and fond acquaintance. Sweet nostalgia and untrammeled avarice. And action! &amp;quot;Here,&amp;quot; says the father to his son and daughter. &amp;quot;You each take one of these and come back when you&amp;#039;re done. And don&amp;#039;t stand together!&amp;quot; The father is a walking memorabilia shop. He is dripping with baseballs and baseball cards. He&amp;#039;s got index cards stuffed into every pocket. Put this guy back in medieval Europe and he&amp;#039;d be toting around enough pieces of various saints to build his own martyr. He dispatches his children toward the rope line, but his daughter has a question. &amp;quot;Now,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I should keep the cap off the pen, right? So I look like everyone else?&amp;quot; The pitcher&amp;#039;s head bobs above the crowd. Haughty as a hawk, eyes level and unsmiling, he signs all the sundry detritus thrust at him by the crowd, working the rope line with the cool detachment of a man performing a job that, while not unpleasant, is still a bother, like making the bed or running the vacuum. He keeps an eye on the crowd around him as the two children disperse into the scrum, one to each side. The pitcher takes another baseball and impales with a glance the person who has handed it to him. &amp;quot;Wait,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Haven&amp;#039;t you been through here before? Y&amp;#039;all keep an eye on these folks. If you catch anyone double-dipping, you let me know.&amp;quot; The daughter stands still, the cap off her pen, trying to blend into the unruly commerce, looking like everyone else. There is, of course, a back story. Kevin Brown is thirty-four years old. Conspicuously bright, he nevertheless is a notoriously prickly personality even by baseball&amp;#039;s formidable standards in that regard. This is a man who once broke four golf clubs during a &amp;quot;friendly&amp;quot; round with teammates. Sometimes that prickly personality has manifested itself in eviscerating glares at miscreant infielders, snappish exchanges with umpires, clubhouse rampages that would&amp;#039;ve embarrassed Keith Moon, and various other episodes that have led baseball people to conclude, &amp;quot;What a competitor!&amp;quot; Other times, it&amp;#039;s manifested itself in chilly public silences, obscene public outbursts, blatant bullying of bus drivers who won&amp;#039;t earn in a lifetime what Brown will earn before July, and various other episodes that have led people outside of baseball to conclude, &amp;quot;What a dickhead!&amp;quot;  Central to the personality that produces these reactions is a back story of fire slowly, only slowly, banked by intelligence. &amp;quot;The identity you have is in the respect that other people have for you as far as what you do on the field,&amp;quot; Brown says. &amp;quot;To me, whether I&amp;#039;m good, bad, or ugly, I&amp;#039;m going to go out and give it all I have every time I walk on the field. That&amp;#039;s how I identify myself. Everything else doesn&amp;#039;t matter. I mean, of course it matters in the bigger picture. But that part isn&amp;#039;t going to change from team to team.&amp;quot; In the past two seasons, he&amp;#039;s been the bulwark of pitching staffs that have helped the Florida Marlins win the 1997 World Series and the San Diego Padres win the 1998 National League pennant. At roughly the same time that Brown was reporting to spring training last year with the Padres, Rupert Murdoch&amp;#039;s News Corp. bought the Dodgers from Peter O&amp;#039;Malley for $311 million. Apparently, baseball people believed Murdoch would behave as a docile and cooperative partner in a luxurious mo-nopoly enterprise. The only warning came from Ted Turner, a lesser species of public carnivore to whom nobody in baseball listens anyway, who pointed out that Murdoch didn&amp;#039;t get to where he could pay $311 million for a baseball team by working and playing well with others. Apparently, Turner was the only owner who&amp;#039;d ever watched When Animals Attack. Then, shortly before last Christmas, Kevin Brown signed a contract with the Dodgers that will pay him $105 million over the next seven years. Leaving aside the question of whether it is wise to commit that kind of money to a pitcher already well past thirty--Brown will cash his last check when he&amp;#039;s forty-one--the industry cried betrayal, poor-mouthed with the energy of a battalion of defense contractors, and reacted generally as though the Good Ship Lollipop had been seized by Captain Hook.  Brown became the inadvertent focus of baseball&amp;#039;s attack of public apoplexy. He found that being the sport&amp;#039;s first $100 million player became the easy shorthand for his entire career. An era had pivoted, and it had pivoted upon him, which did little to thaw Brown&amp;#039;s public demeanor, even on easy, breezy spring mornings in Dodgertown, where the hardest work he has to do is keep a gim-let eye on the enthusiastic profiteers surrounding him at the rope line as we pan back up, past the mockingbirds and the citrus trees, and past all the fat young buzzards again, all the way into the cloudless blue of the boundless sky, the only changeless thing in a changing age, in which so many things seem like movies, or the exclusive property of the people who make them. Fade out.  