Sportswriters stunned... STUNNED... that Rickey Henderson could write a speech

Why... it's the most incredible thing ever! He can talk! Who woulda thought that a dumb bag of rocks like Rickey Henderson could craft sentences into paragraphs!

Not Bill Madden.

"[W]as that really the same slap-happy, card-playing, oblivious Rickey we've come to know over the past quarter-century, standing up there at the podium for the Hall of Fame inductions, elegantly garbed in a Good Humor Man white suit and white tie, speaking slowly and concisely, deftly injecting both humor and inspiration into what will go down as one of the most remembered Hall of Fame speeches of all time?"

We know what Madden expected -- the unintelligible, selfish buffoon that sportswriters made Henderson out to be for 30 years. Madden devotes his column to how Henderson needed help from a speechwriter.

Henderson was always a piece of work. But he's not alone, as we've noted in the past. Most of baseball's greatest hittters were nutjobs. (Babe Ruth, glutton. Ty Cobb, evil. Mickey Mantle, drunk. Wade Boggs, sex addiction. Pete Rose, gambler. Ted Williams, womanizer. Barry Bonds... you get the picture.) Some got ripped. Some got winked at. It never changes.