Rickey

Rickey Henderson’s career happened to coincide with my childhood. My first memories of watching baseball are from 1982, at which time - in retrospect - the stats bear out that he was already the best player in baseball.

He was talked about as the most exciting player but I never remember him talked about as the best. It was Mike Schmidt, and then maybe Dale Murphy, and then Don Mattingly, or Cal Ripken… and these were all sensible choices, but of course none of them played the game the way Rickey did. Nobody walked like he did, nobody scored like he did, nobody carried themselves the way he did.

He truly seemed like someone who would live into his 100s, someone timeless, someone who would never stop being relevant. It is truly shocking that he is gone at 65.

Rickey Henderson amassed 70.2 WAR (Wins Above Replacement) in the years 1981-1990.

Since then, the only four position players to have topped 70 WAR over 10 consecutive seasons are Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, and Mike Trout.

In the 40 years prior, it was only Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Eddie Mathews, Hank Aaron, and Mike Schmidt.

Rickey is the pivot between eras, and yet nobody was like him then or any time. He was breathtakingly exciting, one of the best known players in the game, and with the help of advanced statistics, we can see he was the greatest ballplayer of the 1980s… and yet if anything he was underrated, because it was so hard to compare him to anyone else.

Rickey retired with 2,190 walks, which at the time was a record. Barry Bonds would eventually surpass him with 2,558. But break it down by which walks were intentional:

Rickey: 2,190 total minus 61 intentional equals 2,129 unintentional

Bonds: 2,558 total minus 688 intentional equals 1,870 unintentional

2,129 unintentional walks to a man who you desperately did not want to put on base!

Of course there are other players who were, and are, something like Rickey Henderson. In the 80s, a sensible comp was Tim Raines, who amassed 48.8 WAR over those 10 years. Raines was arguably one of the 10 best players of the decade, and among those, the one most like Rickey. He was a truly great player, a deeply deserving Hall of Famer.

Rickey averaged more than 2 WAR per year more than Raines over the decade.

Rickey was that much better than the other great players in the game.

Rickey’s all-time records for stolen bases, unintentional walks, and runs scored will never be surpassed.

As I picture it, what differentiated Rickey Henderson from all of them was the takeoff. He is standing, taking in what’s happening before him, and then… he is gone.

Look at how low to the ground he is on takeoff:

Look at how absurdly powerful he is - he literally looks like he is somehow swimming:

Does this even seem possible?

The combination of strength, speed, eye, and instinct is unmatched in the annals of the game. The closest modern comps are perhaps Ronald Acuña Jr. and - if he can develop his eye - Elly De La Cruz. Or maybe it’s best to understand Rickey as a unicorn, and the only modern comp is another unicorn: Shohei Ohtani. It’s not that the Shohei’s 50/50 season is an analog, but rather, it’s the combination way he has broken the game. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned up to this point how he’s the all-time leader in leadoff home runs. He hit more home runs than Kirk Gibson or Roger Maris or Roberto Clemente!

Perhaps more so than any of those attributes though - more than the eye, more than the instinct, more than the strength, more than the speed - there is this: Rickey wanted to play ball more than anything. He went and played independent ball. He sincerely believed that if anyone would have him, he still could have played at the major league level into his sixties. You take all of his natural ability, and add that confidence, and that need to play, that thirst to win, how could you possibly match that? For such a man to also be one of the great characters of the game… we really must appreciate these unicorns while they still walk among us.