Friday, October 21, 2011

TTM Success - Carl Erskine

I opened my mailbox this afternoon to find another of my brown mailers inside.  The mailer contained a signed baseball from former Dodger, Carl Erskine.  What I wasn't expecting was the amount of inscriptions that he put on it.  Take a look:

 Erskine, born 1926, pitched for the Dodgers from 1948 to 1959.  He wore uniform number 17 throughout most of his career, with the exception of wearing number 11 in 1950.  He retired at age 31 in 1959 due to shoulder issues.  His career record was 122-78, with 981 strikeouts and an ERA of 4.00.


 Erskine pitched two no hitters in his career, as you can see from his inscriptions.  If you can't read the dates well, they read:  June 19, 1952 vs the Cubs and May 12, 1956 vs the Giants.

 Erskine was a major part of five NL pennant winning Dodgers Teams (1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956).  He was on the 1959 team, but did not pitch in the actual post season.  The Dodgers would win the World Series in 1955 and 1959.

Erskine won 20 games once in his career, when he went 20-6 in 1953 (3 years before the Cy Young Award would debut).  That season, he finished 9th in the MVP voting in the NL (teammate Roy Campanella would win the 1953 NL MVP Award).

I wrote to Mr. Erskine on October 14 and got the signed ball back today, October 21, making him a 7-day TAT.  Pretty awesome.  Erskine is my 36th TTM success.

5 comments:

Paul Hadsall said...

That came out very nice. I don't think I've ever seen that much writing on a single-signed baseball before, though.

William Regenthal said...

I meant to also say that if you look closely, he marked out where the ball had been made in China... I chuckled a bit when I saw it...

night owl said...

Erskine is THE MAN.

Drew said...

Dude, that looks incredible with all of the inscriptions on there! Definitely a nice treat to find laying in the mailbox!

Dean said...

One of the coolest signed modern-day balls I've seen. A true keepsake.