A sweet piece in Slate by Bryan Curtis about a major-league ballplayer who finally replied to his request for an autograph by mail– fifteen years after the fact– is worth reading.
I recount all this because my mother, who still lives in the house I grew up in, sent me an e-mail the other day. Remember those ballplayers you used to write to, she asked… Well, she wrote, another one of them replied. Someone named Don Carman, a left-hander with the Philadelphia Phillies.
It seems that Carman, who pitched for a little over a decade for the Phils, Reds and Rangers before calling it quits in 1992, stumbled across a box full of letters similar to Curtis’ and decided, a decade-and-a-half later, to answer them all.
We slagged Curtis mildly in October for an article he wrote for Slate about standup, but we’re not totally Anti-Bryan Curtis. This article was a joy to read and we related to Carman (the ballplayer) because, over the last two or three years, we’ve been receiving requests for autographs– not our autographs, but the autographs of famous comics. We’ve posted in the past, trying to explain that we don’t know the addresses of any really famous comedians! It’s the teachers who put them up to it– some sort of letter-writing exercise. We gotta open the letters, just in case there’s a death threat or whatever. Some of them are funny, some are goofy, some are just plain pathetic. One of them even seeks a reply from Snoop Dogg!