Rickey Henderson's Death Is a Huge Loss for Oakland and for Baseball

The Golden At-Bat Is a Dreadful Idea

by Lincoln Mitchell

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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I front-loaded my posts in December because I am on vacation and don’t have great internet access. Then Rickey Henderson died and I felt I had to write somthing. This has been a tough year for Bay Area baseball fans, the greatest San Francisco Giant ever died back in June and now the greatest Oakland A’s player ever has passed on. The city of Oakland, where Henderson grew up and had most of his best years suffered another blow as the A’s have played their last game in Oakland.

Henderson, who was born on Christmas Day, died a few days short of his 66th birthday. He is rightly remembered for being one of the greatest ballplayers ever, but he was more than that. He was a great baseball character, the kind of complete player who could do everything, a deeply decent man and had a strong connection to the city of Oakland.

Henderson brought a an energy and dynamic to the game that cannot be captured simply by numbers, but those numbers are nonetheless extraordinary. He was by far the greatest base stealer of all time. His 1,406 career stolen bases are more than 450 more than Lou Brock, who is number two on the list with 938. Henderson’s record of 130 stolen bases in a single season is 12 more than Brock who also has the second most stolen bases in a single season.

Henderson was such a great base stealer that it sometimes obscures just how good a player he was. Henderson would have been Hall of Famer even if he had never stolen a single base. His 3,055 hits, 297 home runs, career slash line of .279/401/.419 for a OPS+ of 127 and solid, and at times excellent defense, are are strong Hall of Fame credentials on their own.

One of the amazing things about Henderson was that he played seemingly forever and was a very good old player. I remember being at Yankee Stadium for Game Six of the ALCS. If the Yankees won, the Subway Series would be on. It was a great game and going into the ninth the Yankees led 9-7 with the great Mariano Rivera coming in for the save. The top of the Mariners order was due up. I remember wondering why Mariners manager Lou Piniella didn't send up Rickey Henderson to pinch hit for Stan Javier to lead off the inning. The Mariners needed base runners and if there was one thing Henderson always knew how to do, it was to get on base.

Henderson had signed on with Seattle midway through the season and posted a .362 OBP with 31 stolen bases in 92 games. He was 41-years-old at the time. Piniella left him on the bench. Rivera got the first two batters out, gave up a single to Alex Rodriguez and then got Edgar Martinez to ground out to clinch the pennant for the Yankees.

While Henderson was playing, there was a narrative around him that he was selfish and kind of goofy. He referred to himself as Rickey, famously framed, rather than cashed a check for $1,000,000 from the Oakland Athletics and frequently forgot the names of his teammates. Those stories always bothered me. The racist undertone was tough to miss, but then after he retired, other stories emerged.

Henderson’s caring spirit, particularly when it came to distributing post-season and World Series shares, revealed that he understood and cared about people. Mike Piazza described this in his 2013 memoir. “Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out “Full share!” We’d argue for a while and he’d say, “%$# that! You can change somebody’s life!”

A 2017 story about Henderson returning a lost cell phone to an Oakland man, and then taking the time to sign autographs and take selfies, again showed him to be a good guy who thought about others.

Henderson played parts of 25 seasons in the big leagues for a total of nine teams, including four stints with the Oakland A’s, but my best memories of Rickey Henderson were during those early years with the A’s. Growing up, the A’s were always my second favorite, often a distant second, MLB team in the Bay Area. Most of my friends were also Giants fans, but my friend Mark, who I met in the late 1970s and remains a close friend, was, and still is, an A’s fans, so we would sometimes attend A’s games together in the early 1980s.

I did not see Henderson during 1979, but I saw him a lot during the 1980-1982 seasons. In those years, Henderson was on base all the time as he had a .409 OBP and stole an amazing 286 bases over three seasons, a number that is even more impressive given that a third of the 1981 season was lost to the strike. Henderson also made dazzling plays in leftfield. The centerfielder on those teams was a now largely forgotten player named Dwayne Murphy. Murphy was a very good ballplayer in his own right and was a Gold Glove centerfielder from 1980-1985. Murphy and Henderson were good for a highlight reel play or two every game.

The late 1970s and early 1980s was a golden age of base stealing. Guys like Ron LeFlore, Omar Moreno, Tim Raines, Willie Wilson and, a few years later, Vince Coleman all could steal between 70-110 bases, but Henderson was better than all of them, and only Raines got on base nearly as much as Henderson.

The Rickey Henderson in those years was the most exciting player I ever saw. His flashy defense, and emerging power, was part of that, but it was his baserunning that made him so special. Henderson almost taunted the pitchers who knew he was going to steal but could do nothing about it.

As the A’s theme song at the time “Billy Ball” sang, “leads off of first base cool and slow, everybody in the park knows he’s gonna go.” That was Rickey Henderson.