The Baseball 100: No. 24, Rickey Henderson (2024)

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.

When Rickey Henderson was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, 28 people did not vote for him. I realize you can play the rage game all day and all night; you can just point to so many of the all-time greats (well, actually, all of them except Mariano Rivera) and count the number of people who did not vote for them, and get angry all over again.

Here are the closest to unanimous election:

1: Derek Jeter
3: Ken Griffey Jr.
4: Ty Cobb
5: Tom Seaver
6: Nolan Ryan
8: Cal Ripken Jr.
9: Henry Aaron; George Brett
10: Bob Feller
11: Babe Ruth; Honus Wagner
12: Chipper Jones
13: Tony Gwynn
15: Randy Johnson
16: Mike Schmidt; Greg Maddux; Johnny Bench
20: Ted Williams; Steve Carlton
23: Willie Mays; Stan Musial
24: Carl Yastrzemski
27: Reggie Jackson
28: Rickey Henderson

You will note that list does not even include Mickey Mantle (43 short), Al Kaline or Frank Robinson (45 short), Sandy Koufax (52 short) or Bob Gibson (64 short, the same as Warren Spahn).

But a special word must be said for Rickey. He stole about 500 more bases than anyone, but you know that already. (You can add Lou Brock’s stolen bases to active leader Rajai Davis’ stolen bases and still not climb up to the top of Mount Rickey.) He scored more runs than anyone, but you know that already. He got on base more times than anyone not named Rose, Bonds or Cobb, he hit more leadoff home runs than anyone, on and on.

Bill James, when asked if Henderson was a Hall of Famer, gave the legendary answer, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” And that’s right — really, you could divide him into three and get three Hall of Famers. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer just for the base stealing. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer for 3,000 hits. He’s a bona fide Hall of Famer for being the greatest run-scorer.

Beyond that though, Rickey was Rickey. Has there ever been a player who was more fun, who is the centerpiece of more great stories, who made your heart sing the way he did? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Rickey Henderson went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, like most of the great ones, and he had his day in Cooperstown, and his plaque begins with these words: “Faster than a speeding bullet.” He didn’t need those 28 votes to secure his legacy, and those 28 votes are nothing more now than pointless trivia.

But my point is: Why would you even want to vote for the Hall of Fame if not to vote for Rickey Henderson? Or in other words, if you love baseball, as a Hall of Fame voter surely does, why would you want to live the rest of your life knowing that you didn’t vote Rickey Henderson into the Hall of Fame?

All right, the rest of this will be a series of Rickey stories. That’s what you want. That’s what I want. We can only assume that’s what Rickey wants. Rickey loves a good Rickey story. We’ll get the most famous one out of the way first because it isn’t even true. The story goes that when Rickey joined the Seattle Mariners in 2000, he saw John Olerud taking some groundballs while wearing his batting helmet.

“Huh,” he said, “I played with a guy in New York who did that.”

“Yeah,” Olerud said. “That was me. Last year.”

As mentioned, the story isn’t true. Olerud and Henderson have debunked it. Apparently, it was a gag the Mariners’ assistant trainer came up with and it soon spread around the clubhouse, as good gags will.

But even an untrue Rickey story leads to a great tale. When Rickey was debunking the story, he made the point that while it was funny, it was also silly because he’d known Olerud years before they played on the same team. Of course he did. Olerud played first.

And, as Rickey said, “I was always on base.”

Henderson was born on Christmas Day in 1958, in the back seat of an Oldsmobile speeding toward the hospital. “I was already fast,” he said. He was named Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson after Ricky Nelson, the teen music sensation of the day who had grown up in front of America on the television show “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and at the time had more hits than Elvis.

Football was Rickey’s game as a teenager, not baseball. He was, by all accounts, an awe-inspiring running back, which is not hard to imagine. His dream was to play for the Oakland Raiders, and he very well might have done that; Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott grew up in California at the same time and saw Rickey at a few all-star games and said he was a serious handful as a runner.

