I'm feeling nostalgic these days....

I don't post many blogs here but the A's are like most of my loves- they always let me down eventually. Do you think the coming of Kirk Gibson when I was 16 and my lifelong frustration with women have anything in common? 1981 trained me in disappointment. God, I loved that team. Was there ever such a unique team, one that likely would have won the Series if not for the arm-wrecking pause in midseason? It was the strike that broke Langford and McCatty and gave Norris time to find bad coke. Armas, Murphy, and Henderson were the best offensive and defensive outfield in baseball. And don't even get me started about BillyBall, A's Baseball, BillyBall, You Blew That Ball- Woo, it's back in the dugout... anyone have a recording of that ol' ditty?

Anyhow, I'm feeling particularly let down these days as people quickly forget or maybe never knew that, for a decade, Rickey Henderson was unquestionably the single most exciting man in baseball. At a time when hardhat guys like Yount and Murphy and Ripken and Brett got all the ink, Rickey was the most exciting and unpredictable thing in baseball. Every at bat of every game, even when he was six spots away in the order, was performed with Rickey in mind. You just never knew what he'd do.

I desperately want to see Rickey in a coaches' box in Oakland. If he's good enough for the Mets, he's more than good enough for us. He's our boy. Bring him home.

I wrote this little ballad on the occasion of 756. Barry, like Rickey, is a character of legend. We who've watched them, even though we know we'll never be loved like we deserve, have been blessed.

BTW, I worked with Nico in Medford in the summer of 1992. I remember "Soft Shoulder".

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Rickey, I'm coming to Cooperstown, day you get in,
 it's my next destiny and the best reason to
  push on a few more years, Odysseus would
 be as dead and forgotten as any anonymous soldier
  were it not for Homer, and no, you're
 ten-team wanderings looking for one last gasp
  don't add up to years of sea-wracked
   torture and goddess sightings you couldn't
    separate from your own lonely madness,
 no, Rickey, you were just a man showing up
  every day for work, who knew the rules well enough
   to drive your co-workers crazy, knew
   where to slide in those cracks, head-first,
    an East Bay youth who learned that not
     all thievery's a crime,
 who knew that life's just one theater after
  another, and you kept playing the star, though
  we all turned away when the game passed us by
   and life called us away to less meaningful quests,
 I'm not Homer, either, just a Hayward boy with
  an Oakland A's program in my hands, an education
  soiled by the neo-con death parade, and those
   milestone numbers counting up in orange on
   the left-field Coliseum scoreboard, 97, 100, 119, 130,
   and the game needed you, Rickey, needs
    you now more than ever, Billy Martin's dirt-kicking
    shoes can't get him back out of that last six feet,
  the epic you played out among
   decrepit East Bay industrial parks, under
   the Old Milwaukee-soaked watch of blue-collar men
    who didn't want to get out of the
   East Bay until it was far too late to leave safely,
    you deserved Homer and Shakespeare,
    but writers who play the fame game don't
     buy Colossal Dogs off of Hegenberger Road,
  so you'll just get me, I'll see you in
   Cooperstown 2009, your date with fame,
   look for the lunatic bard who never outgrew
   his green and gold youth and cheap BART tickets
    to the Coliseum station.

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