"They overdo the whole business of juding raw talent rather than the ability to win games," says Brayton. "It's like in football, where they keep computer cards on every player--your height, weight, how fast you run the hundred. They emphasize physical characteristics. One time a scout told me that the best way to impress a scout is to throw like hell for five innings, and don't worry about how long you can last, or about where the ball goes."

This is not Brayton's style. He's more or less a wily pitcher--he tries to outsmart the batter, throw a wide variety of pitches rather than blaze it by him. Less a grunt thrower like Tom Seaver than, say, a Catfish Hunter. (Whom he admires: "He'll give you one pitch to hit and if you miss it, you're gone.") In the past year the style has worked well enough, even though he's at "the bottom of the totem pole" on the best pitching staff on the league. He led the team in ERA last year, gave up one home run in 95 innings, surrendered two earned runs in his last 43 innings. "I know I'm a better strike-out pitcher than a hell of a lot of guys who can throw harder than me. There's no correlation between how hard you throw and how well you pitch."

Brayton won't mention names, and his bitterness never singles out one rival or one front office villain. Part of this is because he respects some of the pitchers he played with and lived with who are on the brink of the big time, like Don Aase and Rick Jones, who are both "outstanding" and deserving. He knows that players who got big stipends when they signed represent an "investment" and thus have a better chance. (Brayton himself was no bonus baby.) He might drop hints about Pete Broberg, the big Dartmouth pitcher who made the majors around the time Brayton was breaking in. "Broberg weighs 200 pounds and he's one of the types who's impressive to watch. He can throw through a brick wall. But that doesn't necessarily win ball games."

It's this sort of thing that bothers Brayton. One week at Winston-Salem he pitched five innings on a Tuesday. On Thursday the starting pitcher got sick and they pointed to Brayton. He walked in and pitched a shutout for 8 2/3 innings. Afterwards the coach walked up to him and said, "Brayton, you're my new spot starter." When Brayton got called up to Bristol soon after, he ever got another start. Or the way Briston manager Dick MacAuliffe likes to let a faltering starter finish a game when it's obvious he should be pulled, just to give him a complete game. Brayton can understand letting someone finish off a shutout, but sitting out while a tired pitcher gets a free hand is frustrating. The fact that he's a "slow starter" hurts him, too--spring training is important, and with the scouts, first impressions can be very important.

"I'm not saying I'm the only guy who hasn't gotten a fair shake," and indeed he's lucky, he knows, to have made it this far. Of his original 26 teammates at Elmira, six are left. Four of his roommates have been cut. When it happens, the sword of justice is swift. "The guy who gets it is always the last to know--I play with guys I know are never going to make it." Same thing with trades. Once Bristol was playing the Milwaukee Double A club. Everything was as usual. The other team took the infield and a big first baseman was out there throwing. Then a voice from a dugout called him in and he never came back out. They'd told him to pack his bags and get going. This could happen to Brayton at any moment: in early December, the player-to-be-named-later from the Ferguson Jenkins trade was still unnamed, and it was being conjectured that a minor league reliever would be going to Texas. "Hell, it might be me." Further, there is the winter draft to weather--a process where any team can lift a player from another team providing they move him up to a higher league. Brayton didn't get grabbed for either of these, but the most basic question still lies open: not knowing "at what level I'm being protected."

The door opens and several people come into Barney's. The shadow of a tennis sweater looms behind Brayton. It turns out to be an old Harvard acquaintance, a member of the Porcellian Club, like Brayton's two old roommates. The conversation is a bit strained.

"Well, gee, what are you up to?" Brayton asks.

Sweater: "I'm down in New York working at Morgan Guaranty. What about you, what do you do?"

Brayton (he pauses, savoring it, taking pleasure in the way he can lightly shrug and say, humbly): "I play baseball."

Sweater: "What? You do what? How long are you going to do that?"

Brayton: "Well, until I feel I'm not going to make the big leagues, or until I do."

He smiles, Sweater retreats, confused. Brayton turns and rolls his eyes. "Working at a bank--that's one thing I'm sure glad I'm not doing."

But in fact, if Brayton were not doing what he does, that's where he might be, or "at business school or something," he says. Brayton went to exclusive Milton Academy; his father is head of a large clothing company in Pennsylvania. This isn't held against him in baseball, where there are "just a bunch of guys, like at Harvard or anywhere else. Hell, look at Varney." And indeed, White Sox catcher Pete Varney '71 comes from Quincy, Massachusetts--his background has none of the trappings of the Harvard stereotype, unless it is the very real stereotype of the local kid plucked up by Harvard athletics. With an occasional exception. Brayton says, ball players don't know or care if the guy out on the mound comes from Teddy Kennedy's final club. "I took more grief about Harvard in college leagues." Instead there are the skeptical reactions he has to face about baseball from the guardians of his old life. His parents have "gotten used to it," he says, but sometimes the old men sidle up to him like he was Dustin Hoffman, whispering, "plastics, plastics--there's a great future in plastics."

That's part of why Brayton is a baseball player. Why isn't he out making money? (At Bristol he is paid $900 per month, the month he works--he has driven a taxi in the off-season; now he works for his father.) "This is the only thing I ever really worked hard at, the only thing I always knew wasn't going to be given to me because I went to such-and-such a school. If I make it, I'll make it on my own--if anything, my background will count against me."

A cynic might suggest that it is exactly because Brayton comes from a privileged background that he can afford to follow up the chancy business of flirting with a baseball career--he's got an out if things fall through. But he's too serious for that: