Flashback Friday: 4 Cleveland Browns with a brother on Indians

Over the years four Cleveland Browns had a brother who played for the Cleveland Indians. Three of those Browns were running backs and one was a quarterback.

Would you believe that the Cleveland Browns had a player whose brother played for the Cleveland Indians? It’s true, and in fact, it’s happened a total of four times. Not only that, but there was a fifth player whose brother played for the independent minor league Lake Erie Crushers.

This is a truly improbable stat. It is hard to know how you would look that up, but is there any other case of two brothers playing in the same city, with one playing NFL football and the other one playing Major League Baseball?

It may well have happened, but this writer was unable to find any reference to it on the internet. Perhaps some of Dawg Pound Daily’s sharp readers can think of another example, and if so please post them in the comments section. Till then, however, it may be that the Cleveland is the only town that has hosted one brother as an NFL Brown, and the other brother as an MLB Indian. Almost certainly Cleveland is the only city to have had it happen four times.

Three of the brother combinations were a running back and an outfielder. The other consisted of a quarterback and first baseman.

It’s probably more common to have brothers who played the same sport, and sometimes on the same team. Sandy Alomar, Jr. and his brother Roberto played together for the Indians for three years. Gaylord and Jim Perry played for the Indians together for two seasons.

There were three Alous (Felipe, Matty and Jesus) in the San Francisco outfield briefly in 1963. Former Browns Jason McCourty joined his brother Devon in the Patriots’ defensive backfield the past two seasons. Peyton and Eli Manning both played quarterback for different NFL teams.

The Niekro brothers, Phil and Joe were on the same team for a while. Phil, of course, was also an Indian late in his career. Tommy and Hank Aaron played together for a while. So did many others.

It seems to be much more rare for brothers to succeed in baseball and football.

The Browns/Indians players were not slouches, either. All told, the four families collected an American League batting title, two MLB All-Star appearances, a World Series appearance, eight NFL Pro Bowls, four NFL First-Team All-Pros, an NFL Championship, and one selection to the NFL Hall of Fame. That is a lot of hardware among those eight individuals. Now, of course, not all that happened with the Browns and Indians, as the players moved around a bit.

We will reveal the brothers in roughly chronological order, starting with the oldest pair of brothers and moving forward to the youngest.

Here is a hint to get you started:

What Hall of Fame Cleveland Brown won an NFL Championship and had a brother who closed out his MLB career in Cleveland after having been an All-Star?