Rickey Henderson “The Greatest of All Time”
I can’t remember who said it -- Ken Burns, maybe, or maybe not -- but I once heard baseball described as a pastoral game that was relocated into American cities. For whatever reason, that depiction unlocked an inner Field of Dreams for me. Though I had played some version of the sport most of my life, it took me decades to fully decode the magic of a game played slowly, on dirt and grass, but contained within the grandeur of modern urbanity. There are many things that separate baseball from other sports, but the idea of grown men playing a game on farm land, tucked inside the walls of a city, is — I think — the hardest to describe and the most deeply felt.
Another special feature, of course, is the sport’s well documented history. Baseball box scores, recaps and interviews have sold newspapers for over a hundred years. And all of that information -- but especially the statistics -- inspired obsessions and rankings and attempts to make objective sense out of the generally unknowable. In the statistical comparison of ballplayers, existential solace could be found. Mickey vs Willie vs Henry. Babe vs Lou vs Ted. Cobb vs Hornsby. Good versus less good. North versus South. Cottage industries have been built on these pursuits -- baseball cards, sticker books, magazines, encyclopedias, prospectuses, rotisserie sports and, more recently, sabermetrics.
Today, years after “Bull Durham” and “Moneyball,” baseball’s identifying marks might appear obvious. Or like cliches. However, back in the early 1980s, when ballparks were still ancient, before trading cards were big business, when fantasy baseball was underground and when Bill James had a mail order newsletter, they were more implicit than explicit. During that decade, and especially if you were a young man, statistical comparisons were not simply adolescent banter or expressions of fandom. They were quite literally how senses of time and place and order were defined. If you lived anywhere near New York, it was important that Don Mattingly was objectively better than Eddie Murray. If you lived in Boston, the stakes were equally high when comparing Jim Rice to Reggie Jackson. If you lived in the Midwest, you desperately needed to prove that Robin Yount was superior to Cal Ripken Jr. If you were from Texas, you would go to impossible lengths to demonstrate that Steve Carlton was not, in fact, the equal of Nolan Ryan. And, if you were from Philly, you did not give a shit about batting average because, deep in your bones, you knew that Mike Schmidt was far more valuable than that petulant, pretty boy, George Brett.
Most of these arguments conversations were entirely biased, while purporting to be evidence based. But, even then, James and his acolytes were wrestling with derivative stats that could indicate player value more accurately than batting average, home runs and RBIs. Nerds (like me) were introduced to Runs Created and Win Shares and OPS. We were still years away from W.A.R. and V.O.R.P. but there was increasingly a sense that our silly debates were actually mathematical proofs, just peppered with hometown prejudice. Increasingly, it seemed that, through Cecil Cooper and Dave Parker and Dwight Evans, we could make some sense of the universe. Many years later, those seeds of hope are in full bloom. Billy Beane and Nate Silver and hundreds of lesser known Bill James enthusiasts helped usher in a statistics revolution that changed our economy, our politics and -- yes -- our sports.
Our ability to understand relative value, possibly across generations, has advanced exponentially since the 1980s. We can more confidently answer those questions about Carlton vs Ryan (Carlton) and Brett vs Schmidt (Schmidt). I’m certain that our world is no more orderly, and we probably have more new questions than we ever could have imagined back when Tony Armas led the league in home runs, but we do have some answers. There is still one thing, however, that makes absolutely zero sense, no matter how lucid we’ve become, or how quickly our data science advances, or how far back we look, or forward we project. And that is Rickey Henderson. People (like me) lazily toss around adjectives like “inimitable” or “incomparable” or “singular.” But, there has never been a person so professionally atypical as Rickey Henderson. He made Steve Jobs and Henry Ford seem kind of pedestrian. In my mind, he had more in common with Hermes or Spiderman than with Vince Coleman or Mookie Wilson.
Rickey Henderson broke baseball. He literally ran the risk of ruining it — of making it unfair. Fortunately, he was both (a) human and (b) completely unique. So, he (a) made occasional mistakes and (b) was not replicable. Had either exception been untrue, we would have had to end the game, because Rickey was better at getting on base than almost any player to have ever played and he was better at scoring runs than everyone else. If we agree on the Tao of Rickey — that the goal of baseball is to score runs -- then we could reasonably suggest that he was better at baseball than anyone before or after.
