Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Rickey Henderson/archive2

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by SandyGeorgia 03:08, 21 February 2009 [1].

Rickey Henderson[edit]

Nominator: Timneu22 (talk)

This article was nominated for FA status before, but that review was a long, long time ago; the article has been drastically improved since then. It is now a good article, with plenty of sources and a good variety of encyclopedic information. This article is ready to be featured, or it is very close to it. (Ideally, we will reach FA status by July 26, his induction day for the Hall of Fame.) Timneu22 (talk) 18:33, 15 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments
- I'm a bit concerned about the reliance on a primary source, especially for statements such as "In 1987 he had an off-season by his standards, fueling criticism from the New York media, which had never covered Henderson or his eccentricities kindly."
- "Manoloff, Dennis. "One on one with Rickey Henderson: future Hall of Famer - Interview". findarticles.com." Give publication name and date of publication, not just the name of the reprinter.
- Newspapers/periodicals should be italicized. BuddingJournalist 03:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments -

You've mixed using the Template:Citation with the templates that start with Cite such as Template:Cite journal or Template:Cite news. They shouldn't be mixed per WP:CITE#Citation templates.
Current refs 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 are all just link titles. THey need publishers and last access dates at the very least, authors, and other bibliographic information would be better.
What makes the following reliable sources?
Newspapers titles in the references should be in italics. If you're using {{cite news}}, use the work field for the title of the paper, and the publisher field for the name of the actual company that publishes the paper. Same goes for magazines, the titles need to be in italics.
Per the MOS, link titles in the references shouldn't be in all capitals, even when they are in the original.
Current ref 83 (MLB.com...) is lacking a pubilsher and last access date.
Current ref 103 (Manoloff..) the publisher isn't find articles, it is from Baseball digest and should be formatted liek a journal article.

Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:35, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - After an in-depth look at the references, I'm concerned that the sourcing is bad. In addition to the ones that Ealdgyth found, these also concern me:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/ Used many times; I feel that these should be switched to Baseball-Reference where possible (most of them seem to be sourcing stats).
http://web.archive.org/web/20041109095208/http://baseballreport.tripod.com/The+Baseball+Report+Volume+V+Issue+1.htm Tripod pages usually aren't considered reliable. Is this some kind of printed publication? If so, it may be able to sneak by, although I'm surprised they wouldn't have had a website.
http://www.thebaseballcube.com/
http://www.terra.com Don't really know who Terra is; are they like the Spanish version of Yahoo!? Either way, I'm concerned about the fact that this is Google-translated. Who knows what errors may have been introduced by the translation?
http://www.minorleaguenews.com/
http://www.brittanica.com/ This is not really a bad source, but I'm sure better sources can be found than a fellow encyclopedia.
http://baseballanalysts.com/ Is Al Doyle a baseball writer or historian?
http://bleacherreport.com/ This is citing his election into the Hall of Fame. It should be easy to find a higher-quality source than this.
http://www.smackbomb.com/nolanryan/art-imjustaman.html Can't an AP story be found on a better site than this? Especially needed because this is citing a quote.
http://z.lee28.tripod.com/sbnscoverstories/id12.html Another Tripod site. This is citing "These words have been taken by many to support the notion that Henderson is selfish and arrogant". Sorry, but in a biography of a living person the highest-quality sources are needed to support such a claim. That is not a fringe opinion among baseball people, so a better source is surely waiting to be found.

A person like Rickey Henderson should have more than enough good sources avaliable for writing an article. Honestly, it surprises me greatly to see this many questionable/unreliable sites used, and I hope that these can be replaced or removed promptly. Giants2008 (17-14) 22:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose I am sorry to say that the nominator's confidence in this article is misplaced, as it has a lot of problems and a long way to go to achieve featured status.

The sourcing issues above are serious. I second all the comments on sourcing above and would further stress that Rickey Henderson has been discussed a lot in a variety of media, and I am concerned that a large body of pertinent work was not consulted in drafting this article, leading to serious questions as to its comprehensiveness.
The retirement section is longer than any of the individual sections on his career. Now, I feel that the career summary sections are probably too short, but that does not mean the retirement section is not way to long. There is no need for multiple quotes from Rickey on his desire to keep playing and no need for a whole paragraph relating to Billy Beane and a potential signing that failed to materialize.
The Illeism, malapropism and anecdotes section need not exist at all. Any material from this section of importance should be integrated into the narrative flow of his career.
The legacy section is sorely lacking. Many baseball scholars have been debating where Rickey sits among not just the best leadoff hitters of all time, but also the best players of all time, yet there is no discussion of the complete package he brought to the number one spot and how that ranks with other players. His stolen base numbers are impressive, but they are not the sole reason he is considered one of the top players of all time. The quotes from contemporaries add nothing to the article as they are basically just aimless fawning that give no insight into his accomplishments. The quote about basestealing technique is way to long for what it adds to the article. In general, block quotes are avoided unless they are crucial to understanding a particular point. Same goes for his speech on breaking the stolen base record. Much has been made of his claim to be the greatest and this should be discussed, but the entire quote is not necessary to do so.
As hinted above, the career summary sections are probably too short and do not adequately explain how his performance helped the several pennant-winning teams he played on or how his performances stack up to other players throughout baseball history. There is also an over reliance on rate stats and counting stats versus arguably more useful sabermetric analysis and virtually no discussion of his defense.

Rickey Henderson is probably one of the greatest players in baseball history, but a person reading this article does not get a good sense of his value beyond the fact that he stole a lot of bases. Correcting the above issues would take this article a long way towards FA status, but even then I believe it would still fall short without a better narrative flow among other things. Indrian (talk) 09:30, 17 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.