Matt Kinney is now competing for a starting spot with the Brewers. (Tom Olmscheid/AP)

Kinney, a Bangor, Maine native vying for a spot in the Brewers starting rotation, played on a little league team coached by horror novelist Stephen King, and remains friends with the king of horror to this day. In 1989 the team won a state championship, and King chronicled the season with "Head Down," a non-fiction piece published with other short stories in Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

"It's just funny how he's seen in that bad vein," Kinney said. "Ever since, if I have a bad outing, a lot of times they'll write that I had a 'Stephen King-type' day.

"It's amazing how that has followed me. It's cool because it was one of my greatest moments in baseball, and I can read about it in a Stephen King book. How do you beat that?"

"It's the same situation when I made it up in 2000 with the Twins," Kinney said of his move from the AL Central champions to the last place club in the NL Central. "They lost almost 100 games that year, and two years later they were in the American League Championship Series.

"As far as the type of guys that are here -- guys who have proven themselves a little bit and others who are trying to -- it's a lot of the same stuff going on."

Kinney, once a top Twins pitching prospect, battled through tendinitis in his right shoulder and was 2-7 with a 4.64 earned run average for the Twins last season. He was finally forced to the disabled list June 30 after a start against the Brewers.

Kinney finished the season strong, notching a victory in three key games for Triple-A Edmonton. The team clinched a spot in the playoffs, won a first-round playoff series and claimed the Pacific Coast League championship.

"Maybe he's a sleeper," said Javier Valentin, who was behind the plate for all three games and was acquired along with Kinney in a Brewers-Twins in November. "He has the stuff to compete with anybody on this team."

Valentin said Kinney's best pitch is his slider, and he also works with a low- to mid-90s fastball and a nice change-up.

He said Kinney sometimes gets "slappy" and "jumpy" on the mound, but thinks he has a chance to make an impact for the Brewers. The top of Milwaukee's rotation will likely consist of Ben Sheets, Glendon Rusch and Todd Ritchie, with a handful of pitchers vying for the final two slots.

"He's a guy you have to be with and talk to all the time," Valentin said. "If you just let him pitch, he's going to lose his [concentration] a little bit. He's still young and he's going to still learn. It's mental; his stuff is there."

A sixth-round draft pick of the Red Sox in 1995, the 6-foot-5, 225-pound Kinney enjoyed a steady ride through the minors. After having bone chips removed from his elbow in 1999, Kinney combined the next season to go 11-3 in Double-A and Triple-A and went 2-2 with a 5.10 ERA in eight games with the Twins. He spent all of 2001 and started 2002 at Edmonton, but was called up April 18.

Now, after an up-and-down season that ended on a high note, Kinney is not afraid to compete.

"If there's no competition, a team is in trouble," he said. "It was the same way with the Twins; I think it should be that way everywhere you go. You kind of wish it was alittle bit easier to make a team, but with the competition you have to work hard and you can't let your guard down. I'm coming from an organization where we had so much pitching it's crazy. We had one spot open and we had six or seven guys fighting for it."

Adam McCalvy is a reporter for MLB.com based in Milwaukee. This story was not subject to approval by Major League Baseball or its clubs.