Now, I do not personally ascribe to that last claim, but there is a case to be made about his aberrance. He has 50% more stolen bases than any other man to play the game. There is no other major statistical category wherein the delta between first and second place is so great. Even Cy Young’s unattainable 511 wins is less than 30% more than Walter Johnson’s 417. In the whole history of baseball, only sixty or so men have thrown the ball lefty while batting righty. There is something statistically unnatural about that behavior. I perused the names on this short and unusual list, and while I know a little bit about a lot of baseball players, I could not tell you a single thing about any of the other men in that group. Rickey was just very, very, very different.
There are also the stylistic features. If Rickey was a painter, I don’t know who he’d be. Picasso had many imitators. So did the Renaissance masters and the famous Impressionists and Pop artists. Maybe Rickey is our Jackson Pollack — easy to imitate but, by definition, impossible to replicate. Rickey had a low, back leaning crouch that was coiled like Oscar Gamble, but more pronounced, so as to get a better look at the pitch and to further shrink the strike zone. When Rickey hit the ball hard -- whether it was a single or a home run -- he’d uncork the bat with tremendous speed, follow through, and then quickly retract the bat so as to point it back towards the pitcher for either emphasis or insult. And, in the 296 times that the ball left his bat and sailed over the fence (he had one career inside the park home run), he would round the bases incredibly slowly, with the widest berth imaginable. It was galling. But also deliriously fun. When Rickey would catch a lazy fly ball in left field, he would quickly “snatch” it and then pull his glove down towards his side in a rapid, semi-circular, clockwise motion. The move required an impossible amount of skill (and even more flair). Every time I saw him do it, I was certain that the ball would fly out from his mitt from the force of motion. But it never did.
In 1979, when Rickey came up as a rookie, he was approximately 5’10” and 180 pounds. If there was any fat on his body, it was not visible to the human eye. And when he finally retired over twenty five years later, he looked exactly the same, just with more lines on his face. He was (and is) the most efficiently muscular human being I’ve ever seen. He was like Lebron James, dehydrated and then stuffed inside a smaller frame. Even today, baseball players don’t look like Rickey. But, back in 1979, when co-MVP Keith Hernandez was smoking in the dugout and the other co-MVP, Pops Stargell, was loosening his belt buckle, Rickey looked like a different species.
If I tried to recount the “Rickey being Rickey” stories to emphasize my point, I would flirt with the apocryphal, and this essay might run on for days. There’s the story of Rickey framing, but not cashing, his million dollar signing bonus check. There’s the one about him getting frostbite in the summer because he fell asleep on an ice pad. There’s the stories and quotes wherein Rickey incessantly refers to himself in the third person -- how he would tell first basemen “Rickey’s gotta go now” before he would take off and steal second. Those stories are both hysterical and hopefully true. But, they also distort the facts. For many years, Rickey was cast as a “me first” player — a guy who cared more about Ricky’s success than that of his team or teammates; a guy who was all flash and stolen bases and gold chains. For most of his career, there was both latent racism and a complete misunderstanding of statistics in the depiction of Rickey Henderson.
In 1998, at the age of thirty nine, Rickey Henderson led the league in stolen bases while playing for the Oakland A’s. The next year, at forty, he hit .315 and had an OPS near .900 for the Mets. He struggled the next two seasons and then, famously, spent most of 2003, 2004 and 2005 in the minor leagues, waiting for the call to return to the majors. But not just any minor leagues -- the Independent Leagues, where young men who will never make the Big Show play before settling down and where former major leaguers get put out to pasture. After a couple of stellar minor league seasons, where he did everything well, including hamming it up for the fans and unofficially coaching his teammates, Rickey found himself, at the age of forty six, playing outfield for the San Diego Surf Dawgs of the Golden Baseball League.
Many years before he became the Oakland A’s President, David Kaval founded the Golden Baseball League with the presumption that, in order to succeed, he needed to find a unique attraction to draw in fans. Rickey Henderson was that attraction. For half of a major league season, he promoted, practiced, coached, smiled, stole bases, hit home runs, walked more than he liked and did everything everyone hoped he would do for the Surf Dawgs. Fans came out to San Diego and Chico and Yuma and Fullerton. Most everyone loved it. Most everyone, except Rickey Henderson.
