If you could name a player in baseball history who was the Platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, who would you name?
Ricky
Even today, 21 years after Ricky Henderson’s last major league appearance and as news of his death reaches us just four days before his 66th birthday, that first name is likely the immediate answer to the question. Here’s your answer to whether you’re a Gen Xer who was a kid when Henderson chatted with him. Oakland Athleticsor a General Zeer who was a child when he played his last game for her. Los Angeles Dodgers 25 years later.
Ricky If you even know the history of baseball, that’s all you need to answer the question. The name covers a lot.
Put aside everything you know (or think you know) about Henderson for a second and just consider what he was on the field. There, too, he was alone, and not just because he threw left-handed and batted right-handed.
For every team, the leadoff hitter is one of the most important roles on the roster — and it was a role that Henderson filled better than anyone before or since.
Which Ricky did.
Think about the main traits you want in a leadoff hitter: getting on base, stealing bases and scoring runs. Let’s take them in order.
1. To be grounded.
Henderson is one of only 63 players to retire with a career hit over .400. Only three players reached base more times than his career total of 5,343: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb.
Henderson started 2,890 games during his quarter-century in the majors. He batted leadoff in 2,875 of those games. Rose was a leadoff hitter for most of his career, but he also started more than 1,100 games at other spots. Bonds started out as a leadoff hitter but is better known for what he did further up the lineup. Cobb started just 29 games in the leadoff slot.
In other words, no leadoff hitter got on base more often than Henderson.
And of course, he wasn’t a player you wanted too far from the bases, because he did a lot of damage once he got there.
2. Bases of theft
Steals is the category that will likely always be associated with Henderson. He is the all-time leader in single-season steals (130 in 1982) and career leader (1,406). That’s nearly 50 percent above the second-highest career total, Lovebrook’s 938.
It’s hard to describe how we saw Henderson during his prime in the 1980s, a decade in which he swiped 838 sacks. It looked like he had smashed a baseball. Perhaps the best example: July 29, 1989, when Henderson was playing for Oakland and faced off. SeattleWith future Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson starting for the Mariners. Henderson played the entire game and did not record an official hit. Instead, he walked four times, stole five bases and scored four runs.
Every walk felt like at least a double but maybe a triple. So did everyone else. The geometry of the game felt inadequate to accommodate his potential. You can’t help but wonder how many bases Henderson can steal now, with a new set of steal-friendly rules.
Let’s say that Henderson dominates his peers in the home run category by way of the stolen base column by hitting a long ball. That slugger would have finished with about 1,143 homers — or 1.5 times Bonds’ eventual tally.
When Henderson broke Brock’s all-time mark in 1991, he still had more than a decade left in his career. He finished that season, his age-32 campaign, with 994 steals. Since age 33, he has hit another 412, which would rank 68th on the career total list.
With so many things that Henderson did, they all take on an air of myth now, because he did it so well for so long. Henderson first led the American League in steals with 100 swipes in 1980. He was 21 years old. He last led the AL in steals with 66 in 1998 — when he was 39.
3. Making runs.
Despite all those stolen bases, and all those times he was on base, Henderson probably saw those things as a means to his ultimate goal for any trip to the plate: scoring.
In 2009, at the time of his induction into the Hall of Fame, Henderson told reporters, “The most important thing for me was to shake things up and score some runs so we could win the ballgame.”
No one scored more runs. He has the record for crossing the plate 2,295 times, 50 more than Cobb and 68 more than Bonds. Only eight players have broken the 2,000-run barrier. Active Leader — Dodgers Freddie Freemanwho played 15 years in the majors — is at 1,298, nearly 1,000 shy of the mark. This is a surprising figure.
What did Ricky mean?
For most of his career, Henderson was underappreciated for what he did beyond stealing bases. He played long enough to be around to see more baseball concepts change in value than at any other time in the game’s history, but for most of his years, batting average got more attention than on-base percentage. , and the RBIs dominated it. runs
An example of this came in 1985, when Henderson batted leadoff for a Yankees team that featured that year’s MVP, Don Mattingly. It may have been Henderson’s best season overall: He hit .314 with 99 walks, 80 stolen bases, clubbed 24 homers and scored 146 runs — his career high, tied for the combine. Tied for the fourth highest total of the era.
If current analytical practices were in place at the time, Henderson would have been the likely AL MVP, as his 9.9 bWAR led the AL (and dwarfed Mattingly, who won the award with 6.5). Henderson finished third in a hotly contested race between himself, Mattingly and George Brett.
Mattingly’s 145 RBI likely won the required votes for the award, but he wouldn’t have reached that total without Henderson in front of him: Donnie Baseball drove in 56 runs this season. Henderson won an MVP award in 1990 — but probably should have gotten one or two more.
Ultimately, analytics caught up with Henderson’s greatness, and there are few who would dispute his stature at this point. We still have WAR and Henderson’s 111.1 total is the 19th highest in the game’s history dating back to 1871 — arguably, among the best ever to wear the uniform.
Still, he was outnumbered. For legions of Gen X baseball fans, especially those on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was simply stealing a base or mimicking his sleek, low-slung, head-first slide into the bag, he was one of those players you’d pretend was on the sandlot. He was one of your players. Desired You can be.
If you were of that generation, you were about 10 years old when he came to Auckland in 1979. He eventually left the majors — not by choice, as Henderson would have played and if he had — he was in his mid-30s, with adult responsibilities and no big leaguers. Almost no memory of baseball.
Henderson was almost without precedent, the only real historical comparison being to Negro Leagues legend Cole Papa Bell. Whatever you might think of Henderson, given his eccentric and often misinterpreted public persona, the man knew his history. He sometimes used “Cool Papa Bell” as an alias when checking into hotels.
My favorite story about Henderson may be apocryphal, at least in that I have no way of verifying it. But it’s harmless, so I’ll take it along. There is something beautiful in imagining this to be true.
A few years ago when I was in Cooperstown, I was talking to a man who kept a boat on a dock on Otsego Lake, which juts out from under the hill on which Cooperstown sits.
The man told me that on the weekend that Henderson was inducted, Ricky came up to him and asked how much it would cost to get the man on the boat. They agreed on a price and walked out. Henderson was “dressed to the nines” and wearing sunglasses.
The unlikely pair waded into the water one way, then stopped. Henderson sat there looking back at the village, home of baseball’s immortals, perched on the hillside. He did not speak. Just saw, dole with water. After a few minutes, Henderson asked to be taken back to shore. it was. The man had no idea what Henderson was thinking during those minutes.
That was in 2009, four years after Henderson played his final season in independent ball in 2005. For the first 39 years, since his professional career began in the minors in 1976 when he was 17 years old, he did it his way, the perfect way.
In doing so, he became more than a player, but an archetype. Ricky, the lead off guy. No one would be better suited for a role on the baseball field than he was for this job. And no one is likely to do better.