ON A JANUARY afternoon, Bryan Greenberg sat at his dining room table opening piles of fan mail.
The letters, from people across the United States and Japan, were not written to Greenberg. They were not delivered to the mailbox outside his modest home in Stuart, Fla.
Written more than 10 years ago by baseball fans of all ages, the letters — thousands of them, Greenberg says — were mailed to St. Louis Cardinals players at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, the team’s spring training complex in Jupiter.
They arrived in early 2014, addressed to players like Adam Wainwright and Matt Holliday and Michael Wacha.
But they were never opened.
Somehow they wound up in a green Hefty trash bag that Greenberg says he found next to a garbage bin behind the Cardinals clubhouse the day after the team headed north to start the 2014 regular season.
Greenberg, who was working at the time as a Roger Dean Stadium clubhouse attendant, said he doesn’t know who put the letters there or if players even knew their unopened mail had been tossed.
But seeing the big bag of fan mail kicked to the curb, destined for the landfill, didn’t sit right with him.
“Somebody had written them out of passion and hope, and I felt bad for them,” he said. “I could not let these end up in the trash.”
He figured he might as well be the one to make sure that didn’t happen.
“It was either throw it in the trash or throw it in my truck,” he said.
He threw the bag of mail in his truck and took it home.
What he did next he admits was probably a bit strange.
It took him more than a year to do it.
He hopes his actions gave a little joy and closure to thousands of baseball fans from Eden Valley, Minn., to Tokyo.
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Before retiring in 2015, Greenberg, 71, worked as a Major League Baseball clubhouse attendant for more than 20 years. He started with his hometown Montreal Expos, then went to work for the Florida Marlins and, in spring training, the Cardinals.
He had an interesting career. He said that while working as a private carpenter at Olympic Stadium in 1984, he corked bats for Expos players, including Pete Rose. He won a World Series ring with the Marlins in 2003. The team fired him in 2009 after a secretary in the front office accused him of making racially insensitive comments — allegations Greenberg denies. A year or so later, he sold his World Series ring for $22,000 — more as a symbolic severing of his Marlins ties than to replenish his bank account, he said.
Around 2010, he started working as a spring training clubhouse attendant for the Cardinals. He was assigned to the visiting team clubhouse at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, a short ride from his Jupiter home.
Clubbies, as the attendants are known around ballparks, tend to the daily customer service needs of baseball players. They're like butlers, only they wear shorts instead of suits.
They collect soiled uniforms for the laundry. They dig dirt from cleats. They set up coolers, cups and containers of sunflower seeds and bubblegum in the dugouts. They prepare post-game meals. They run errands. They’re the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Some clubbies help players answer their fan mail.
Each piece of mail usually contains three items: a handwritten letter, at least one baseball card for the player to sign and a self-addressed stamped envelope for the player to return the autographed card.
When a player asked him for help, Greenberg said he might open about 20 to 50 pieces of mail at a time, employing a choreographed routine designed for efficiency:
He placed the written letters in one pile, which wound up in the trash.
He inserted the baseball cards into the return envelopes, with one end of the card sticking out for the player to easily grab.
When the player was ready, he pulled out the card, signed it and dropped it back into the envelope. Signing 20 cards took less than a minute.
Greenberg sealed the envelopes — some had adhesive strips, others he licked — and took them to the team’s mail room to be shipped out.
Greenberg said he thinks most players make a decent effort to respond to fan mail, even if their response is slow .
But lots of fan mail is never opened, he said, a fact of life with professional athletes in all sports, along with actors, musicians and celebrities.
In 2013, Taylor Swift made headlines when hundreds of unopened fan letters to the pop superstar, many covered in glitter and heart stickers, were found in a Dumpster behind a Nashville school. A Swift spokesperson said it was an “accident” and “oversight.”
Greenberg said he thinks Swift’s handlers tossed the mail on purpose, just as he has seen some players do over the years. The players aren’t necessarily trying to disrespect the fans, he said. They’re just overwhelmed by the volume of mail they get every day.
“You’ve got to understand. One clubhouse at spring training has 60 guys in it. They all get one to 50 letters a day. Do the math,” he said.
And fans aren’t the only ones writing to players. Unsolicited mail comes from real estate brokers, financial investors, car salesmen, people claiming to be destitute and others looking to make money off athletes who this year will earn a minimum salary of $760,000.
On top of that, players are approached for autographs every day in ballparks, the player parking lot, hotels, restaurants, airports and malls. Los Angeles Dodgers star Max Muncy has received fan mail at his Texas home.
No wonder a pile of fan mail might be the last thing a player wants to deal with when he arrives in the sanctity of the clubhouse.
As the Marlins beat writer for The Palm Beach Post from 1999 to 2013, I witnessed a few players at their lockers tossing stacks of unopened fan mail into the trash. It was less than a handful of times.
