Former Yankees Pitcher Named Biggest Draft Bust

The 2025 MLB Draft is underway, and the New York Yankees have drafted remarkable success stories and their fair share of disappointments over their long history.

In his piece on the worst Yankees draft busts of all time for FanSided, Stephen Parello named left handed pitcher Brien Taylor in the No. 1 spot.

"No list of Yankees draft busts would be complete without the king of the category, former first overall pick Brien Taylor," Parello wrote.

"Upon arriving on the scene, Taylor immediately delivered with a 2.57 ERA over 161.1 innings for Hi-A Fort Lauderdale. The next year, in 1993, Taylor would post a 3.48 ERA for Double-A Albany-Colonie. He'd miss the 1994 season with a torn labrum sustained in an off-field altercation, and would never be the same."

The 1994 altercation Parello refers to was an offshoot of a fight between Taylor's brother Brenden and a man named Ron Wilson. Brenden suffered head lacerations in the fight, and Taylor went to Wilson's trailer home with a cousin to defend his brother.

In the fight, Taylor suffered a shoulder injury on his left side that was reportedly described by his surgeon, Frank Jobe, as one of the worst he had ever seen. He was never the same following the injury, and ultimately never played a single game in the majors.

In September 1994, when he returned to baseball, Taylor told the New York Times how he felt about the altercation in retrospect.

"A lot of people have said I should take it as a lesson," Taylor said. "I might handle it differently the next time, but I don't think there was much of a lesson to be learned because I wasn't just being stupid. I was just being there for my brother. It's something that will always be put on me and nobody is ever going to know the truth. Me giving the story won't do any good."

MLB scout Ron Rizzi watched Taylor pitch a perfect game in high school at East Carteret High School in Beaufort, NC, later describing him on the phone to a scouting director with awe.

"The scouting director called me and said, ‘How did your first game go?’ I told him it was unbelievable," Rizzi said in retrospect. "I’m telling him about the pitcher and he said, ‘What grade did you put on him?’ We used [Overall Future Potential] numbers back then and I said, ’72.’”

That was 72 OFP on a scale of 20 to 80. Rizzi shared that he never again rated a player higher than 70.

Sports agent Scott Boras said of Taylor in 2006, "I've been through 28 drafts, and Brien Taylor, still to this day, is the best high school pitcher I've seen in my life."

Taylor was released by the Yankees after the 1998 season and left baseball altogether in 2000, when Taylor moved back to North Carolina. He worked odd jobs to support his family, including bricklaying with his father, package handling for UPS, and distributing beer. He was arrested in March 2012 for trafficking cocaine, sentenced to 38 months in August 2012, and was released in September 2015, commencing three years of supervised release.

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