One of the Lesser Brauns

Goodbye, Steve!

On Monday, the Brewers released a multitude of minor leaguers, including Steve Braun, a 25-year-old second baseman out of the University of Maryland. In three minor league stints all below AA, Braun only managed an OPS above .500 in a 41 PA stint in Low-A. In his other two stints, Braun hit .175/.214/.263 and .140/.252/.178.

So, Braun is just another terrible minor league free agent whose career flamed out in the low minors. Except for one thing: Steve is the brother of Brewers star and Jersey Shore moonlighter Ryan Braun. Sure, Steve may not have shown any semblance of MLB or even MiLB talent, but hey, he’s related to Ryan, so why not. In fact, I’m willing to bet that his addition to the Brewers system was at the behest of Ryan, the Brewers Deputy GM. The only reasoning given by Doug Melvin was that “Helena was short of infielders.”

That Helena club with Braun is effectively the cast of the movie Werewolf, a 1996 movie about (you guessed it) werewolves starring Joe Estevez, brother of Martin Sheen and uncle to Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez (prompting the riffers of MST3K to call him “One of the lesser Estevezes”). I was introduced to this classic flick via the always fantastic Mystery Science Theater 3000. In this case, Braun plays the part of Estevez. Estevez’s character in the movie doesn’t really do much, kind of like Braun and his .477 OPS. The rest of the movie is filled with actors that barely know how to speak English, much less act, kind of like rookie-level minor leaguers and professional baseball.

It was a short lived career for Steve Braun, but hey, it’s not all bad. Most people don’t even get the taste of professional baseball that he got, and maybe Ryan will give him some of the cash he’s making off of his awesome t-shirt line. Most importantly, Steve Braun now becomes a trump card in everybody’s favorite game, “Who would you want in your werewolf movie?”, where you cast your own werewolf movies with brothers of actual stars.

Personally, my werewolf movie would have a baseball slant (naturally), casting Steve Braun along with Billy Ripken, Randy Wolf’s umpiring brother Jim Wolf, Robin Yount’s brother Larry, and, of course, Fred Molina.