As the dollars and years mounted in the offers to Cliff Lee this off-season, many pessimistic observers invoked the specter of the game’s most infamous pitching contract: the seven-year, $105 million deal signed in 1998 by the surly sinkerballer Kevin Brown. His name has become synonymous with free-agent excess, and serves as a cautionary tale for any general manager contemplating a long-term contract with a pitcher.

“All I could think of was Kevin Brown,” Maury Brown, who runs the Web site The Biz of Baseball, wrote at the height of the bidding war for Lee. He warned that Lee’s suitors were “setting themselves up for a bad contract” and risked losing “all sense of common sense.”

There’s no doubting that seven-year deals for pitchers in their 30s are often bad bets. However, the choice of Brown to personify this is mystifying. Yes, he was the highest-paid pitcher of his generation without being the best, and he was accused in the Mitchell report of buying steroids. But his deal was far from an albatross for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In fact, the Dodgers came close to breaking even on the transaction.

In 1998, Brown was the undisputed star of a strong free-agent class. He had just completed a dominant three-year stretch in which he posted the major leagues’ best earned run average (2.33) and was third in innings pitched (narrowly trailing Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux). His unparalleled ability to post high strikeout rates while inducing large numbers of ground balls suggested he was likely to remain effective. His new contract’s average annual value of $15 million was just slightly higher than Mo Vaughn’s or Albert Belle’s. Only its length  it would pay him through age 40  seemed excessive.