Merry Christmas. Forty-six days until pitchers and catchers … and here’s your daily splash of joy.
Why do you love baseball?
Brilliant Reader Glenn Williams: “I have been carrying around a little black and white photo in my wallet of Ted Williams standing in the Fenway outfield that my late father took in the fifties. When I fell in love with baseball as a little kid, I asked my father who the best hitter ever was. He said that many think Ted Williams is. Wow, the same last name as us, I think. Who did he play for? The Red Sox. Our team!”
Brilliant Reader Michael: Because Lou Gehrig was played by Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. What perfect casting, an honor to them both.
Brilliant Reader Zach: “No matter how down you are, you still have a chance to come back and win and truly do something extraordinary.”
Brilliant Reader Ruth: “This is my son and me at the 2015 World Series. We were in the upper deck for every playoff game, and until we lost that last game, we were the happiest two people In Citifield! Noah Syndergaard was pitching that day. We were photobombed by a Thor!”
If you would like to send in the reason why you love baseball, we’d love to hear it. And in that spirit, we’re also now collecting photos and artwork too — old snapshots, ballpark scenes, favorite scorecards, kids’ drawings, ticket stubs, whatever captures the joy of the game for you. Some people are sending song lyrics. Some are sending poems. It’s utterly wonderful. Just send along your baseball joy to [email protected].
On Christmas Day, 1958, an Oldsmobile sped as fast as possible to a hospital in Chicago. The mother, writhing uncomfortably in the back seat, was — in the words of a nurse we once met — “very pregnant.” That nurse explained to us the first time we went to the hospital that yes, while Margo was quite pregnant, she was not yet “very pregnant.”
“Come back when you’re more pregnant,” she advised.
The woman on the way to the hospital that day in 1958, Bobbi Earl, was very pregnant. She knew the feeling well, even though she was only 19 — this was to be her fourth child. At some point, she understood that the car wasn’t going to make it in time, and she gave birth to a son in the Oldsmobile. After she reached the hospital, baby in hand, she named him after teen idol Ricky Nelson. Only she spelled Ricky with an extra E.
That was Rickey Henderson.
“Rickey was born on Christmas Day,” Rickey used to announce sometimes, and he was indeed a Christmas miracle all his life. How much happiness did Rickey bring into the world with his speed, his showmanship, his brilliance, his unyielding love of the game, and the countless hilarious stories he inspired? If heaven has a joy meter, Rickey melted it exactly the way that thermometers melt on hot days in the cartoons.
Many, many Rickey stories make me laugh, but my favorite does something else: It makes me feel. It involves Rickey’s high school guidance counselor Tommie Wilkerson, who tried — as so many high school counselors do all over this vast country — to inspire him to be the best version of himself.
Rickey said he didn’t want to play baseball.
Tommie said she would give him a quarter for every good thing he did on a baseball diamond. Well, Rickey needed the money.
Two things qualified as “good” in her book.
A run scored.
A stolen base
Rickey Henderson went on to become the greatest base stealer and run scorer in the long history of baseball.