But Rickey’s mother, Bobbie, insisted he play baseball.

And so did others. It’s funny, looking back, at how many people in his life seemed to be conspiring to make him a ballplayer. Perhaps the most influential of those was his school guidance counselor Tommie Wilkerson, who offered him a deal: She said that she would give him a quarter for every good thing he did on the baseball diamond.

What qualified as a good thing? She decided he would get a quarter for every hit, for every stolen base and for every run scored.

Hits. Stolen bases. Runs scored. You think Wilkerson set Rickey on the right course or what?

Rickey, at his Hall of Fame induction, said that he quickly had 30 hits, scored 25 runs and had 33 steals. That’s 22 bucks! “Not bad money for a high school kid,” he said.

If Wilkerson had kept the deal going for his big-league career, she would have had to pay for 3,055 hits, 2,295 runs and 1,406 stolen bases. If you’re a math teacher, feel free to use this example for your classes. They’ll love it.

Answer: It’s $1,689.

Henderson led the American League in stolen bases every year in the 1980s except one. That was 1987. He was injured that year and only played in 95 games — he was hurting for many of them. He stole “just” 41 bases. That would have led the National League in 2019.

The actual stolen base race went down to the final day. Seattle’s Harold Reynolds had 59 stolen bases and Kansas City’s Willie Wilson had 58. Wilson stole a base in the Royals’ win over the Twins to tie it, but Reynolds also stole a base off Texas knuckleballer Charlie Hough and won the title. It was a pretty big deal, as Reynolds says: It was the first time a Mariners player had led the league in a major category.

The next day, his phone rang. It’s Rickey. Reynolds was expecting congratulations.

This is what he heard instead.

“Sixty stolen bases? You ought to be ashamed. Rickey would have 60 stolen bases at the All-Star Break.”

And then Rickey hung up.

Right, we better get the third-person thing out of the way: Rickey did indeed call himself Rickey. Now to be fair, Rickey didn’t call himself Rickey quite as much as people claimed Rickey called himself Rickey. A lot of that stuff was for effect. A good Rickey Henderson story requires a good third-person reference. So, we don’t really know if, during negotiations with the San Diego Padres and GM Kevin Towers, he left a message that said: “Kevin, this is Rickey. Calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball.”

But isn’t it pretty to think so?

“Listen,” Henderson said, summing this whole thing up, “people are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey.’ But it’s been blown way out of proportion. People might catch me, when they know I’m ticked off, saying, ‘Rickey, what the heck are you doing, Rickey?’ They say, ‘Darn, Rickey, what are you saying Rickey for? Why don’t you just say I?’ But I never did. I always said ‘Rickey,’ and it became something for people to joke about.”

This one has been told in different ways but here is the most likely version: In 1996, at 37, Henderson played his first game in the National League. It was a big deal then. He played the bulk of his career when the leagues were really separate entities, before interleague play, before easy passageway between them. So, while everybody in the National League obviously knew about Rickey Henderson, he was still something of a curiosity when he joined the Padres.

His first game was against the Chicago Cubs, and Jaime Navarro was pitching.

Henderson stepped into the box and then he started talking to himself. Everyone knew about that routine in the American League; Henderson would constantly talk to himself, pump himself up, “Rickey gonna hit this guy! This guy’s got nothing! Rickey’s good, Rickey’s getting a hit, Rickey’s going to steal second and then steal third … ” and so on.

So he was going through that whole routine and behind the plate, Cubs catcher Scott Servais and home plate umpire Jim Quick were trying hard not to laugh. Nobody put on a show quite like Rickey … but with the count 2-2, Henderson swung and missed. And then he turned around toward Servais and Quick and he said this:

“That’s OK. Rickey still the man.”

The Athletic’s Jayson Stark was once doing a story on Lenny Dykstra — when Nails was evolving into the best leadoff hitter in the National League while Henderson dominated the American League. So naturally, Jayson wanted to ask Rickey about Lenny.

