*** VD 13 Commentary Thread ***

[Kevin Seitzer]

how do you spell cooooky ? This is hard to ask by typing I suppose. Not someone who bakes, someone who is mentally not all their

Are they a cooky monster?

[The Feral Slasher]

Are they a cooky monster?

Not sure about them, but I am

[heyelander]

how do you spell cooooky ? This is hard to ask by typing I suppose. Not someone who bakes, someone who is mentally not all their

Kooky?

[Ken]

Not sure about them, but I am

So are we going to get the "I was drunk/high" post tomorrow?

We all knew he was slightly off his rocker but it's a shame to see that crap he posted tonight. Honestly not surprising but disappointing. I honestly did enjoy reading his unique views even though they were very, very strange.

[The Feral Slasher]

Kooky?

I like it

[The Feral Slasher]

So are we going to get the "I was drunk/high" post tomorrow?

We all knew he was slightly off his rocker but it's a shame to see that crap he posted tonight. Honestly not surprising but disappointing. I honestly did enjoy reading his unique views even though they were very, very strange.

Yeah, and i wished him the best in his unorthodox life. But that was not right

[The Feral Slasher]

So are we going to get the "I was drunk/high" post tomorrow?

We all knew he was slightly off his rocker but it's a shame to see that crap he posted tonight. Honestly not surprising but disappointing. I honestly did enjoy reading his unique views even though they were very, very strange.

No i was completely sober....oh, nevermind

[The Feral Slasher]

The more i thought about JJ's post the more pissed off i got. When millions or billions of peoples lives will be disrupted and thousands of people will die it is really shitty to jump on here and post that "i am the healthiest guy in the world, so i am not worried". What a dick

[Bene Futuis]

The more i thought about JJ's post the more pissed off i got. When millions or billions of peoples lives will be disrupted and thousands of people will die it is really shitty to jump on here and post that "i am the healthiest guy in the world, so i am not worried". What a dick

I marveled at the ability of that post to portray so many negative characteristics with such relative brevity --- condescencion, proud ignorance, lack of empathy, the list goes on. Really, when you think about it, it's close to a masterpiece of douchery.

[The Feral Slasher]

Revo's Tubes pick was a beauty. Steal of the draft

[heyelander]

#24 Ricky Henderson
I think this one was my favorite read.

Bill James, when asked if Henderson was a Hall of Famer, gave the legendary answer, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” And that’s right — really, you could divide him into three and get three Hall of Famers. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer just for the base stealing. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer for 3,000 hits. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer for being the greatest run-scorer.

Beyond that though, Rickey was Rickey. Has there ever been a player who was more fun, who is the centerpiece of more great stories, who made your heart sing the way he did? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Rickey Henderson went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, like most of the great ones, and he had his day in Cooperstown, and his plaque begins with these words: “Faster than a speeding bullet.” He didn’t need those 28 votes to secure his legacy, and those 28 votes are nothing more now than pointless trivia.

But my point is: Why would you even want to vote for the Hall of Fame if not to vote for Rickey Henderson? Or in other words, if you love baseball, as a Hall of Fame voter surely does, why would you want to live the rest of your life knowing that you didn’t vote Rickey Henderson into the Hall of Fame?

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Henderson was born on Christmas Day in 1958, in the back seat of an Oldsmobile speeding toward the hospital. “I was already fast,” he said. He was named Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson after Ricky Nelson, the teen music sensation of the day who had grown up in front of America on the television show “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and at the time had more hits than Elvis.

Football was Rickey’s game as a teenager, not baseball. He was, by all accounts, an awe-inspiring running back, which is not hard to imagine. His dream was to play for the Oakland Raiders, and he very well might have done that; Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott grew up in California at the same time and saw Rickey at a few all-star games and said he was a serious handful as a runner.

But Rickey’s mother, Bobbie, insisted he play baseball.

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Right, we better get the third-person thing out of the way: Rickey did indeed call himself Rickey. Now to be fair, Rickey didn’t call himself Rickey quite as much as people claimed Rickey called himself Rickey. A lot of that stuff was for effect. A good Rickey Henderson story requires a good third-person reference. So, we don’t really know if, during negotiations with the San Diego Padres and GM Kevin Towers, he left a message that said: “Kevin, this is Rickey. Calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball.”

