Hey, Rickey!

EvenTheGreatIlleistOfAllTimeDeservesToBeIn
TheHallOfFameVille


When C. and I lived in in the Bay Area we often hopped on the BART train at the North Berkeley station and headed down the EastBay line to what was then officially known as Oakland Alameda County Coliseum.

Heckfire, if truth really be told....

...After the then tiny e. was born, I would often postpone the day's delivery of S35-methionine to the lab and take off for the ballpark with the baby-in-backpack to watch the Bash Brothers crush balls, one after the other, into the left field bleachers during batting practice.

And, moving in-and-out of the batting cage with Canseco and McGwire, in sequence, was Rickey Henderson, who didn't hit 'em as far, but almost always hit 'em out just as often.

****

But here's the thing.

During the 80 or 90 games I saw in Oakland during those glory days, Rickey was not actually my favorite Henderson patrolling the Athletics' outfield.

Instead, Dave was.

The Outlaw Josey Wales was in right....Rickey was in left...... and David Henderson, the journeyman who feasted on hitting between the two of them in the batting order, was in center.

And while Canseco and the self-proclaimed 'Greatest Base-Stealer Of All Time' clearly loved themselves, it was Dave Henderson who loved the fans in the cheapseats, and back then, back before Al Davis wrecked those bleachers as a prerequisite for the return of his stupid football team, the fans out there loved him.

That's the thing about baseball that is gone from the other professional sports - you can still kinda/sorta buy reasonably cheap seats and really get to know the players - at least the on-field, no needles-in butts version of the players.

Anyway......

By 1994 Dave was gone and Rickey was back from yet another free agency-assisted money grab.

Unfortunately, by then the A's were on their invevitable downhill, pre-Billy Beane, slide.

Which, to my mind at least, hit bottom on a cold, wind-swept afternoon in early the fall when a mean-nothing second division day game slowed to a late-inning crawl and a single voice rang out from the bleachers with one of the best heckles I've heard - before or since.

It went like this:

.....Hey!.....Rickey!.....They Traded The Wrong Henderson!...

Of course, these days R. Henderson is getting ready to enter The Hall of Fame.

For all the right reasons.

Including the fact that, as SI's Dave Verducci noted not so long ago:

Rickey is the modern-day Yogi Berra, only faster.

As for Dave?

Well.

He's still having fun (and making a little green) with the fans.....


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The image at the top of the post comes from a 20 year reunion of the 1989 champion A's. The accompanying story in the SF Chronicle by Ray Ratto is here.
Why am I writing about this now? Well, blame Ishmael and/or a final post from a guy whose stuff I used to read quite often named Ray Arneson. Ray's idea machine, which he shut down just before spring training earlier this year (I'd missed that) somehow represents just about everything I recall fondly when I find myself, often out of the blue, thinking about the crazed, intelligent, whack-a-doodle energy that powers the Bay Area's real innovation engine.

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