Late bloomer Brown boosts A's

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Emil Brown's career arc did not suggest that he had this kind of start in him, nor did it suggest that the Athletics would be all that interested in him to benefit from it. He did possess the A's-ian values of being available, well traveled and inexpensive, true, but he didn't seem to quite fit the Oakland mold. Not a lot of walks, an ordinary OPS-plus, and he had passed through these gates before without making a discernible impression.And today? Today, he is playing RBI Bingo. Having driven in 29 Athletics including the first one in Tuesday's 4-2 victory over Baltimore, he ranks second in the American League and fifth in the majors, and by his estimate has pretty much driven them in by every means possible."Well, no," he corrected Tuesday night. "I haven't gotten a groundout RBI yet."Then he got one that way in his first at-bat Wednesday afternoon.Brown, at the tender age of 33, has found an ideal situation -- hitting fifth pretty much every day, behind a number of hitters who have been offering him frequent RBI opportunities, and not in Kansas City, where he performed with the same frequency as the rest of the Royals -- which is to say intermittently."It was tough there because things were never going good for us for any length of time," he said. "Last year, nobody really did much, and the year before Mark Teahen went pretty good for awhile and then he got hurt. The year before, (current teammate Mike) Sweeney got hurt, and there just weren't a lot of opportunities for anyone to drive in runs."If it sounds like Brown is dogging his former employers for not setting the table properly, it isn't meant as such. He simply noted that the Royals have been, well, the Royals, a fact that even Royals fans cannot refute.But in fairness, it wasn't as though Brown was in any position to save the franchise either. His profile for much of his career suggested an AAAA player with many addresses but no homes. He was drafted by the A's in 1994 but never reached the big-league camp. In 1996, he was taken by Pittsburgh in the Rule 5 draft, did not excel, and went to San Diego as a pinch-hitter who didn't. He then bounced from the Tampa Bay to Cincinnati to Houston to St. Louis organizations before landing in Kansas City and winning a job by having an ungodly spring, something that rarely happens in these days of big contracts and ironclad prejudgments.He was ordinary enough in Kansas City, an uninspiring defensive player but a good RBI man by the team's subterranean standards, but when he finally was released at the end of the 2007 season, he looked like a late bloomer who had run his course.Instead, the A's took a flyer on him after reaching a contract impasse with Shannon Stewart, and now he is Jim Rice incarnate.Well, no, that's untrue. He's Emil Brown having his best month ever. If it weren't against the law to use the concept "on a pace to," he would be on a pace to drive in 137 runs.Oh, I'm sorry, officer, it was entirely inadvertent. Please, it'll never happen again.Actually, when you consider Brown's background, it makes a fair amount of sense that he would find his sweet spot so late. He did not grow up a baseball player, and didn't even play in high school until his junior year."I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood they call 'The Wild Hundreds,'" he said. "If you looked at it from the outside, you wouldn't think it would be too bad, but there was a lot of violence and stuff there. If someone asked you where you lived and you said, 'On 103rd,' they'd say, 'Oh, you're one of those 103rd dudes.' It was easy to stereotype people that way, even if you were staying clear of all that."But after playing football and basketball, he found baseball in his junior year at Harlan High School. He and his best friend, Charles McGraw, became borderline obsessed with the game, and Brown went on to get drafted and begin his elongated odyssey.And now he's the most unlikely of the unlikely A's. He still doesn't walk much (five to date), his on-base percentage is still ordinary, and nobody has yet thought to begin an All-Star ballot-box-stuffing campaign on his behalf. But while RBIs may not be proof of incipient greatness, they are still handy to have, and on a roster that has had more than its share of players who believed that runs can only be driven in with home runs, his variety is as interesting as his number is large. Not that home runs are a bad thing, mind you. Most baseball people approve of them, by and large. But if you're Emil Brown, your only way to get to 100 is to find as many ways to achieve the goal as possible, because your dream season is going to look a lot more like Paul Molitor's 1996 season (nine homers, 113 RBIs) than Harmon Killebrew's 1959 (42 homers, 105 RBIs). You make do with what you have.(E-mail Ray Ratto at rratto@sfchronicle.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)