Jayson: So I’m writing this story about how Lenny Dykstra is becoming the National League version of you …

Rickey: Who is Lenny Dykstra?

Jayson (laughing): “He’s the other leadoff hitter.”

Rickey: “There ain’t no other leadoff hitter but me.”

Alex Rodriguez can remember times when Henderson would strike out looking. It didn’t happen often. As Jim Murray famously wrote, “He has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart.” Henderson would get into that familiar crouch, and he had the most discerning eye of anyone west of Ted Williams, and over his career, he walked about 500 more times than he struck out.

So, no, pitchers didn’t often slip that third pitch past him while he watched.

But every now and again they did, and when he would get back to the dugout, Rodriguez would ask, “Hey Rickey, was that a strike?”

And Henderson would say: “Maybe. But not to Rickey.”

It seems to be true that in 1996 or 1997, the San Diego Padres’ payroll department freaked out because they had a million-dollar surplus that they couldn’t identify. They kept looking and looking and finally came to understand that there was something wrong with the million-dollar bonus check they had given Henderson. So they went to Henderson and asked if there was any problem with it.

There wasn’t. Rickey hadn’t cashed it.

He’d framed it instead.

No player in baseball history had such an unusual relationship with money. On the one hand, he always felt desperately underpaid and was constantly fighting for more. It wasn’t spring training unless Henderson was holding out. As Don Mattingly once said when Henderson was not there on the first day of camp, “You have to say Rickey’s consistent. That’s what you want in a ballplayer: Consistency.”

Yes, Rickey negotiated hard. Once, during one of those disputes, he said, “If they want to pay me like (Mike) Gallego, I’ll play like Gallego.”*

*Gallego did not take that personally. He, like everyone else, loved Rickey. “When we were kids,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “we played in the backyard emulating Pete Rose’s stance or Joe Morgan’s. I believe Rickey emulated Rickey. He was his own star. He was the best at being Rickey.”

So, OK, yes, he wanted money. On the other hand, money seemed to mean nothing to him. There are so many stories of him not cashing checks. And you might know, he never spent a penny of his per diem meal money. He would instead stuff the cash in shoeboxes and whenever one of his daughters got good grades in school, he would let her go up and choose a shoebox, like an educational version of “Let’s Make A Deal.”

Rickey, much like Yogi Berra, sees the world through his own wonderful prism.* Someone asked him what he thought of a Sports Illustrated article in which Ken Caminiti said 50 percent of the players in baseball were using steroids (he actually said “at least half,” but that’s close enough). Rickey’s response? “The article said 50 percent. Well, I’m not one of them. So that’s 49 percent right there.”

*The two men, Rickey and Yogi, connected briefly in 1985. Henderson signed with the Yankees and Berra was the manager before getting fired after only 16 games. There was enough time for this: Berra was asked by reporters how he would handle Henderson’s baserunning. “He can run anytime he wants,” Berra said. “I’m giving him the red light.”

Then there was the time Henderson went on the Padres’ team bus and there were no open seats near the front. He looked around for a moment when someone — Steve Finley or Brad Ausmus seem to be the most likely candidates — said, “Just make them move and take any seat you want, Rickey. You’ve got tenure.”

To which Henderson responded, “Tenure? No, Rickey got 15 year.”

Then there’s the famous sign story. I have heard it told several different ways by several different people, so it might just be legend. But my favorite version is one Tony La Russa tells, of how when Henderson was traded from the Yankees back to Oakland in 1989, some of the newspapers were pretty ruthless. It’s true.

“The A’s manager,” Frank Blackman of the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “will have to apply his considerable skills to the care and feeding of one of the game’s most gifted — but reportedly most temperamental — players, Rickey Henderson.”

“Did A’s acquire Jekyll or Hyde?” asked the Sacramento Bee.

“I don’t care if the Yankees got three dogs and a rat for him,” one Yankees fan told a reporter in New York.

So Henderson was pretty ruffled when he met with La Russa for the first time. “Rickey’s a team player,” he kept saying again and again. La Russa said he was happy to hear that. And then they began discussing signs, and La Russa said that Henderson didn’t have to worry about all that because he would have a perpetual green light — steal at will.

