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sports nut: The stadium scene.

The Autograph ManA baseball player answers his fan mail 15 years later.

By Bryan Curtis
Posted Friday, Dec. 1, 2006, at 4:33 PM ET

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After his playing career, Carman earned a degree in sports psychology from Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. He now works for Scott Boras, baseball's most rambunctious player agent, tending to the psychological demands of his clients. Even though he's been out of the game for more than a decade, new fan letters arrive in his Naples mailbox two or three times per week. The letters—presumably from grown-ups trying to recapture some small ecstasy from their childhood, when there was nothing more wonderful than receiving a piece of mail from a major-league ballplayer—contain the same platitudes. "Most of them say, 'You're one of my favorite players,' " Carman says. He is trying to answer them in a timely fashion.

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Bryan Curtis, a contributing writer, writes the "Middlebrow" column.
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