Baseball standout's promising career derailed by injury and drugs

By Greg Barnes
Staff writer

BEAUFORT - The house that Brien Taylor built is falling apart.

A blue tarp that once covered part of the roof has long since blown away. Weeds sprout from shingles. Five broken-down lawn tractors litter the yard, along with an assortment of abandoned cars and trucks. Vines are starting to swallow the two boats at the rear of the property.

Taylor provided the money to help his parents build this house, on the dirt street named in his honor, back when Taylor was the pride of East Carteret High School and the New York Yankees.

Taylor had a gift - a 99-mph fastball - that made him the Yankees' No. 1 pick in the 1991 amateur draft. That translated into a record-setting signing bonus of $1.55 million.

Super agent Scott Boras, who advised Taylor at the time, described the left-hander as the "best high school pitcher I've ever seen in my life."

Taylor signed his contract the same year as Yankee pitching great Andy Pettitte and a year after 12-time Yankee all-star Mariano Rivera. Taylor might have been right there with them, winning five World Series rings.

But a barroom brawl led to a cruel twist of fate.

By 2000, after drifting around in the low minor leagues, Taylor was out of baseball, becoming only the second top draft pick to never make it to the majors.

Life continued downhill from there. Taylor was charged with misdemeanor child abuse in 2005 after leaving four of his children alone for more than eight hours.

And last week, the boy with the golden arm was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison - a 40-year-old addict caught selling crack cocaine to undercover cops.

There isn't much to Brien Taylor Lane, just a little dirt track that dead-ends into the woods about eight miles north of downtown Beaufort.

Locals refer to the area as North River, a community of fishermen and laborers far removed from the million-dollar yachts that dot Beaufort's waterfront.

Taylor's home lies at the end of his road, on the left next to a roofless cinder-block house with piles of junk parked out front.

A mobile home lies in a ditch across the road, as if a tornado picked it up and tossed it there.

Taylor had lived in the trailer with his mother, Bettie, who worked for a seafood house at the time, and his father, Willie Ray, a bricklayer, until Brien got that big signing bonus and spent part of it to help pay for the new house.

Bettie Taylor still lives there, along with her son's children.

She responds to a knock on the front door wearing a light-blue cap and a frown. Her son was sentenced the day before. She says she doesn't want to relive his past.

"It's over. It's been over 20 years. The glory days are gone," she says, keeping one foot inside her home and continually saying she's through talking.

She offers a few glimpses of her son's past, just the same.

Brien's uncle first noticed his athleticism at the age of 2, she says, when Brien hurtled his milk bottle across the room.

" 'Whatever you do, you let that child play sports,' " Bettie Taylor says, quoting the uncle.

By age 5, she says, her son stood out in the T-ball league. By age 12, he was turning heads.

Richard Bailey said he used to catch for Taylor during breaks in action in the Babe Ruth League.

Taylor was in the eighth grade then, Bailey four years his senior.

Bailey - who coached Jack Britt High School to football prominence before moving to Scotland High School this year - said Taylor had a long, looping delivery that caused the ball to explode when it left his hand.

"He just made throwing it that hard look that easy," Bailey said. "He is the best I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot."

By ninth grade, Bailey said, Taylor was throwing 93 mph and had an equally impressive curve ball.

By 10th grade, he had caught the eye of major league scouts, including Don Koonce of Fayetteville.

Koonce said he first saw Taylor pitch in a tournament called the Wilmington Seashore Classic. Taylor was a sophomore then, Koonce recalled, a tall, skinny kid who kept his team in the game against a much tougher foe with a fastball clocked in the upper 80s to low 90s.

Koonce said he wrote down Taylor's name, noted the year he would graduate and told his high school coach that he looked forward to seeing the boy down the road.

That coach, Gary Chadwick, described Taylor as a quiet, unassuming boy - "just an outstanding kid on a team filled with good kids."

Chadwick, now a teacher at Beaufort Middle School, declined to say more because at least one of Taylor's children attends his school. But like Boras and Bailey, he said Taylor was the best pitcher he has ever seen.

By Taylor's senior year, Koonce and other scouts were lining up behind the fence at East Carteret High School to watch him pitch.

"The only athlete I ever saw who could throw over 90 mph and run to first base in under four seconds," said Koonce, who was scouting Taylor for the Yankees. "He was just one of those special athletes."

Koonce believes the events that transpired after Taylor graduated from high school in 1991 contributed to his unraveling.

That summer, Taylor was projected as the top major league prospect, and the Yankees held the first pick in the draft.

Koonce said the Yankees were trying to sign Taylor for what was customary at the time, somewhere in the $400,000 range.

Bettie Taylor would have none of that. The year before, she had learned, top prospect Todd Van Poppel had signed a record $1.2 million contract with the Oakland Athletics, despite being drafted 14th overall.

She wanted at least the same amount for her son. So did Boras, the agent to the stars who became the family's adviser.

Before the summer was over, Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" fame and a writer for Sports Illustrated would knock on the Taylors' door. Bettie Taylor, whose toughness was established in the 1960s when she helped integrate Carteret County schools, became as much a part of the story as her talented son.

When the stalemate over signing dragged on, Koonce became a part of the story, as well.

In August 1991, The New York Times wrote that Bettie Taylor accused Koonce of showing up at her house and misrepresenting himself as an agent for the commissioner of baseball in an attempt to get her son to sign.

Koonce denies her account, saying he went to the house as a Yankees scout in an effort to move negotiations along. He said he did nothing improper, and he was never punished.

Koonce said Van Poppel got such a huge signing contract because he had the leverage of being a smart kid with a scholarship offer to attend the University of Texas. The Athletics, he said, were forced to offer Van Poppel a lucrative contract to keep him from going to college.

