RIP Rickey Henderson

This is not a sports blog. I am not going to turn it into one. I do want to make note of Rickey Henderson's passing. He was just days away from his 66th birthday. I remember him from his first season with the Oakland A's in 1979. His unique batting stance, which was more of a crouch, definitely caught my attention - especially since it worked well for him. I would later learn his stance had helped him see the pitcher better, which was definitely to his advantage. I tried that batting stance for a brief while myself and alas it was of no help for me. He was an all-around great lead-off batter who could get his plate appearances, steal tons of bases (I thought Lou Brock's base stealing records were untouchable until Rickey Henderson came along), and he could hit for power. He was a gold-glove left fielder. He had it all and certainly was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal 1979 season for the A's. He would be a great asset to the A's and any other team he played on during his storied Hall of Fame career. He was truly one of the greats.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and ...
Read more

Desantis still wants to be Mussolini when he grows up

The Florida governor dictator has been working like madness to kill a ballot initiative that has already been given the go-ahead and which is already on actual ballots, weeks before election day. He is desperate to keep that 6-week abortion ban in place. It's the same ban Trump supports. The tactics Desantis uses are disturbing and anti-democratic: sending secret police to ballot initiative signatories, threatening media outlets that run ads in favor of the initiative, and even cooking up an excuse to invalidate any votes for the initiative. Read more here . What we are witnessing in Florida as is the case in other GOP dominated parts of the US is best understood as follows: GOP politicians don't care about the give and take that comes with governing. They want raw power to rule, period.
Read more