Bulldogs know no body type. Toughness in a pitcher is not a function of athleticism, if only because the craft of pitching is so unique that it can be developed in virtually any kind of frame. Roger Clemens is bulky and bullish. Pedro Martinez is slender and delicate. Kevin Brown is a lanky, sinewy, six feet four inches and could pass for an NBA guard. Brown is visibly tough on the mound, often staring his own catcher all the way back behind the plate if disinclined to confer with him. He glowers and fumes, barely at the edge of control--a great paradox, since his talent comes from his motion, a delicately controlled half pivot out of which comes a bewildering variety of speeds and deliveries, most notably a gravid, bat-shattering ninety-four-mile-per-hour sinker that no less an authority than Tony Gwynn has called the most difficult pitch in the game to hit. To watch him deliver the ball is to watch a series of finely jeweled movements that once threatened to strangle Brown&amp;#039;s career with relentless minutiae. There was a time when Kevin Brown raged because he couldn&amp;#039;t get out of his own head long enough to deal with the batter at hand. &amp;quot;I was so focused on what my body was doing that I didn&amp;#039;t focus on getting the guy out. I don&amp;#039;t worry about how I&amp;#039;m throwing the ball now. I let my body take care of itself.&amp;quot; When he came up with the Texas Rangers in 1986, Brown&amp;#039;s perfectionism drove him to distraction. A poor outing--or, more to the point, what Brown interpreted as a poor outing--moved him to destroy clocks, lights, stereos, and anything else within the compass of his anger.  His was a reputation made all the more remarkable by the fact that his anger seemed innate, something amplified by his pitching but caused by something far beyond it. After all, Brown did not grow up burning to pitch professionally. The son of central-Georgia chalk miners, Brown aimed for a career as a chemical engineer and enrolled at Georgia Tech, where math and science appealed to his devotion to precision. However, he pitched in a local amateur tournament, where a Mets scout saw him and recommended him to Tech&amp;#039;s baseball coach. He was drafted by Texas in 1986, and he came up to the big leagues almost immediately. In Texas, even when he pitched well, such as in his twenty-one-win season in 1992, Brown&amp;#039;s rages nearly consumed him. Gradually, though, he came to watch Nolan Ryan and admire his celebrated teammate&amp;#039;s ability to treat each individual pitch as a separate act, so as not to let any frustration become cumulative. Somebody who first wanted a life in the sciences was finally learning dispassion.  In 1996, Brown signed as a free agent with the Florida Marlins. A year later, he threw a no-hitter, went 16--8, and beat the favored Atlanta Braves twice in the National League Championship Series. He lost twice in the World Series to the Cleveland Indians, enlivening one postgame media session with the kind of expletive-laced tirade thought to have disappeared from baseball with the demise of John McGraw. The Marlins won the Series, however, and were immediately sold off for parts by their owner, Wayne Huizenga.  As part of the fire sale, Huizenga peddled Brown to San Diego, where, a year later, he once again was pitching in the Series, losing once to the Yankees. Last winter, after using the team&amp;#039;s 1998 success to blackjack a new stadium out of San Diego voters, the Padres did pretty much the same thing the Marlins had done, guaranteeing they would put into their new stadium a team no thinking person would ever pay to see. Now Brown was on the market again. &amp;quot;In Florida,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;the ax was over our heads by the time the parade was over. Then, with San Diego last year, it made it a lot easier to put 1997 behind me and move on. It would&amp;#039;ve been a lot more difficult for me to swallow if I hadn&amp;#039;t been through it before.&amp;quot; He entered free agency last October in the best possible bargaining position, a proven talent who had been a central part of two surprising championship teams. And not all baseball owners are chop-shop artists like Wayne Huizenga or quick-buck charlatans like the stadium grifters in San Diego. One of them was in it for the long haul, because that&amp;#039;s the only way you control the world. And, thus, Kevin Brown joined Mulder and Scully, the Simpsons of Springfield, and all those photogenic predators in the grand design of an Aussie brigand for whom baseball is very much the least of it. Teams are not assembled anymore; they are cast the way movies are, and the role of the $100 million bulldog starter opened up in Los Angeles just as Kevin Brown was between projects. He got the part. Fade in. The game spreads over the fields of Dodgertown in shouts and sunshine, the way it has for more than fifty consecutive springs. Pitchers and catchers run through the drills in boisterous polyglot, baseball being a far more diverse place than it was in the days when everyone conversed in fluent Cracker. Kevin Malone sits in a golf cart deep in dead-center field of one of the ball fields, feeling very much as though he&amp;#039;s gone from being Bob Cratchit to being King Farouk.  Short and bubbling, with a Gil Hodges memorial buzz cut, Malone is a baseball lifer who began his career running the cash-strapped Montreal Expos and now runs the Dodgers, where he oversees a payroll that tops out this season at $84 million, a figure that gave the vapors to those baseball owners who are not Rupert Murdoch. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s different with the Fox and the News Corp. people,&amp;quot; Malone says. &amp;quot;They know where baseball fits into what they&amp;#039;re trying to build.