Taylor, Koonce believed, did not have the same leverage because his grades weren't good enough to land a scholarship with a major university.

But Taylor would prove smart enough. He enrolled in little Louisburg College near Raleigh and was scheduled to start classes. That's when the Yankees signed him with the $1.55 million bonus. If Taylor had gone on to Louisburg, he would not have been eligible to sign a pro contract until the next year.

Koonce says the fight over money hurt Taylor's progression to the major leagues. In the time it took, he said, Taylor lost a full season of baseball.

"He wasn't in a baseball environment," Koonce said. "He was out of shape, not pitching, not supervised.

"He wasn't under (Yankees) control, and a lot of good things don't happen to kids when they are on their own like that."

Still, it's hard to imagine Brien Taylor having a much better season than the one he turned in a year after signing his contract. Pitching for Fort Lauderdale in the Florida State League, the 19-year-old struck out 187 batters in 161 innings - an average of more than one per inning. Although he compiled only six wins against eight losses, he managed an impressive 2.57 earned run average.

In 1993, Taylor moved up to Double A, where his pitching for the Albany-Colonie Yankees slipped some - his ERA increased to 3.48 - but he won 13 games and lost only seven.

His performance was good enough that Baseball America rated him the second best prospect in 1993, behind only future hall-of-famer Chipper Jones.

"He was probably, literally, a year away from being on a major league roster,'' Bailey said.

And then things went south.

According to published reports at the time, Taylor skipped the Yankees' fall instructional league, choosing instead to return to Beaufort to spend time with his family.

On the night of Dec. 18, 1993, Taylor's older brother, Brenden, got into a bar fight in the nearby township of Harlowe and suffered a cut on his head.

Bettie Taylor said Brien received a telephone call shortly afterward and rushed out of the house, intent on avenging his brother.

He drove to a trailer park where the man who had hurt his brother lived and confronted the man's friend. Brien Taylor threw a punch so hard that he missed and fell, dislocating his shoulder and tearing the labrum tissue in his throwing arm.

Bettie Taylor said she and her husband were out of town at the time.

"If we had been there, none of this would have happened," she said. "He would never have gone if we were there."

Dr. Frank Jobe, who helped pioneer Tommy John surgery, reportedly called Taylor's injury among the worst he'd ever seen. Jobe operated on Taylor and seemed optimistic afterward, but Taylor's arm was never the same.

Taylor tried to make a comeback in 1995 with the Yankees' Gulf Coast League affiliate. He had lost 8 mph off his fastball and could not locate his breaking ball. He pitched only 40 innings that year, compiling a 2-5 record and a 6.08 ERA.

Taylor's pitching went from bad to worse. He spent three more losing seasons, with Greensboro in the South Atlantic League, before the Yankees released him. He tried another comeback in 2000 with a Cleveland Indians affiliate, pitching just 2.2 innings.

The best pitcher Don Koonce had ever scouted was out of baseball for good.

"You don't ever know how anything will turn out, but I sure would have liked to seen him get that chance," Koonce said. "Things just didn't fall into place the way they need to."

Brien Taylor's life didn't improve after baseball.

He moved to Wake Forest, near Raleigh, to be with his four children from a current relationship and a fifth child from a previous one.

He worked as a UPS package handler and later as a beer distributor.

According to The News & Observer of Raleigh, Taylor admitted last month in federal court that he dealt drugs in 2003 and 2004.

In 2005, he was charged with leaving his four daughters unattended. Afterward, he moved back home to live with his parents.

He began laying bricks with his father, earning $909.93 a month, according to court records filed in Carteret County.

His father died of a stroke in 2010. The same year, it was revealed in federal court, Taylor began receiving disability compensation after being diagnosed with congestive heart failure and becoming addicted to painkillers. He told the judge that he began selling cocaine again in 2011, the Raleigh newspaper reported.

It didn't take long for the Carteret County Sheriff's Office and the Morehead City Police Department to catch up with him.

At least three times over several months, undercover officers bought cocaine from Taylor, said Ken Raper, chief deputy for the Sheriff's Office. Each time, Raper said, the amount of drugs sold to the undercover officers increased.

"He was jammed up pretty bad," Raper said.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Taylor distributed more than 200 grams of crack cocaine and about 100 grams of powder cocaine.

He was sentenced Nov. 7 in U.S. District Court in New Bern to 38 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. His prison term could be reduced by 15 percent if he behaves.

Taylor apologized in court for hurting his children and others close to him. He is now in the Pamlico County Jail, awaiting transfer to the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh.

Bettie Taylor is a proud, spiritual woman who had worked hard, picking crab meat and later cleaning rooms at the Sheraton hotel, before she became disabled with diabetes.

Standing one foot out of her front door, she says she doesn't know what happened to the bulk of her son's money, and she doesn't really care.

It was never about the money, she says, it was about principle. She didn't want the Yankees to take advantage of her son.

"Those were good times. It was a good ride, but it's over" she says. "I'm just so glad I didn't get caught up in that moment, all that money. I didn't get caught up in it. I'm still me."

She praises her son's four children, saying they all are honor students. The oldest is 19; the youngest, 10. One daughter attends East Carolina University. The others, she says, live with her.

Bettie Taylor recognizes her son's faults, too, but she says she loves him just the same. She called him a quiet man, "gentle as a lamb."

"We were raised not to mistreat people," Bettie Taylor says through the doorway. "He treated everyone the same."

She says she hopes her son learns from this, that he comes home from prison a changed man, a better person.

"Somewhere in life, you have to take advantage," Bettie Taylor says, "Because if you don't, one day they are gone, never to be returned again."

Staff writer Greg Barnes can be reached at barnesg@fayobserver.com or 486-3525

Source: http://fayobserver.com/articles/2012/11/18/1216937

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