Baseball’s stolen base king was born at high speed, on Christmas Day 1958, in the back of an Oldsmobile hurtling through a blizzard toward a Chicago-area hospital.
The man who would go on to swipe a record 1,406 bags would often joke about his wonderfully apropos origin story.
“I was already fast,” Rickey Henderson said about his birth in a 2009 MLB Network Documentary. “I couldn’t wait.”
Henderson, unequivocally the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, died Saturday at the age of 65. His wife and three daughters offered a statement, confirming his passing.
“A legend on and off the field, Rickey was a devoted son, dad, friend, grandfather, brother, uncle, and a truly humble soul,” the family statement read. “Rickey lived his life with integrity, and his love for baseball was paramount. Now, Rickey is at peace with the Lord, cherishing the extraordinary moments and achievements he leaves behind.”
Henderson was a statistical thunderstorm. His numbers befuddle, overwhelm. The Hall of Famer is one of only two position players to appear in 25 MLB seasons, playing 3,081 games over that span, fourth in MLB history. Across a quarter-century, Henderson compiled quite a résumé. He stole 468 more bases than anybody else. His 2,190 walks sit second all time, behind only Barry Bonds. Among position players to debut 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 is so much more than the numbers. As a player, Henderson was magnificent, magnetic, game-changing. 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 old-school, overwrought commitment to performative humility.
In an era in which players were reluctant to express themselves, Henderson wore neon-green batting gloves and a gold necklace with a diamond pendant emblazoned with the number 130, after his record-setting stolen-base total in 1982. He admired his home runs, punctuating them with the swaggering style of a showman well before his time. And, of course, Rickey famously referred to himself, on occasion, in the third person.
His was an unshakable confidence that was crafted and molded on the hardscrabble streets of Oakland, California, where Rickey relocated with his family as a 7-year-old in 1966. It was in Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, a place that uniquely embodies the plight, power and pride of the Black American experience, that Rickey became Rickey.
By the time a young Henderson arrived, the city had already developed a reputation as an incubator of Black athletic greatness. Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Curt Flood and Vada Pinson had all come through the town’s high school ranks, 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 emanating from the East Bay that included Gary Pettis and Dave Stewart.
Over his lengthy big-league career, Henderson appeared for nine teams, but he began, peaked and will endure as a member of the Oakland A’s. It is appropriate then that the defining, lasting moment of Henderson’s career, one that perfectly showcased the might of his unapologetic bravado, occurred at the Oakland Coliseum under an East Bay sun.
On May 1, 1991, Henderson stole his 939th base, breaking the record held by Cardinals legend Lou Brock. The flecks of dirt, thrown into the air by Rickey’s trademark headfirst slide, hardly had time to return to earth before the man of the moment had ripped the base in question from its moorings and thrust it toward the sky. A sold-out crowd roared around him, and the stolen base king basked in the noisy adoration.
Later, while speaking to the crowd, Henderson channeled his boyhood hero, Muhammad Ali, exclaiming, “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing. But today, I’m the greatest of all time. Thank you.”
With Henderson, the line between truth and myth, fact and fiction, was often blurry. It didn’t much matter whether the larger-than-life stories about Rickey were real or not. It was enough that they were believable. And the verified accounts carried more than enough heft, like when Henderson framed and hung a million-dollar check without cashing it first.
“At the time I got a signing bonus for $1 million, I go, ‘Wow, I’m a millionaire!’” Henderson told Mike & Mike in 2009. “So I’m gonna frame this here check. The Oakland A’s finally called me when they was doing they book in December and asked where was the check, and I said it was on my wall. They said, ‘Can you take it down, go cash it and then put a duplicate in the frame?’ So I eventually took the check down and cashed it.”
But not all of Henderson’s off-field life was so jovial. In 1994, he was accused by his half-sister of raping her when he was in his mid-teens and she was 12. Rickey vehemently denied the allegations and eventually won a lengthy court battle that, legally-speaking, cleared his name. The incident is thoroughly covered in Bryant’s biography, “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.”
That book, which came out in 2022, provides a phenomenal glimpse into the complex, eventful life of a man who spent most of his adulthood in the spotlight. For much of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, anything Rickey said or did was news.
For instance, during a spring training contract dispute in 1991, Henderson’s A’s teammates jokingly filled a jar with bills to “raise money” for Rickey. Reggie Jackson delivered the container to Henderson, who reported to camp a day late, during a stretching session in a wheelbarrow. Rickey, laughing, lifted the vessel and posed with it for cameras. “They short-changed 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 get Henderson back into camp, March 7, 1991 pic.twitter.com/nC0JjQ7VzN
— Baseball In Pics (@baseballinpix) November 8, 2023
That anecdote highlights another side of Rickey, one that made him a lightning rod and a trailblazer. During the peak of his career, Henderson maintained a fervent desire to fight for every last dollar that he believed he deserved.
In the mid-1980s, with free agency barely a decade old, the perennial All-Star deftfully weaponized his status as one of baseball’s best. As money gushed into the sport, Rickey used arbitration as an opportunity to go to 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 landmark, four-year, $12 million deal with his hometown club. But the rising salary waters swiftly overtook Henderson and his contract. By 1991, he was the 40th-highest paid player in the game, something that ruffled his feathers, leading to that spring training dispute.
“I’m asking you to be fair to me,” he told reporters the day he received his teammates’ donation. “There’s 40 players in the game that’s better than me? That’s a load of crap. I don’t even think there’s two or three of ‘em that’s better than me.”
Such statements of frankness made Henderson an outlier and, to some in the world of baseball, a villain. But for most fans, the man with the fast feet, gold chain and smooth way about him was a beloved figure — easy to watch, easy to enjoy. 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 comprehended: Baseball is entertainment.
And there were few characters more captivating, more enthralling, more irresistible than Rickey.
