Some days, after you wake up, you get dressed, eat breakfast, and then go take your place as a productive member of society. Other days — instead of all that stuff — you spend the first two or so hours of your life wandering without direction through YouTube’s maze of videos.

This post is a product of the latter.

What you have here, bespectacled readership, is an interview that Mike and Mike (of the eponymous radio program) did with Rickey Henderson, in which they ask Henderson to either confirm or deny legends about the Hall of Famer.

So far as videos go, it’s probably not what you’d call a Perfect 10. Mike and Mike, whatever their other virtues, are what a person smarter than me might call “garrulous.” Henderson, though, is hard not to enjoy — as per usual.

Notable moments:

0:42 Rickey Henderson pronounces the names James Brown and Luther Vandross, an angel gets its wings.

1:06 Henderson confirms that he was once given a million-dollar bonus check that, instead of cashing, he just framed and hung up on his wall.

2:28 Henderson gives a borderline logical — and nearly touching — explanation for the check incident.

In the New Year’s edition of the New York Times, Michael Schmidt wrote an interesting article on Rafael Palmeiro and the hall of fame. Naturally, PEDs are a major theme. The topic of how the writers will treat those players from the steroid era – not just those like Palmeiro who were caught, but players like Jeff Bagwell with whom speculation is all the evidence we have – also came up. On that subject, Ross Newhan a former columnist from the LA Times, said the following:

“Somebody said we are not the morality police, but yet I think we are. If we aren’t, who is? Part of our job is that we are custodians of the game’s history. I do look at the larger picture, and Palmeiro had a lot of good years, but that brings back to my feeling that otherwise he would be worthy of the Hall of Fame.”

The merits of Newhan’s viewpoint can be debated – I, for one, stand in the “innocent until proven guilty” court – but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because the image of Ross Newhan as a Custodian of Baseball is funny. See?

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Road uniform concept sketch.

It sounds like the Korea Professional Baseball League may be getting a ninth team, this one in the city of Changwon.

As in Japan, baseball teams in South Korea are typically owned by corporations. Intriguingly, one corporation bidding for the rights to the proposed Changwon franchise is NCSoft, a leading publisher of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, including the popular Lineage and Guild Wars series of games.

NCSoft’s corporate motto is “make people’s life more fun.” But when does more fun become too much fun? That question was raised in a US District Court last summer, when a former customer sued NCSoft for negligence, arguing that their game Lineage II was “too addictive.” The plaintiff claimed that he was “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.”

Video gaming is a plausible competitive sport in Korea, and perhaps NCSoft sees some nefarious synergies between publishing video games and running a baseball team. More likely, they’re just looking to do some good old-fashioned advertising.

Fear not, innocent denizens of Changwon: there is no way baseball will ever be as life-wreckingly fun as massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Baseball has a far more wholesome and more moderate fun-ness.