Baseball’s stolen base king was born at high speed, on Christmas Day 1958, in the back of an Oldsmobile driving through a snowstorm en route to a Chicago-area hospital.
The man who went on to unearth a record 1,406 bags often joked about his wonderfully apt origin story.
“I was already fast,” Rickey Henderson said of his birth in a 2009 MLB Network documentary. “I couldn’t wait.”
Henderson, unequivocally the greatest hitter of all time, died Saturday at the age of 65. His wife and three daughters made a statement confirming his death.
“A legend on and off the field, Rickey was a devoted son, father, friend, grandfather, brother, uncle and truly humble soul,” read the family’s statement. “Rickey lived his life with integrity and his love for baseball was paramount. Today, Rickey is at peace with the Lord, cherishing the extraordinary moments and accomplishments he leaves behind.”
Henderson was a statistical storm. Its figures confuse, overwhelm. The Hall of Famer is one of only two position players to appear in 25 MLB seasons, playing in 3,081 games during that span, fourth-most in MLB history. In a quarter of a century, Henderson has put together quite a resume. He stole 468 more bases than anyone else. His 2,190 steps rank second all-time, behind Barry Bonds. Among position players who debuted after integration in 1947, Henderson’s 111.1 bWAR ranks fifth, behind Bonds, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Alex Rodriguez.
He was simply one of the best to ever do it.
But Henderson’s legacy goes far beyond the numbers. As a player, Henderson was magnificent, magnetic and a game-changer. But Rickey, the character, was, as his biographer Howard Bryant wrote, an American original. He was disruptive, flamboyant, proudly unwilling to conform to baseball’s overworked, old-fashioned commitment to performative humility.
At a time when players were reluctant to speak out, Henderson wore neon green batting gloves and a gold necklace with a diamond pendant adorned with the number 130, after his record stolen base total in 1982. He admired his home runs. , punctuating them with the swagger of a showman well before his time. And, of course, Rickey sometimes referred to himself in the third person.
It was an unwavering confidence that was forged and shaped on the tough streets of Oakland, California, where Rickey moved with his family at age 7 in 1966. It was Oakland, the place of birth of the Black Panthers, a place that uniquely embodies the plight, power and pride of the black American experience, whether Rickey became Rickey.
By the time young Henderson arrived, the city had already developed a reputation as an incubator of black sporting greatness. Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Curt Flood and Vada Pinson had all attended the city’s high schools, as had NBA stars Paul Silas and Bill Russell. Henderson, who wowed in baseball and football at Oakland Tech, led a second wave of talent coming out of the East Bay, including Gary Pettis and Dave Stewart.
During his long major league career, Henderson played for nine teams, but he started, reached his peak and would endure as a member of the Oakland A’s. It’s fitting, then, that the defining and enduring moment of Henderson’s career, one that perfectly showcased the power of his unapologetic bravado, occurred at the Oakland Coliseum in the East Bay sun.
On May 1, 1991, Henderson stole his 939th basebreaking the record held by Cardinals legend Lou Brock. The particles of earth, thrown into the air by Rickey’s headfirst slide, barely had time to return to earth before the man of the moment tore the base in question from its moorings and propelled it skyward. A sold-out crowd roared around him, and the stolen base king rejoiced in the raucous adoration.
Later, while addressing the crowd, Henderson channeled his childhood hero, Muhammad Ali, exclaiming, “Lou Brock was the symbol of a great base stealer.” But today I’m the best ever. THANKS.”
With Henderson, the line between truth and myth, between reality and fiction, was often blurred. It didn’t matter whether the larger-than-life stories about Rickey were real or not. They just had to be credible. And the audited accounts carried more than enough weight, like when Henderson framed and hung a $1 million check without first cashing it.
“The moment I got a million-dollar signing bonus, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m a millionaire!'” Henderson told Mike & Mike in 2009. “So I’m going to frame this check here. The Oakland A’s finally called me while they were making their reservation in December and asked me where the check was, and I said it was on my wall They got me. said: “Can you remove it, go and cash it, then put a duplicate in the frame? So I finally took the check and cashed it.”
But not all of Henderson’s off-field life has been so jovial. In 1994, his half-sister accused him of raping her when he was in his mid-teens and she was 12 years old. Rickey vehemently denied the allegations and ultimately won a lengthy court battle that, from a legal perspective, cleared his name. The incident is covered in detail in Bryant’s biography, “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.”
This book, released in 2022, offers a phenomenal insight into the complex and eventful life of a man who has spent most of his adult life in the spotlight. For much of the ’80s and early ’90s, everything Rickey said or did was news.
For example, during a contract dispute in spring training in 1991, Henderson A’s teammates jokingly filled a jar of bills to “collect money” for Rickey. Reggie Jackson delivered the container to Henderson, who showed up to camp a day late, during a stretching session in a wheelbarrow. Rickey, laughing, lifted the ship and posed with it for the cameras. “They deceived me,” he proclaimed to reporters.
Rickey Henderson, who was protesting spring training until his contract was renegotiated, kisses a jar of money his teammates had collected for him as a joke to bring Henderson back to camp, March 7, 1991. pic.twitter.com/nC0JjQ7VzN
– Baseball in Photos (@baseballinpix) November 8, 2023
This anecdote highlights another side of Rickey, one that made him a lightning rod and a pioneer. At the height of his career, Henderson maintained a fervent desire to fight for every dollar he believed he deserved.
In the mid-1980s, when free agency was barely ten years old, the perennial All-Star skillfully weaponized his status as one of baseball’s best. As money poured into the sport, Rickey used arbitration as an opportunity to engage in a financial battle with his employer. When he and the A’s couldn’t agree on an extension before the 1985 season, Oakland dealt its superstar to the New York Yankees.
He returned to Oakland via trade in 1989 and signed a historic four-year, $12 million contract with his hometown club. But rising salaries quickly overtook Henderson and his contract. In 1991, he was the 40th highest paid player in the game, which ruffled his feathers, leading to this spring training conflict.
“I ask you to be fair to me,” he told reporters the day he received the donation from his teammates. “There are 40 players in the game who are better than me? It’s a load of bullshit. I don’t even think there are two or three who are better than me.
Such candid statements made Henderson an exception and, to some in the baseball world, a villain. But for most fans, the quick-footed, gold-chained, mild-mannered man was a beloved figure — easy to look at, easy to like. Henderson, with his play between the lines and his confidence beyond them, understood something fundamental about the sport he conquered, something that many players before and since have never fully understood: the Baseball is entertainment.
And there were few characters more captivating, more captivating, more irresistible than Rickey.
