Former Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Domonic Brown plays against the Phillies while playing for the Toronto Blue Jays during Spring Training 2016. (Frank Klose/Sports Talk Philly)
By Tim Kelly, Sports Talk Philly editor 
Throughout the course of his storied career, ESPN baseball writer Tim Kurkjian has often said that he thinks baseball is the most difficult sport to play mentally because you have time to "think yourself into a slump." Kurkjian has also suggested that baseball is the only sport where you can go from being at the pinnacle of your sport, to out of the game in the blink of an eye. Former Phillies outfielder Domonic Brown may be living proof of both of Kurkjian's theories.
Brown, who was once a higher ranked prospect than Mike Trout, seemed destined to be a bust through the first 156 games of his career, which were scattered over the course of the 2010-2012 seasons. Even in 2013, Brown batted just .233 in April. Then May of 2013 happened.
In the month of May, Brown slashed .303/.303/.688 with 12 home runs and 25 RBIs, finally beginning to fulfill his potential. Brown rode the month of May — and even a pretty strong June — to the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field.
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Less than four years later, Brown's baseball career appears to be on the ropes.
Even after hitting his first home run of the season Tuesday, Brown is slashing just .229/.263/.346 with eight RBIs in 52-at bats for the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes. (The Isotopes, who will actually be changing their name to the Green Chile Cheeseburgers for a game in June, are the Triple-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies.) It's a small sample size for Brown, but when you consider that he hit just .239 in 464 at-bats a year ago at the Triple-A level, it makes you wonder what his future in the game is.
We don't need to relive the ugly end of Brown's tenure in Philadelphia. Long story short, May 2013 proved to be a fluke, and Brown never improved from being one of the league's worst fielding outfielders. After the 2015 season, Brown was non-tendered by the Phillies, eventually joining the Blue Jays on a minor league deal prior to 2016. Brown wasn't able to make the team out of Spring Training, but the Blue Jays were one of the league's deepest on-paper lineups.
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Brown spent the entire 2016 season in a familiar place, Triple-A. There's probably not a place on the planet that Brown hates more than the Lehigh Valley, which probably felt like purgatory to him as he tried numerous times to work out flaws, get back to the Phillies and make good on his potential. But 2016 — a year in which he hit .239 with seven home runs and 41 RBIs — probably made him fairly disdainful of Buffalo, New York. And thus far, Brown is having as positive of an experience in Albuquerque, New Mexico as Walter White did in the later seasons of Breaking Bad.
If Brown doesn't turn his 2017 season around fairly quickly, he may find himself out of professional baseball altogether next year. He's going to be 30 in September, and the ship appears to have sailed on the "maybe a change of organizations will allow him to recapture some of what made him an All-Star in 2013" narrative. Teams are now forced to evaluate Brown as a potential career minor leaguer, and when you consider how ineffective he's been in Triple-A over the past year plus, it's unclear why any organization would continue to give him at-bats if his production doesn't drastically improve.