Twenty nine years after he first played minor league baseball, Rickey was playing in an Independent League for one reason only -- to show Major League clubs that he could still play. He was padding his resume and waiting for the call — in spite of the fact that he hadn’t played well during his last two stints; and in spite of the fact that, since 2001, only twenty two other men had ever played in the Majors past the age of forty five; and in spite of the fact that most of those men were pitchers or pinch hitters or Pete Rose; and in spite of the fact that writers and fans were telling him to hang it up and wait for the call from Cooperstown. In spite of all of those things, Rickey was certain that he could still add value to a major league team.
I’m pretty sure he was right. Rickey had long since figured out baseball — a game where the goal is to get on base and to then advance the bases until you score a run. The rules were the same in 2005 as they were in 1979. His body was still remarkably similar to the one that he’d started playing with. If anything, he was a more learned player. Sure, his bat had slowed. He couldn’t steal a hundred bases. But he could get on and score. Maybe not better than Bonds or Pujols or Chipper. But better than a hundred other guys on rosters? Hell yes. Did he come with baggage? Surely. Was he a distraction? Maybe. But would he be able to create more runs than a replacement level player? I would not have bet against that.
For Rickey, it was always that simple: get on base and score as efficiently as possible. In his prime, he could get from his lead on first to second base in 2.8 to 3.0 seconds (or 131.5 steps). The average pitcher took 1.5 seconds to get the ball to the catcher and the average catcher took another 1.7 seconds to get the ball to second base. That’s 3.2 seconds total. Rickey Henderson probably never clocked either time. I don’t know if a coach ever even shared those averages, or specific pitcher and catcher stats with him. But Rickey knew this. He knew how to draw walks, steal bases and score. When called upon, he knew how to surprise pitchers and swing at the first pitch in the first inning and take the ball yard (he did that eighty one times in his career). Like everyone, he got older. Sure. But Rickey knew how baseball worked. For as long as he could remember, he’d beaten the game.
In 1991, fifteen years before he officially retired, Rickey passed Lou Brock, one of his heroes, for the all time stolen base record. When the game was briefly stopped, he pulled the base from the ground, held it above his head, and gave a short speech, declaring that he was “The Greatest of All Time.” Many writers and fans cringed at his hubris. It was almost indisputable -- even then -- that Rickey was greater than Lou Brock. But, “The Greatest”? Why would he say that? What did he mean? On the one hand, the comment was a not so veiled allusion to Rickey’s other hero -- Muhammad Ali. This was Rickey’s title — his coronation. He imagined himself as the The Champ and his boast was a fitting homage.
But, equally, his claim was a statement of fact. He was one season removed from an MVP award. He had the highest cumulative WAR of the 1980s. He’d won the World Series with the A’s in 1989. His stolen base and home run efficiency had both improved in time. He’d led the league in runs scored five of the last ten years. His stats page featured a lot of “black ink,” as Bill James described it. Now, I don’t think Rickey Henderson was the greatest baseball player of all time -- either at his peak or over his career. But, in that moment in 1991, you can imagine what that crown signified to him. He loved playing baseball. He loved being great at the game. He was proud. He could not contain himself. He was saying “I won,” which, in almost any measurable sense, was true.
In 2005, while a Surf Dawg, Rickey apparently did get a couple of calls from interested clubs, but no offer materialized. He officially, and reluctantly, retired in 2007, after another year, waiting for the call to come. Just two years later, the phone did ring, but it was the other call -- the Hall of Fame. In Cooperstown, at fifty one years young, he still looked like he could help a contender manufacture some runs down the stretch. Give him 30 days notice and I would bet an .800 OPS was plausible. Why not? He was more than two Eric Davises plus three Brady Andersons. He was more than Jeff Bagwell plus Manny Machado. He was all the things that were statistically true and enough of the things that were completely fabricated. Comparing him to Don Mattingly or Robin Yount felt wrong, even back in 1982. Those guys were great players. Rickey was something else altogether.