By Michael S. Rosenwald
Rickey Henderson, the thrilling and charismatic Hall of Fame outfielder who, with his signature crouched stance, blazing speed and unlikely home run power, was widely regarded as the greatest leadoff hitter in Major League Baseball history, died Friday. He was 65.
His death was announced by his family. They did not cite a cause or say where he died, but they thanked the staff at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.
Often called “the man of steal” by sports writers, Henderson holds the career record for stolen bases with 1,406 — a mark unlikely to be swiped from him anytime soon, or perhaps ever. He stole more than 100 bases in three seasons, and his 130 in 1982 is the single-season record.
Henderson also owns the record for runs scored, with 2,295. Eighty-one of those runs were the result of leadoff home runs — another record. His 2,190 walks rank him second behind Barry Bonds.
“Without exaggerating one inch, you could find 50 Hall of Famers who, all taken together, don’t own as many records, and as many important records, as Rickey Henderson,” baseball statistician and historian Bill James once wrote.
Henderson played for nine teams over 25 seasons, but he spent most of his career with his hometown Oakland A’s (on four separate occasions) and the New York Yankees.
In addition to being one of baseball’s most exciting players, Henderson was legendarily eccentric.
He was unaware of many of his teammates’ names. During the 1993 season, he missed three games in August with frostbite after falling asleep with an ice pack on his injured foot. He framed a $1 million bonus check instead of cashing it.
Though he was frequently accused of being self-centered, Henderson wasn’t strictly an “I” kind of player. He often referred to himself in the third person; he once said, “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.”
Another time, while Henderson was playing with Oakland, catcher Terry Steinbach found him in the locker room stark naked and mumbling, “Rickey’s gonna have a game” five minutes before the game.
“I’m pretty sure the anthem is playing,” Steinbach recalled in Howard Bryant’s 2022 biography, “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.” “He’s still in the locker room, talking to himself, ‘Rickey’s gonna have a good day.’”
About 30 seconds before the first pitch, Henderson put on his uniform and announced, “Rickey’s ready to go!”
“He walks down the tunnel,” Steinbach said. “Gets his bat. Hits a home run.”
At 5-foot-10, Henderson was smaller than many big leaguers, but he overcame his size with a combination of horsepower, a savantlike ability to exploit deficiencies in pitchers, and an extreme bravado that many players viewed as cockiness.
Once, playing against the Baltimore Orioles, he stood on first base and seemed to flash the peace sign — two fingers — to the third baseman, Floyd Rayford.
“Rayford didn’t know what he meant,” sports writer Joe Posnanski wrote in “The Baseball 100,” in which he ranked Henderson the 24th-greatest player ever. “That’s because it wasn’t a peace sign — Rickey was holding up the number two. And two pitches later, he was standing on third with Rayford after having stolen two bases.”
Drafted by the A’s in the fourth round in 1976, Henderson showed his potential almost immediately in the minor leagues. One of his coaches thought that he could defy physics by outrunning the baseball.
“He’d only been in the minors for a half-hour,” Bryant wrote in his biography, “but there was immediately something about Rickey’s style that embarrassed even professional players.”
His crouched batting stance shrank his already small strike zone. (Los Angeles Times sports writer Jim Murray would later write that “Henderson has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart.”)
“The guy is impossible to pitch to,” Frank Quintero, who pitched against Henderson in the minor leagues, once recalled. “His strike zone is about 10 inches deep. He drives me crazy, and the umpires, too. And when you do come in with a strike — boom, he rips it.”
Oakland called up Henderson about halfway through the 1979 season. The A’s were terrible, but Henderson hit .274 and led the team in stolen bases with 33. The next year, the A’s hired Billy Martin as manager, and the team improved. So did Henderson: He hit .303, walked 117 times, stole 100 bases and played in the first of 10 All-Star games during his career.
Henderson was a line-drive hitter early in his career, but he decided to start hitting for power after contract negotiations with the A’s after the 1982 season.
“I stole 130 bases and went to arbitration, and they said that the only guy who earned the salary was a guy that hit home runs,” Henderson told Sports Illustrated in 2009, just before he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “That’s when I decided I had to elevate my game and do something different. I decided to develop the physique.”
Henderson hit a total of only 35 homers through his first five seasons, but he hit 91 during the next five, including a career-high 28 in 1986 for the Yankees after he was traded in 1984.
Rickey Nelson Henley was born in Chicago in the back seat of his family’s Oldsmobile on Christmas morning in 1958.
When Rickey was 2, his parents, John and Bobbie Henley, broke up. His mother moved with Rickey and his siblings to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where she had grown up.
Not long after, she moved to California to find work, leaving her children behind with her mother. In California, she married Paul Henderson, and the new family eventually settled together in Oakland.
As a teenager, Rickey was primarily interested in football.
Though he played baseball in youth leagues, he didn’t consider playing in high school until his sophomore year, when his guidance counselor called him into her office. The baseball team was short on players and needed him, she said. No way, he told her.
“She offered me a quarter,” he told Bryant. “Hits, runs, stolen bases — a quarter each. I said, ‘I’m about to make me some money.’”
He joined the team. In one game, he earned a whopping $5.25.
Henderson continued playing football each fall, but eventually his speed and line-drive-hitting ability drew the attention of professional baseball scouts, notably J.J. Guinn, who worked for the A’s.
Still, Henderson wasn’t set on baseball; he wanted to play Division I football. But his mother, worried about injuries, pushed him to choose baseball. Interviewed for Bryant’s biography, Guinn recalled asking him what he wanted to accomplish.
“I want to be the greatest base stealer of all time,” Henderson said.
On May 1, 1991, while playing for the A’s, Henderson stole third against the Yankees. It was his 939th stolen base, surpassing Lou Brock’s record.
There was a celebration on the field. Speaking to the crowd on a microphone, Henderson said: “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing. But today, I am the greatest of all time.”
Survivors include his wife, Pamela. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
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