They're going with the back-story around Dodgertown right now, because it's so much more fun to listen to than the Back Story. The back-story is about a team succeeding, grinding right ahead and even challenging for its division lead, despite one of the most obvious obstacles in the National League this season.

	Kevin Brown, right, missed most of 2001 to injury, and he could miss the rest of the 2002.

The obstacle? Ah, yes. That would be the Back Story.

A week ago, of course, Kevin Brown's concern was the elbow, his surgically repaired pitcher-part that recently had become inflamed to the point of forcing Brown to the disabled list for the second time this season. Even a couple of days ago, the Dodgers were fixated on that wildly valuable right elbow of Brown's, the one with the fluid building up in the back and the bad vibes shooting off in just about every other direction.

But that was before Monday evening, when Brown was admitted to Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, Calif., because of pain in his back so severe it prevented him from even making it to the Dodgers' home game Sunday. An MRI test quickly identified a protrusion in Brown's back that most likely is a bulging disk.

Which would require surgery.

Which might -- repeat, might -- signal the end of Brown's season.

And all of which raises a perfectly reasonable question: If baseball is going to kill itself, must you be forced to observe?

The Brown saga is actually a back-story to the Back Story in its own right. The context of every issue surrounding the once-great pitcher's spate of injuries, after all, is the fact that he's in just the fourth year of a seven-year, $106 million contract.

Not even halfway through the rich deal, that is -- and suddenly with the prospect of sacrificing virtually an entire season here in 2002, after undergoing surgery for a torn tendon in that elbow last September.

	Kevin Brown Starting pitcher Los Angeles Dodgers Profile
	2002 SEASON STATISTICS GM W L Sv K ERA 9 2 3 0 38 4.06

In other words, Brown's twists of fate now virtually ensure that the Dodgers spent not only wildly but in miserable miscalculation when they signed Brown away from the Padres after the 1998 World Series. And that speaks to just about every team in the majors who ever contemplates such a ludicrous proposition as attempting to project seven years' worth of future performance on the part of any athlete.

Or, now that we mention it, it doesn't speak at all to those teams, because those teams don't listen and quite possibly never will. They will observe, with something approaching actual denial, Brown's misfortune and the fact that the Dodgers have not a single playoff appearance to show for their investment, just as they will observe -- without recording a single note of self-warning -- the fact that Tom Hicks and the Texas Rangers (whom we discussed two weeks ago) have discovered they can't ride Alex Rodriguez's fabulous game and $252 million contract to the playoffs by themselves.

Which hurts baseball more? The notion of a watertight players union or the reality that any time more than one owner is bidding on a decent player, reason and objectivity are the first two things jettisoned in the name of a lighter zeppelin?

In the Old As Dirt department, I'm still running comfortably behind the pack. But I have watched enough baseball to have seen absolute scores of big-money, long-term contracts fail to even approach earn-out status, and so has anyone who has followed this sport even a handful of years. It's the exceptions that become such great stories, because they feel so rare: Maddux and Glavine in Atlanta, things like that.

It's mind-boggling that owners run so paranoid, so blindly enthusiastic or so grimly why-fight-the-market resigned that they essentially put themselves in a financial prison, a place from which they can be rescued only by Changing The System or by gouging the fans (or, in a perfect owner world, both). The owners always have held the power to accept or reject onerous deals. It's their money. They just can't figure out how to stop spending it.

Now, I have always found it the most simplistic dodge in the world for people to advise owners, "Just don't pay it." It doesn't work like that. The Giants want a player, the Mariners want that player, the Mets enter the bidding -- it's ludicrous, and an insult to ticket-buyers everywhere, to suggest that any of those teams quit competing simply because the market heats up.

But that is separate and apart from this longest-term lunacy. We're not talking about eliminating the four-year deal at a great price that draws an emerging star to a builing franchise; we're talking about scrapping the kinds of risk-loaded, payroll-sapping, six- and seven-year guaranteed contracts that just suck the life out of teams if they fail to produce anything less than smashing success.

Whether Kevin Brown, a single pitcher contributing every fifth day at the absolute optimum, ever could have so produced for the Dodgers is a perfectly valid question. The better one is whether this latest Back Story sparks even a glimmer of caution in the next ownership group that spots a player it just can't live without.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.