But isn’t it pretty to think so?

“Listen,” Henderson said, summing this whole thing up, “people are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey.’ But it’s been blown way out of proportion. People might catch me, when they know I’m ticked off, saying, ‘Rickey, what the heck are you doing, Rickey?’ They say, ‘Darn, Rickey, what are you saying Rickey for? Why don’t you just say I?’ But I never did. I always said ‘Rickey,’ and it became something for people to joke about.”

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It seems to be true that in 1996 or 1997, the San Diego Padres’ payroll department freaked out because they had a million-dollar surplus that they couldn’t identify. They kept looking and looking and finally came to understand that there was something wrong with the million-dollar bonus check they had given Henderson. So they went to Henderson and asked if there was any problem with it.

There wasn’t. Rickey hadn’t cashed it.

He’d framed it instead.

No player in baseball history had such an unusual relationship with money. On the one hand, he always felt desperately underpaid and was constantly fighting for more. It wasn’t spring training unless Henderson was holding out. As Don Mattingly once said when Henderson was not there on the first day of camp, “You have to say Rickey’s consistent. That’s what you want in a ballplayer: Consistency.”

Yes, Rickey negotiated hard. Once, during one of those disputes, he said, “If they want to pay me like (Mike) Gallego, I’ll play like Gallego.”*

*Gallego did not take that personally. He, like everyone else, loved Rickey. “When we were kids,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “we played in the backyard emulating Pete Rose’s stance or Joe Morgan’s. I believe Rickey emulated Rickey. He was his own star. He was the best at being Rickey.”

So, OK, yes, he wanted money. On the other hand, money seemed to mean nothing to him. There are so many stories of him not cashing checks. And you might know, he never spent a penny of his per diem meal money. He would instead stuff the cash in shoeboxes and whenever one of his daughters got good grades in school, he would let her go up and choose a shoebox, like an educational version of “Let’s Make A Deal.”

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what follows are a bunch of wonderful Henderson stories that are worth your subscription alone, so I won't post. Onward...

Lord, did he love stealing third — he always told people it was easier than stealing second. Nobody else really believed that, but it was for Rickey: He stole third base 322 times, the most ever. Base-stealing stats for older players like Cobb are not complete, but we don’t know of anyone else who stole third even 200 times. Brock stole third just 79 times, for instance.

He loved getting into a pitcher’s head and drawing walks. For Rickey, a walk wasn’t just as good as a hit, it was better. One of my favorite baseball statistics is that Henderson led off an inning with a walk 796 times in his career. That is just an impossible number. Think about it from the perspective of a pitcher: Henderson comes up first in an inning, what is the absolute last thing you would want to do? Right: Walk him.

And yet he walked 796 times leading off an inning — that’s more walks than Ryne Sandberg, Ernie Banks, Gwynn, Brock, Vladimir Guerrero or Berra had in their entire careers, and those include intentional walks. What a force of nature Rickey Henderson was.

[The Feral Slasher]

#24 Ricky Henderson
I think this one was my favorite read.



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what follows are a bunch of wonderful Henderson stories that are worth your subscription alone, so I won't post. Onward...

My brother and I made up our own baseball game using 20 sided dice from Dungeons and Dragons. We only used 10 sides, but used three of them to get 001-1000. Anyway, we would pick our teams from our baseball cards....I probably ruined a $100 Rickey Henderson rookie card playing our game. It was worth it.

[heyelander]

My brother and I made up our own baseball game using 20 sided dice from Dungeons and Dragons. We only used 10 sides, but used three of them to get 001-1000. Anyway, we would pick our teams from our baseball cards....I probably ruined a $100 Rickey Henderson rookie card playing our game. It was worth it.

Didn't D&D also come with a 10-sided die? why were you making things more complicated?

[The Feral Slasher]

Didn't D&D also come with a 10-sided die? why were you making things more complicated?

D and D had 20 sided, 12. Sided, 10 sided, 8 sided and mayne some others. 20 sided also worked as 10 sided
D

[The Feral Slasher]

D and D had 20 sided, 12. Sided, 10 sided, 8 sided and mayne some others. 20 sided also worked as 10 sided
D

Also 4 sided. Forgot those