There is a peculiar and painful symmetry here: the Oakland Athletics and the Oakland Athletics’ all-time greatest player, Rickey Henderson, have both departed from the scene within two months of each other.
Henderson, one of the most talented, accomplished, and exciting baseball players who ever lived, has died at age 65. The transformational baseball analyst Bill James was once asked if he thought Rickey Henderson was a Hall of Famer; James responded that “if you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” Indeed. What Rickey Henderson did was as eye-popping and unprecedented as what Babe Ruth did in his day.
What Ruth did for home runs, Rickey Henderson did for stolen bases. In 1980, Henderson became the first American League player in the modern era to steal 100 bases in a single season; two years later, he set a new all-time record with 130 stolen bases, a record that is likely never to be broken. (In 2024, Elly De La Cruz of the Reds led the majors with 67 base thefts.) Rickey ended up with 1,406 lifetime stolen bases, obliterating the previous record by nearly five hundred (Lou Brock had 938). Amid all this, Henderson was also a power hitter who revolutionized what it meant to bat leadoff.
Rickey Henderson was an outsized personality; his character was as big and grand as his accomplishments on the field. When he stole his 939th base to set a new all-time record, he announced modestly: “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing, but today, I'm the greatest of all time.” What would have been arrogance coming from anyone else was just Rickey being Rickey; after all, he really was the greatest of all time.
Everyone knew it, too. Rickey played for nine different teams during his major league career, but he was most closely identified with the Oakland Athletics, with whom he spent twelve of his 25 seasons in the big leagues and parts of two more. When young Henderson was trying to break into the big leagues, A’s manager Billy Martin told him that he could teach him how to steal bases, and not only that, but if he followed Billy’s advice, he’d steal a hundred bases in a year. Rickey followed Billy’s advice. And he stole 100 bases in a year, three times.
Henderson had a less happy stint with the New York Yankees, where injuries limited his effectiveness, although suspicious Big Apple fans suspected that he just wasn’t giving it his all. I was in the Yankee Stadium bleachers one day in 1989 when the entire outfield crowd was booing and jeering mercilessly at Rickey, who was a damp squib at the plate that year for the Bronx Bombers, hitting only .247. Still, his abilities were undeniable. Everyone knew they’d be seeing them again. Amid all the jeers, which were mostly profane variations on “Ya bum, ya!,” one man got off the best taunt of all, yelling at Henderson: “You Hall of Famer!”
As many Rickey Henderson stories circulate as Yogi Berra stories, and just as with the latter, not all of them are true, but they’re terrific anyway. One year the A’s were balancing their books at the end of the year and found, to their absolute puzzlement, that the books were exactly a million dollars off. After an exhaustive search, they discovered that they had given Rickey a million-dollar bonus but he didn’t seem ever to have cashed the check. They called him, and he calmly explained that the prospect of a million-dollar check was so exciting that he had framed it and put it on his wall.
Related: Elegy for the Oakland Athletics
In addition to their astronomical salaries, major league baseball players get meal money for every day on the road. In Henderson’s day, this took the form of envelopes of cash that were given out at the beginning of every road trip, with a certain amount for each day. The envelopes contained a few hundred dollars or over a thousand, depending on the length of the trip. Henderson, who made plenty of money, never used the envelopes of cash; instead, he took them home and put them in a shoebox. When one of his daughters did well on a school exam or had some other accomplishment, her doting father would tell her to grab an envelope out of the shoebox; however much was in it was hers.
Rickey’s habit of speaking of himself in the third person is so famous that when the news broke that he had died, many people took to X to say something in his voice like “Rickey can’t be dead! Only Rickey decides when Rickey gonna die!” Alas, no. Time, alas, hurries on inexorably, and nothing is permanent. In his native Oakland, his team named its field after him a few years ago, only to pull up stakes and abandon Rickey Henderson Field after this past season, as the billionaire team owner pleads poverty and seeks a baseball fortune elsewhere. And now Rickey Henderson and Rickey Henderson Field have both departed from the scene. They will both be missed. And the achievements of Rickey Henderson the man on that field and the others of the major leagues will likely never be surpassed.
As they say in my Church, May his memory be eternal.
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