First things first: hell yeah buddy, that is indeed Rick Honeycutt.
Second, if equally important, is that Megan Greenwell—now off running a different website, having slipped the surly bonds of G/O Media at last—is the person getting excited at the prospect of remembering Rick Honeycutt. With all due respect to Rick Honeycutt’s excellent hair, pioneering approach to hat-wearing, and extremely respectable career stats, not that many people would get excited about seeing an old baseball card of him crouching manfully in stirrup socks. Such a person would have to approach the work of Remembering Guys with a suitably gracious and open heart, and would have to understand the spirit of the broader endeavor, and would also probably have to be some kind of vile Oakland sports fan. Megan, who is undeniably the third, let her abiding love for this goofy baseball team open the door to a more sublime Remembering, and then she stepped through it. I was also there.
And what was on the other side of that door? Guys and more Guys, many of them admittedly fairly obscure by A’s standards, if not quite as obscure as the goofballs to which she was subjected in part one of her farewell Guys session. There’s a pesky utility guy whose best moments came with a different team, a lustily permed second baseman riding the shoulder of a long and mostly meh career, and there is the glowering late-career mastery of Dave Stewart. There’s also some brief video footage of an ill-conceived Mike Bordick prank gone awry, but neither one of us remembered that. Consider it a bonus.
There’s a melancholy aspect to this video, and not just because everyone loved Megan and she doesn’t work here anymore. There’s a thread of melancholy that runs through the entire Let’s Remember Some Guys Cinematic Universe, because there’s some inherent sadness in looking back at days that are irretrievably gone and also and more to the point because every one of these George H.W. Bush-era beardo situational relievers and beefy slugging goofuses I remember is also a reminder that I am old and getting older, and that I have pretty thoroughly misused my brain. It’s not something I regret, really, but it’s hard to sit in the host’s chair and watch an intelligent and high-functioning adult just not really remember that much about Tony Phillips and be fine with it and not wonder what it might be like to remember less of this stuff and more of literally anything else. Megan, for instance, seemed pretty fine with not remembering very much about Glenn Hubbard.
It’s not a thought I spend much time with, though, or can afford to spend much time on. There is always another card to turn over. It’s work, or anyway something kind of like work, but it’s also a comfort to know there’s something else coming.