&amp;quot; Around the time players were reporting for spring training last season, News Corp. bought the Dodgers. Later in the year, the company paid $4.4 billion to keep the National Football League on the Fox Network, put up $1 million in order to spring professional-sports grump Keith Olbermann out of Monica bondage on MSNBC, and offered $1 billion for the Manchester United soccer franchise in England&amp;#039;s Premier League, a transaction that so alarmed the British that Tony Blair felt compelled to inveigh against it.  In that context, and given Murdoch&amp;#039;s monolithic ambitions--his companies control the local cable rights to seventy-one of the seventy-six major-league baseball, basketball, and hockey teams in the United States--it&amp;#039;s hard to imagine what baseball thought it was get-ting when it allowed him to buy the Dodgers. After all, a man who can buy prime ministers will not be reluctant to spend $105 million on a right-handed pitcher. Rupert Murdoch did not get into baseball to turn into Bud Selig. Rupert Murdoch got into baseball to remain Rupert Murdoch. &amp;quot;We expected the reaction, but, to be honest, we didn&amp;#039;t expect the passion that the signing aroused,&amp;quot; explains Bob Graziano, the president and CEO of the Dodgers. &amp;quot;Basically, we didn&amp;#039;t want to get into a bidding war for Kevin Brown. We wanted to come in with a fair and aggressive offer.&amp;quot; For his part, Brown saw not merely a huge offer but also the immense force behind it. &amp;quot;When you sign a long-term contract, you want a chance to win,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;And with the people here, they&amp;#039;re not just dedicated to winning one time. It&amp;#039;s not a hit-and-run situation.&amp;quot; Moreover, Brown soon found himself enmeshed in a unique corporate culture within which even the most nakedly brutal displays of power carry a freebooter&amp;#039;s guerrilla charm. Brown felt this immediately. &amp;quot;You look at the Dodgers, and behind the scenes is Fox, and you think of a big corporation being very impersonal, like a blank piece of steel. That&amp;#039;s not the case. The gentlemen at Fox, while they&amp;#039;re big businessmen, were just normal people.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s one thing I&amp;#039;ve learned, and that is that spending money doesn&amp;#039;t guarantee winning,&amp;quot; says Davey Johnson, whom Kevin Malone hired to manage the 1999 Dodgers. If Johnson has not seen it all, he&amp;#039;s seen most of it. In the mid-eighties, Johnson managed a boatload of famously talented lunatics with the New York Mets. Subsequently, he worked for the insane Marge Schott in Cincinnati and for the manic Peter Angelos in Baltimore, winning in both places. All Johnson hopes is that Brown wins eighteen to twenty games and serves as an example to the promising young pitching staff that the Dodgers are developing. &amp;quot;You know, I haven&amp;#039;t been here that long, but I know that stability has always been what the Dodgers were about, and maybe there was too much stability after a while,&amp;quot; Johnson muses. &amp;quot;From what I know, the Fox people think differently.&amp;quot; Fade in, finally, to a line of pitching mounds, where pitchers work side by side, like bowlers in their lanes. On one of them, Kevin Brown spins tightly in his elegant motion, coming sidearm and then three quarters, the ball dropping like a brick as it reaches the plate. Next to him, a tanned blade of a man, with fingers so long and slender they seem carved out of Renaissance marble, works one of the younger pitchers. Along the rope line, the older people stop and stare and then point him out to their children. Sandy Koufax first came here as a Brooklyn Dodger, back when Dodgertown was considered downright revolutionary--a permanent training facility for what still was supposed to be a seasonal pastime, an element of pure business in what still was supposed to be a game. He even remembers when the place ran a children&amp;#039;s summer camp. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s different,&amp;quot; Koufax says. &amp;quot;The Dodgers of the fifties were different from the Dodgers of the sixties, and they were different from the Dodgers of the eighties, who were different from the Dodgers now. I mean, there was family ownership then, and that created a different atmosphere.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s something inevitable, a closing shot consonant with the opening montage, about the Dodgers being central to a new era in baseball. For all the talk of what Murdoch may do to Dodger tradition, it was the O&amp;#039;Malley family that can be said to have begun the modern age of baseball economics when it abandoned Brooklyn in favor of the more lucrative markets of California. It was there that Sandy Koufax flourished, as symbolic of his Dodgers as Kevin Brown is of the Dodgers of the new century.  There&amp;#039;s talk of them leaving this place. An Indian tribe in Arizona has offered the Dodgers a sweetheart deal, so next year this may be Orioletown or Indiantown. Sandy Koufax will not be here. Neither will Kevin Brown. The crowds will be here, though, the ageless tableau under some other opulent new management, fathers with their sons and with their daughters, too, clustered around ballplayers in unruly commerce, looking like everyone else beneath the fat young buzzards and the boundless, unchanging sky. Fade in. Fade out. Fade away. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/a1142/highest-paying-role-hollywood-0599/>