If you could possibly title one participant within the historical past of baseball who was the Platonic best of a leadoff hitter, who would you title?
Rickey.
Even at present, 21 years after Rickey Henderson’s final large league look and because the information of his loss of life simply 4 days earlier than his 66th birthday reached us, that first title is probably going the speedy response to the query. That’s your reply whether or not you are a Gen Xer who was a toddler when Henderson broke in with the Oakland Athletics, or a Gen Zer who was a toddler when he performed his final sport for the Los Angeles Dodgers 25 years later.
Rickey. If you’ve got even a passing information of baseball historical past, that title is all you must reply the query. The title encapsulates a lot.
Set apart for a second all the pieces you realize (or assume you realize) about Henderson as a one-of-a-kind persona and simply contemplate what he was on the sector. There, too, he was singular, and never simply because he threw left-handed and batted righty.
For each workforce, the leadoff hitter is without doubt one of the most vital roles on the roster — and it was a job Henderson performed higher than anybody earlier than or since.
What Rickey did
Think of the essential traits you need in a leadoff hitter: getting on base, stealing bases and scoring runs. Let’s take them so as.
1. Getting on base.
Henderson is one in every of simply 63 gamers to retire with a profession on-base proportion over .400. Only three gamers reached base extra instances than his profession complete of 5,343: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb.
Henderson began 2,890 video games throughout his quarter century within the majors. He batted leadoff in 2,875 of these video games. Rose was a leadoff hitter for almost all of his profession, however he additionally began greater than 1,100 video games in different spots. Bonds began off as a leadoff hitter however is a lot better identified for what he did additional down within the lineup. Cobb began simply 29 video games within the leadoff slot.
In different phrases, no leadoff hitter has ever gotten on base extra typically than Henderson.
And after all, there was no participant who you wished to maintain off the bases extra, as a result of he did a lot harm as soon as he was there.
2. Stealing bases.
Steals is the class that can probably all the time be most related to Henderson. He’s the all-time chief in single-season steals (130 in 1982) and the profession chief (1,406). That profession complete is sort of proper at 50% above the second-highest mark, Lou Brock’s 938.
It’s arduous to explain how we checked out Henderson throughout his apex within the Eighties, a decade during which he swiped 838 baggage. It nearly felt like he had damaged baseball. Perhaps the proper instance of this: July 29, 1989, when Henderson was enjoying for Oakland and going through Seattle, with future Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson beginning for the Mariners. Henderson performed the complete sport and didn’t document an official at-bat. Instead, he walked 4 instances, stole 5 bases and scored 4 runs.
Every stroll felt like at the least a double however maybe a triple; so did each single. The geometry of the game felt insufficient to accommodate his means. You can not help however surprise what number of bases Henderson may steal now, with the brand new set of steal-friendly guidelines in place.
Let’s say a long-ball hitter dominated the house run class over his friends the way in which Henderson did the stolen base column. That slugger would have completed with round 1,143 homers — or 1.5 instances the ultimate tally for Bonds.
When Henderson broke Brock’s all-time mark in 1991, he nonetheless had greater than a decade left in his profession. He completed that season, his age-32 marketing campaign, with 994 steals. From age 33 on, he tacked on one other 412, a complete which by itself would rank 68th on the profession checklist.
With so many issues Henderson did, the scope of all of it now takes on an air of mythology, as a result of he did it so properly for thus lengthy. Henderson first led the American League in steals with 100 swipes in 1980; he was 21. He final led the AL in steals in 1998 with 66 — when he was 39.
3. Scoring runs.
Despite all these stolen bases, and all these instances on base, Henderson probably nonetheless noticed these issues as a way to his final aim for any journey to the plate: scoring.
In 2009, across the time of his induction to the Hall of Fame, Henderson advised reporters, “To me crucial factor was stirring issues up and scoring some runs so we may win a ballgame.”
