Congrats, Curt

You’re a blowhard, and a know-it-all, and sort of a geek.

But you were our geeky blowhard know-it-all. And when you rolled into town not long after that awful Bronx night, a good-guy gunslinger pledging, at long last, to make us whole, promising to “make 55,000 people from New York shut up,” few could have predicted, despite the fact that you'd done it before, how emphatically you’d make good on your word — never mind the incredible circumstances under which you’d labor to do so. More than four years later, I still can’t quite believe it all happened like that.

So, yeah, you liked to hear yourself talk. But at least you also made for great copy, and, more often then not, you backed up your words.

You made a better starter than a closer. You never should’ve shaken off Tek that day in Oakland. And I’m still miffed at you for talking politics the morning after the ’04 World Series.

But, hey, you won us that World Series. And then a few years later you helped win us another one.

And, for that, one can be nothing but eternally grateful.

So congrats on your well-deserved and hopefully happy retirement.

Now please don’t be like Clemens and Favre.

Sincerely,
Someone who was there in the stands, screaming himself hoarse, when you won # 200.

PS: And please don’t run for Senate. But I look forward to an encore performance, perhaps, on Celebrity Jeopardy.