Why no leadoff hitter will ever surpass Rickey Henderson
It’s hard to describe how we viewed Henderson during his heyday in the 1980s, a decade in which he stole 838 bases. It almost seemed like he had broken baseball. Perhaps the perfect example of this: on July 29, 1989, when Henderson was playing for Oakland and facing the Seattle Mariners, with the left-handed Randy Johnsonfuture Hall of Famer, as the Mariners’ starter. Henderson played the entire game and did not record an official at-bat. Instead, he walked four times, stole five bases and scored four runs.
Each walk looked like at least a double, but maybe a triple; the same thing happened with each single. The geometry of the sport seemed inadequate to accommodate his ability. You can’t help but wonder how many bases Henderson could steal now, with the new set of steal-friendly rules in place.
Let’s say a home run hitter dominated the home run category over his peers the same way Henderson did in the stolen base column. That batter would have finished with about 1,143 home runs — or 1.5 times Bonds’ final tally.
When Henderson broke Brock’s all-time mark in 1991, he still had more than a decade left in his career. He finished that season, his age 32, with 994 steals. Starting at age 33, he added another 412, a total that alone would place him in 68th place on the all-time list.
With so many things Henderson did, the scope of it all now takes on an air of mythology, because he did it so well for so long. Henderson first led the American League in steals with 100 in 1980; I was 21 years old. He last led the American League in steals in 1998 with 66, when he was 39 years old.
3. Score runs
Despite all those stolen bases and all those times on base, Henderson probably still saw those things as a means to achieving his ultimate goal on any trip to the plate: scoring.
In 2009, around the time of his Hall of Fame induction, Henderson told reporters, “For me, the most important thing was to liven things up and score some runs so we could win a game.”
Nobody scored more runs. His 2,295 times crossing the plate is the record, 50 more than Cobb and 68 more than Bonds. Only eight players have ever surpassed the 2,000 run barrier. The active leader —Freddie Freemanof the Dodgers, who has played 15 years in the majors– has 1,298, almost 1,000 shy of the mark. It is an astonishing figure.
What Rickey meant
For much of his career, much of what Henderson did beyond stealing bases was underrated. He played so long that he was around to see perceptions about the value of baseball change more than at any other time in the sport’s history, but for most of his years, batting average received more attention than batting percentage. base, and runs batted in prevailed over runs scored.
An example of this was in 1985, when Henderson was the first hitter on a New York Yankees team that had the Most Valuable Player of that year. Don Mattingly. It might have been Henderson’s best season overall: He batted .314, walked 99, stole 80 bases, hit 24 home runs and scored 146 runs — a personal best, a figure that tied for the fourth-highest total in the league. era of integration.
Had current analytical practices been in place back then, Henderson likely would have been the American League MVP, as his 9.9 bWAR total led the American League (and eclipsed that of Mattingly, who won the award with 6.5). Henderson finished third in a closely contested race between himself, Mattingly and George Brett.
Mattingly’s 145 RBIs probably earned him the votes he needed for that award, but he wouldn’t have reached that number without Henderson in front of him: Donnie Baseball drove in Rickey 56 times that season. Henderson won an MVP award in 1990 — but probably should have won one or two more.
In the end, the analyzes echoed Henderson’s greatness, and few could question his value at this point. We now have WAR at our disposal and Henderson’s total, 111.1, is the 19th highest in the history of a sport that dates back to 1871 — certainly one of the best to ever put on a uniform.
Still, it was more than their numbers. For legions of Generation X baseball fans, especially those on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was the simple act of stealing a base or imitating his graceful, low head-first slide toward the base, he was one of those players you pretended to be on the field. He was one of those players that you wished you could be.
If you were of that generation, you were about 10 years old when he arrived in Oakland in 1979. By the time he finally left the majors — not by choice, since Henderson would have continued playing if it were up to him — you were more than 30 years, adult responsibilities and virtually no memory of Major League baseball without Rickey.
Henderson had virtually no record, and the only real historical comparison was with the legendary Cool Papa Bell of the Negro Leagues. Whatever one may think of Henderson, given his quirky and often misunderstood public persona, the man knew his story. He sometimes used “Cool Papa Bell” as an alias when checking into a hotel.
My favorite anecdote about Henderson may be apocryphal, at least in the sense that I have no way of verifying it. But it’s harmless, so I’ll share it. There is something beautiful about imagining it to be true.
A few years ago, when I was in Cooperstown, I was chatting with a man who had a boat at one of the docks on Otsego Lake, which extends from the base of the hill on which Cooperstown sits.
The man told me that during the weekend that Henderson was inducted, Rickey approached him and asked how much it would cost to take him for a ride on his boat. They agreed on a price and left. Henderson was “dressed to the nines” and wearing wraparound sunglasses.
The strange couple went a little way into the water and then stopped. Henderson sat there looking out over the town, home of baseball’s immortals, spread out along the hillside. He didn’t speak. He just watched, swaying with the water. After a few minutes, Henderson asked to be taken back to shore. That was it. The man had no idea what Henderson was thinking during those minutes.
That was in 2009, four years after Henderson played his final season of independent ball in 2005. For the previous 39 years, since he began his professional career in the minors in 1976 when he was 17, he did it his way, which was the perfect way.
In doing so, he became more than just a player, but an archetype. Rickey, the man who opens the game. No one will be better suited for a role on the baseball field than he is for that job. And chances are no one does it better.