No one scored extra runs. His 2,295 instances crossing the plate is the document, 50 greater than Cobb and 68 greater than Bonds. Only eight gamers have ever cracked the two,000-run barrier. The lively chief — the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, who has performed 15 years within the majors — is at 1,298, almost 1,000 shy of the mark. It’s a staggering determine.
What Rickey meant
For a lot of his profession, a variety of what Henderson did past stealing bases was underappreciated. He performed so lengthy that he was round to see perceptions of baseball worth shift greater than in any time within the sport’s historical past, however throughout most of his years, batting common earned extra consideration than on-base proportion, and RBIs held sway over runs.
The illustration of this got here in 1985, when Henderson batted leadoff for a Yankees workforce that featured that yr’s MVP, Don Mattingly. It may need been Henderson’s finest general season: He hit .314 whereas drawing 99 walks, stealing 80 bases, clubbing 24 homers and scoring 146 runs — his profession excessive, a determine tied for the fourth-highest complete of the combination period.
If present analytical practices had been in place then, Henderson would have been the probably AL MVP, as his 9.9 bWAR complete led the AL (and dwarfed that of Mattingly, who received the award with 6.5). Henderson completed third in a hotly contested race amongst himself, Mattingly and George Brett.
Mattingly’s 145 RBIs probably received the votes he wanted for that award, however he would not have reached that complete with out Henderson in entrance of him: Donnie Baseball drove in Rickey 56 instances that season. Henderson did win an MVP award in 1990 — however he in all probability ought to have received one or two extra.
Eventually, the analytics caught up with Henderson’s greatness, and there are few who would dispute his stature at this level. We have WAR at our disposal now, and Henderson’s complete of 111.1 is the nineteenth highest within the historical past of a sport that dates to 1871 — indubitably, among the many best who ever placed on a uniform.
Still, he was greater than his numbers. For legions of Gen X baseball followers, particularly these on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was the mere act of stealing a base or imitating his glossy, low-slung, head-first slide into the bag, he was a type of gamers you’ll fake to be on the sandlot. He was a type of gamers you wished you could possibly be.
If you had been of that era, you had been about 10 years previous when he arrived in Oakland in 1979. By the time he lastly left the majors — not of his personal volition, as Henderson would have performed on and on if it had been as much as him — you had been in your mid-30s, with grownup duties and nearly no reminiscence of Major League Baseball with out Rickey.
Henderson was nearly with out antecedent, the one actual historic comparability being the legendary Cool Papa Bell of the Negro Leagues. Whatever you may consider Henderson given his quirky and infrequently misinterpreted public persona, the person knew his historical past. He would generally use “Cool Papa Bell” as an alias when checking right into a lodge.
My favourite anecdote about Henderson is likely to be apocryphal, at the least in that I’ve no option to confirm it. But it is innocent, so I’ll go it alongside. There’s one thing lovely in imagining it to be true.
Just a few years in the past once I was in Cooperstown, I used to be chatting with a person who stored a ship on one of many docks of Otsego Lake, which spreads away from the underside of the hill on which Cooperstown resides.
The man advised me that throughout the weekend on which Henderson was inducted, Rickey approached him and requested how a lot it will price to be taken out within the man’s boat. They agreed to a worth and headed out. Henderson was “dressed to the nines” and sporting wraparound sun shades.
The unlikely pair went out into the water a methods, then stopped. Henderson sat there trying again on the village, dwelling to baseball’s immortals, arrayed alongside the hillside. He did not converse. Just appeared, swaying with the water. After a couple of minutes, Henderson requested to be taken again to shore. That was it. The man had no concept what Henderson was interested by throughout these minutes.
That was in 2009, 4 years after Henderson performed his final season in impartial ball in 2005. For the 39 years earlier than that, since his professional profession started within the minors in 1976 when he was 17, he did it his manner, which was the proper manner.
In doing so, he turned greater than a participant, however an archetype. Rickey, the leadoff man. No one will ever be extra suited to a job on the baseball area than he was for that job. And nobody is more likely to ever do it higher.
