Rickey Henderson was about so much more than the stolen bases
When Kevin Towers was the San Diego Padres’ general manager, he received a voicemail delivered in a high-pitched, high-energy voice then familiar to most baseball people: “KT! It’s Rickey! Calling about Rickey! Rickey wants to play baseball!” Rickey Henderson, in 2001, became a Padre again.
His combination of talents earned him sport’s honorific: Like the song (“Talkin’ Baseball”) that celebrated New York City’s three 1950s center fielders (“Willie, Mickey and the Duke”), Rickey’s first name sufficed.
He came from Oakland, an incubator of athletic excellence, including basketball’s Bill Russell. He became something novel: a first-ballot Hall of Famer who played for nine teams. Without today’s arcane metrics, they recognized baseball value, including a high pain threshold, when they saw it.
Baseball fans, debating the all-time best team, select three outfielders from a pantheon that includes Henry Aaron, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente. Only two of those 10 should be in the starting lineup. Rickey should start in left field and bat first: He homered in the first inning a record 81 times.
Baseball’s objective is to score runs. Rickey scored more than anyone: 2,295. More than Cobb (2,245), Aaron or Ruth (2,174), or Mays (2,068). When Aaron retired in 1976, he probably held the record for the most records held, but he was particularly proud of his total bases: Home runs are glorious, but the game is basically about 90-foot increments. Winning is getting enough of them. Rickey’s total bases (4,588), although more than Mantle’s (4,511), do not tell the full story.
In football or basketball, an individual – a hot-handed quarterback or shooter – can take over a game. In baseball, a pitcher can dominate a game, but supposedly no batter can. Rickey could.
Tie game, bottom of the ninth, he leads off. In his crouch, with a strike zone the size of a sandwich, he walks. (He walked 496 more times than he struck out; he walked leading off an inning 796 times.) Steals second. Steals third (or gets there on a ground ball to the right side of the infield). Scores on a sacrifice fly. We’ll see you tomorrow night.
A college football coach, tired of hearing football called “a contact sport,” said: Dancing is a contact sport, football is a collision sport. Those who think baseball is for the delicate have never taken a 98 mph fastball to the ribs. Or done what Rickey did stealing bases.
Only three players (Pete Rose, Cobb, Barry Bonds) reached base more often; no player made better use of being there than Rickey did. Mays led the National League in stolen bases four times, with a four-season total of 136, just six more than Rickey’s single-season record of 130 in 1982. His career total 1,406 steals is 468 more than Lou Brock’s second-best. He stole third – for the catcher, a shorter throw than to second – 322 times.
Think of leaping from a car going about 20 mph, landing on your chest on sunbaked dirt, approximately 2,000 times over 25 seasons, well into middle age. No player absorbed more punishment in the pursuit of excellence. Bill James, the high priest of seamheads (baseball nerds fascinated by ever-more-arcane metrics), said of Rickey, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” One for his 3,055 hits (27th all-time), one for everything else.
Joe Posnanski in “The Baseball 100” says Rickey “was born on Christmas Day in 1958, in the back seat of an Oldsmobile speeding toward the hospital. ‘I was already fast,’ he said.” As an 18-year-old in Modesto, California, he stole seven in one game. He stole his last in the major leagues at 44.
Because of Rickey’s eccentricities – e.g., he framed a $1 million bonus check; think about that – he was caricatured as an athletically gifted child. The cerebral Tony La Russa, who won more games than any manager not named Connie Mack, and who managed Rickey and against him, remembers him even more for “his baseball IQ” than for his legs.
Rickey died the day before Dec. 21, the “shortest day,” with the least amount of sunlight, the beginning of winter. To baseball fans, however, it is the beginning of the end of something awful: the offseason. Forty-five seasons ago, Rickey began playing major league baseball in a way – his wanting as well as his playing – no one else has.
