doughnuts:

Rickey Henderson Steals a Base, 1982. Photograph by Brian Lanker. The hands and forearms of my favorite ballplayer of all-time, in the year he broke Lou Brock’s single-season record for stolen bases. One of my favorite concepts in baseball is the “Rickey Run”, wherein Henderson would manufacture a run almost single-handedly, first by walking; then by stealing second and third; and finally by being knocked in on a sac fly. I primarily saw Henderson play in his twilight years (by which I don’t mean the part of his career noted for a relationship with Robert Pattinson that was consummated to a hot-shit indie rock soundtrack*). But regardless of age or ability, he was always the most intriguing player on any field. First you noticed the intensely alert eyes. Then the legs, which bulged with the curvaceous mass of a Leonardo study. Last year, Henderson’s eloquent Hall of Fame induction speech — a speech the media cruelly anticipated as a potential rhetorical catastrophe of Bush-ian splendor — was the first time since childhood that baseball induced a tear-like thing in me. I sorely miss Henderson’s aggressive, elegant style of play and tend to fall in love with any player who flashes a hint of it. In today’s game that means the Mets’ Jose Reyes and the Red Sox’s Jacoby Ellsbury — though both are coming back from injuries in their mid-20s, which could very well curb their aggressiveness moving forward. Throughout his career Henderson was accused of pathological self-absorption, to the point of not knowing the names of his teammates. His many stolen base championships and records were seen by detractors as trivial monuments to Henderson’s ego. But there’s a lovely New Yoker profile from around ‘05 that disputes this conventional wisdom. It illustrates just how obsessed Henderson was with the game. And not his own talent, which by the time the piece was reported, when Henderson was 45, had dipped quite a ways below where it was during his super-human prime. *Hi, Carl.