He was one of the most compelling figures ever to pull on the uniform, and he played until they basically had to cut it off him.
Rickey Henderson has died at his home near his native Oakland, reportedly of pneumonia, just shy of his 66th birthday, which would have fallen on Christmas Day. His death comes as a shock. Rickey — everybody just called him by his first name, including Rickey himself, who did so in the third person — played in the majors until he was 44, then played two more years in the independent minor leagues. At 39, he stole 66 bases, leading the American League At 45, playing for Newark in the Atlantic League, he stole 37 bases in just 91 games, getting caught just twice. In retirement, even in appearances at the ballpark this year, he still looked like he might take off and swipe a bag at any moment. With today’s rules, he probably could have.
His career — 30 years of professional baseball, 25 of them in the majors — was monumental. He ran away and hid with the career records for runs scored and stolen bases (and caught stealings, but only due to sheer persistence). He also broke Babe Ruth’s career walks record, although Barry Bonds surpassed him the following year. He’s still second on the list, and Bonds bested him only by drawing so many intentional passes. He cleared 3,000 hits, smacked 297 home runs, and retired fourth all-time in times on base, with a .401 career on base percentage across more than 13,000 plate appearances. Wins Above Replacement rates him as the 19th most valuable player of all time, and 14th among position players. He led the American League in steals eleven times in twelve years. He stole 100 bases in a season three times. In 1986, he hit 28 home runs and stole 87 bases. In 1990, he hit .325, led the league in On Base Plus Slugging (OPS), and won the MVP award. He won the World Series with the A’s in 1989 and the Blue Jays in 1993, and enjoyed a final renaissance with the Mets in 1999, batting .315/.423/.466 and stealing 37 bases in 121 games. He averaged 100 runs scored and 62 stolen bases a year from age 21 through age 42.
Numbers alone can’t quite capture the excitement as well as the eccentric energy that Rickey brought to the game, from his improbably low crouch at the plate (the only batting stance I ever really tried to imitate) to his explosiveness off of first base, to his cocky bat flips when hitting a home run. Raised on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in Oakland, he had a massive chip on his shoulder and was most at home playing for his first manager, Billy Martin, who shared a similar Oakland background and attitude. He got on less well with Lou Piniella, who accused him of malingering. He played for nine different teams, including both New York teams, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and four different stints with the A’s. Ron Darling told the story a few years ago of how Rickey was the only guy he ever played with who could just walk into the clubhouse the day of a game every now and then and announce, “Rickey’s gonna get his today,” and sure enough he’d light up the scoreboard. To have that kind of feel and that confidence and back it up is one of the most remarkable things in sport.
The prototype of the leadoff man, Rickey’s patience at the plate and his careful study of pitchers belied any suspicion that he was just a gifted athlete rather than a competitor and student of the game. He was teachable, and as a veteran, a teacher; he was one of the Oakland youngsters who took a great defensive leap forward under Martin’s tutelage for the “Billyball” A’s of 1980. He ran too much in 1982, racking up 42 times caught stealing on the way to stealing a record-shattering 130 bases, but the A’s were terrible that year after two seasons of winning baseball, so his pursuit of the record thrilled fans who had little else to cheer. He succeeded on at least 75 percent of his attempts in each of the seven seasons when he stole more than 75 bases. Bill James wrote in 1984, when Henderson and Tim Raines and Willie Wilson were at their peak:
We are living in the age of the great leadoff men, and I think it’s important to appreciate that. I grew up in the sixties, and we had all of these awesome power pitchers — Gibson, Koufax, Drysdale, Maloney, Veale, Sam McDowell. I had no sense of historical perspective, as a child doesn’t, and I didn’t understand that it hadn’t always been this way and wouldn’t always be this way. Now they’re mostly gone, of course, and I feel like somebody should have told me to appreciate them.
In 2007, I compiled a list of the game’s most impressive records — some of them also the most unbreakable, but I was looking for the records that stuck out the furthest even in their own time and context. Rickey’s single-season and career steals records both made my list. I rated his career record second:
2. Rickey Henderson, 1406 Career Steals (49.9% [the next best total by another player])
Rickey’s record is just preposterous – nobody could have imagined when Lou Brock set the career steals record that somebody would not just blow by Brock but get halfway to lapping him. Like [Nolan] Ryan, Rickey started early, peaked above everyone else and stayed ridiculously late, and ended by putting his record so far out of reach that nobody will even talk about it again.
The Man of Steal was one of the most compelling figures ever to pull on the uniform, and he played until they basically had to cut it off him. R.I.P.