RICKEY RUNS 1983

This is the first “Throwback” in the YaniMade series, and first in the MLB series. If YaniMade had begun in the early 2000’s, chances are, it would have been focused on the exciting players of those excellent A’s teams who had their World Series hopes dashed seemingly every season, crushing the hearts of die hard A’s fans such as myself. There are many players on a backlog I would like to capture creatively. So with a pause in the Warriors dynasty, there was finally some time to take a look back at players on teams who were larger than life to me as a kid. Rickey Henderson, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, just happened to grow up a few miles away in Oakland, and played for my favorite team growing up. My life has been filled with trips to the Oakland coliseum to see the A’s play, and there are few players who’ve stepped on that field who rank higher than Rickey in excitement, impact, and all around skill and historical achievement. Many times you don’t appreciate what you’re watching until adulthood, with the benefit of hindsight. Rickey redefined the importance of the stolen base, shattering the all time records at an unbelievable clip from the early 80’s to 1991 when he achieved the all time total SB record. He could hit, he could field, he could run. Before I returned to making art professionally, I must have intuited this was an image of him I would one day make something of, because I purchased the original film slide negative on Ebay in 2008. Then I lacked faith and self esteem thinking I had to follow the crowd with a 9-5 job (which was actually a good thing for that time in retrospect), but there is a sense of satisfaction saying I checked this off the list! I feel I got a great result here 12 years later. It would be a thrill to have the A’s sell it as a limited edition wearable print as well, we’ll see if that comes to fruition in the near future. ‘Rickey Runs 1983’ is a 20” x 26” pastel drawing on Sennelier La Carte sanded card paper. It’s currently being professionally framed with museum non reflective glass, so it can hang in a special place, in a special way.