
Case
closed? The baseball impostures seem to have tailed off in the
late-1970s, just as a comedic saboteur named Don Novello was gaining
notoriety for his
Saturday Night Live character Father Guido
Sarducci (shown here). Blazing a trail later followed most notably by
Sacha Baron Cohen, Novello pushed his Sarducci characterization beyond
the limits of fiction by getting arrested at the Vatican in 1981 for
impersonating a priest. For some reason, no inquiry was made at the
time of the arrest into any other possible past impersonations, and the
strange case of Carmen Fanzone aka Craig Swan was never solved. As
recently as 2000, Novello seemed to wink about his unnoticed years as a
mustachioed major league baseball cipher by writing the San Francisco
Giants a sardonic letter containing an idea about employing Portuguese
Water Dogs to retrieve home runs hit into the bay just beyond the
borders of their new ballpark. The Giants, in addition to not
recognizing Novello's apparent desire to be punished for mocking
baseball by leading the league in earned run average the same year he
made several appearances on a nationally televised comedy show, also
failed to fathom the satiric nature of the letter and promptly
implemented the idea. When the Giants subsequently discontinued the
program, Novello
put a curse on the franchise.
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