“It happens more than you think,’’ Greenberg said.
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When he took the bag of unopened fan mail home in 2014, he said he dumped the contents into four plastic storage bins, which he slid beneath a shelf in the corner of his garage. He mostly forgot about it, reminded of the bins’ dust-coated presence only when searching for a drill or saw.
One day, he opened a few, mainly out of curiosity, he said.
He remembers being inspired by the contents — the cursive praise (“Dear Mr Holliday, You are my favorite player…”), the polite requests for autographs and how the writers took the time to include a self-addressed stamped envelope to make it as convenient as possible for the player to respond.
Greenberg decided the letter writers deserved a response, even if the response wasn't quite what the letter writers hoped.
He dropped the unsigned card into the self-addressed stamped envelope and returned it to the sender. He said he did not include a note explaining who he was and why he was sending it.
At first, he said, he’d randomly answer one or two every few months. But when he moved to Stuart three years ago and took the storage bins with him, he realized that it had been nearly 10 years since he found the unopened fan mail.
He decided that 2024 would be the year he’d try to return all of the unsigned baseball cards to the people who’d mailed them 10 years earlier.
It wasn’t long before the enormity of his mission sank in — and how his kind gesture, returning all of the cards to their original owners, might require more time than he really wanted to invest.
“There were thousands of letters,’’ he said, showing a reporter the remaining unopened letters in the plastic bin one day in January. “A year ago, this was so full I couldn't close it.’’
To speed up the process, he took a shortcut.
He would open at least 20 letters a day, sometimes more, scattering the baseball cards in one pile and the self-addressed stamped envelopes in another. (The letters written by fans ended up in his kitchen trash can, he said.)
Then he would grab a random envelope, drop a random card inside and seal the envelope. His final step was to place the day’s pile of answered fan mail in his mailbox for his neighborhood mail carrier to pick up.
But the process had a glaring hitch: Often, the cards he placed in the envelopes were not the same cards the original senders sent. In other words, a kid who in 2014 mailed Adam Wainwright a card to sign might receive in 2024 an unsigned 2014 Michael Wacha card that had been sent to Wacha 10 years earlier by someone else.
Not the most organized method, Greenberg agreed, but he didn’t care.
“I am sending something back to them. There’s a reward,’’ he said.
Most of the SASEs had forever stamps, “thankfully,’’ Greenberg said. But if the SASE had the standard stamp from 2014 — 49 cents — Greenberg sent it anyway. He assumed it would end up being marked “Return To Sender” and sent to the envelope’s return address.
He said he has often thought about the person’s reaction when receiving an envelope with a random baseball card inside. Did the recipient recognize his own handwriting from 2014? Did the recipient even remember sending a card to Michael Wacha 10 years earlier?
The daily process became a source of amusement for Greenberg.
“It was a game I was playing. I just thought, ‘I’ll punk the guy.’ He doesn't know where it's coming from,’’ he said.
In early February, the last letters were mailed. The plastic bins in Greenberg’s garage were empty.
He would like to think he deserves credit for making an effort to send something back to the letter writer, even 10 years later.
“I'm not doing any harm, unless I upset somebody because the kid (who wrote the letter may have since) passed away. I’m doing some good, I feel,’’ he said.
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One day early last month, an envelope arrived in the mail at Greg Gierszal’s house near Cleveland, Ohio. Right away, Gierszal noticed the postage stamp was old.
He opened the envelope and found a single item — a 2011 Adam Wainwright baseball card. There was no autograph on the card, which didn’t surprise him.
Gierszal, 54, said he has been mailing autograph requests to athletes for decades. He said he follows websites dedicated to the art of soliciting autographs through the mail, or TTM as it's known by hobbyists.
Like any TTM pro, he knows there’s never a guarantee his letters — and his baseball cards — will be returned. And he said the Wainwright card wasn’t the first card returned to him over his years as a hobbyist without an autograph.
“That's OK. He's a big star,’’ Gierszal said the other day via email, recalling his reaction when the Wainwright card arrived in the mail last month.
“I could imagine him sitting at his kitchen table saying, ‘The hell with this guy,’ and sending my card back unsigned.”
Only when contacted by a reporter did Gierszal understand the strange 10-year odyssey of the envelope with the unsigned card and the retired clubhouse attendant who sent it to him.
“That's hilarious,” he said. “I've always wondered what becomes of the unanswered fan mail. Funny to see this batch ended up in a guy's garage. Better than the Dumpster!”
Efforts to reach other people who mailed letters to Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium in 2014 were unsuccessful.
Greenberg deserves a tip of the cap, Gierszal said.
“It turned out to be the clubhouse attendant doing everyone a solid,’’ he said. “Thanks to Bryan for (sending) my Wainwright card back.’’
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.