“Does anybody else get the green light?” he asked. When La Russa shrugged, Henderson shook his head and said he didn’t want a green light. He wanted signs like everyone else. “Rickey’s a team player,” he said again. So La Russa, thrilled by the gesture, went over the signs, which included a swiping of the arms that would be used to take off all other signs.

In Henderson’s fourth game, the A’s were playing Toronto, and in the fifth inning, Henderson singled to right. The Blue Jays had a two-run lead and Jimmy Key on the mound. Key had a good pickoff move, so La Russa didn’t want Rickey running. He had his third-base coach go through all the signs and then swipe the arms to take off everything — no go sign. But on the next pitch, Henderson took off anyway and swiped second base. He scored on a single by Dave Henderson, and La Russa figured Rickey just missed the sign.

A little later, though, Rickey singled to put the A’s up 6-2. David Wells entered to pitch for the Blue Jays, and Wells also had a great pickoff move. So, again, La Russa wanted Rickey staying put. He had his third-base coach go through all the signs and then wipe the arms to take off any play. And once again, Henderson stole second on the next pitch.

Now, La Russa was hot. “Hey Rickey,” he said, “all that stuff about being a team player, what gives?”

Henderson looked at La Russa as if he had no idea what he was talking about.

“We gave you a sign,” La Russa continued. “Did you not see it?”

Henderson said, “Yeah, I saw it. You said if you wipe the arm, that means take off. And so Rickey took off.”

Rickey Henderson loved the game, absolutely loved it. It’s funny to think that there was a time when baseball left him cold, because by the end, well, he didn’t want it to end. He just kept playing and playing for anyone who would give him a uniform. Heck, when he was 44, he was kicking it around for an independent team in Newark in the hope that he could get just a few more at-bats.

He loved the game within the game. He loved to challenge players. He used to go up to catchers before games and say, “You think you can throw me out? Well, I’m gonna give you that chance.” Once against the Orioles, he was on first base and looked over at third baseman Floyd Rayford and held up a peace sign. Rayford didn’t know what he meant. 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.

Lord, did he love stealing third — he always told people it was easier than stealing second. Nobody else really believed that, but it was for Rickey: He stole third base 322 times, the most ever. Base-stealing stats for older players like Cobb are not complete, but we don’t know of anyone else who stole third even 200 times. Brock stole third just 79 times, for instance.

Rickey loved sliding headfirst. He used to say that he patterned his headfirst slide not after any person but after a passenger airplane. He was on a plane that had a rough landing, lots of bumps, and it occurred to him that this is what would happen to the body if he dove too high off the ground on his slide. And when the next plane landed without a bump, he developed that low-to-the-ground, graceful slide that he made famous.

He loved making people laugh and cheer and smile and just feel things. “I am a performer,” he used to say. “I give entertainment.”

He loved getting into a pitcher’s head and drawing walks. For Rickey, a walk wasn’t just as good as a hit, it was better. One of my favorite baseball statistics is that Henderson led off an inning with a walk 796 times in his career. That is just an impossible number. Think about it from the perspective of a pitcher: Henderson comes up first in an inning, what is the absolute last thing you would want to do? Right: Walk him.

And yet he walked 796 times leading off an inning — that’s more walks than Ryne Sandberg, Ernie Banks, Gwynn, Brock, Vladimir Guerrero or Berra had in their entire careers, and those include intentional walks. What a force of nature Rickey Henderson was.

There are so many great quotes about Rickey Henderson and Rickey Henderson quotes — who can forget how on the day he stole the base that broke the big-league record, he thanked a bunch of people and then said, “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base-stealing. But today, I am the greatest of all time!”

But my favorite Rickey Henderson quote is a simple one, offered by his old teammate Mitchell Page. He said, “Rickey Henderson is a run, man.” Yes, he was. Yes, he was.

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

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(Photo: Bettmann)