Rickey Henderson 1958-2024

[Frayed Knot]

BB-Ref mentions his (somewhat obscure) record of Most Times Reaching Base of any RH Hitter

[Gwreck]

Frayed Knot wrote: BB-Ref mentions his (somewhat obscure) record of Most Times Reaching Base of any RH Hitter

I would've guessed that record belonged to Aaron or Mays, both of whom are a fair bit higher on the hits leaderboard.

[Edgy MD]

But Rickey, on the other hand, walked about a million times.

[whippoorwill]

I remember that Rickey was exactly six months older than I

[batmagadanleadoff]

He was named after Rickey Nelson.



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[Frayed Knot]

=batmagadanleadoff post_id=181608 time=1734895492 user_id=68]
He was named after Rickey Nelson.

[Bob Alpacadaca]

Frayed Knot wrote: =batmagadanleadoff post_id=181608 time=1734895492 user_id=68] He was named after Rickey Nelson.

The fact that he played for nine different clubs, including the Yanquis twice, the Padres twice, and Oakland four times ... kind of made him a Travelin' Man, didn't it?

[Edgy MD]

Dan Brouthers is the leader with 11.* Rickey (nine teams) is tied for second place with Rich Gossage, Deacon White, and Hoyt Wilhelm. Gaylord is just behind them with eight, tied for fifth with Jim O'Rourke and Lee Smith.



The best part of all that is that, somehow, it still feels like Henderson could eventually take the lead, despite having now passed on.



* Nineteenth-century star Brouthers gets something of an asterisk. One of the teams he played for was in the one-year-only Players League, which was a solid league full of National League walkouts, but not all historians accept as a major league. They're probably full of it, though. The talent was pretty indisputable. (The Federal League is another matter.)



Also, eight years after what had been thought to be his final MLB game, a 46-year-old Brouthers laced 'em up for two games (five plate appearances) with the Giants, adding an 11th and final team to his total. It's not clear what the circumstances were, but it wasn't uncommon in the era for coaches who were retired players to take the field in the final innings of blowouts. Brouthers managed the press box for John McGraw's club after his career so it's possible he was in the house wearing civilian garb and ran down to the field and borrowed some spikes when McGraw called on him.

[Bob Alpacadaca]

Fascinating! Thanks, Edgy!

[Edgy MD]

Two 11-teamers with a chance of making the Hall-of-Fame and tying Brouthers:



> Kenny Lofton (decent chance)

> Bartolo Colón (outsidish chance)

[batmagadanleadoff]

Frayed Knot wrote: =batmagadanleadoff post_id=181608 time=1734895492 user_id=68] He was named after Rickey Nelson.

The fact that he played for nine different clubs, including the Yanquis twice, the Padres twice, and Oakland four times ... kind of made him a Travelin' Man, didn't it?

[Edgy MD]

Andrew L. and I weren't tight back in our school days. He was clever and confident and I less so. He played third base on the AOT team that beat my Halperin Shoes team two games to one in the 1980 championship series of the Rockville Centre Little League Minors Division. We were 14-2 during the regular season that year and should have won the series pretty handily, but our star pitcher and my best frenemy Eric G. was dealing with a scrotum infection and was fading over the last two innings. With one out to go, Andrew hit a two-run triple to tie things up, and a double by Henry F. plated him with the go-ahead run. We went down in order in the bottom of the inning, and that was that.



Andrew also successfully defended me from a wife-murder rap in a mock trial in seventh or eight-grade. I knew he had the bug, and he would grow up and be a successful attorney, and indeed he has. During our trial prep, I learned he also had a baseball-card collecting bug. I loved my cards, but there was no way I could go after special rare ones, and try and complete sets like he did.



Decades later, Andrew and I are Fezbook friends. We rarely engage, though. I saw him at a thirtieth anniversary reunion, though. I was actually catching up with frenemy Eric, whose scrotum had long since healed, but he was really in the bag when I arrived, and talking out of school. He sees Andrew and says something ridiculously anti-Jewish. I didn't know where it had come from. Both these guys were Jewish, though and I briefly thought, hey, I guess, maybe, this is OK to say among themselves? Maybe they'd kept in touch and regularly talk to each other like this.



It wasn't, though, and they hadn't and didn't, and Andrew looked at Eric like he was trying to come up with a reason not to kill him, and then walked away. I resigned myself to the sad reality that frenemy Eric had not improved over the decades, and getting drunk and stirring the pot was probably a pretty regular thing for him, and not that different from the guy I hadn't seen since 1992 or so. I wrote Andrew an apology that night before I went to bed. "Hey, I was with the guy, but I wasn't with him, you know?"



That's far more than you need to know about Andrew L. (or Eric), but about a year ago, his brother friended me. I didn't really remember his brother Jon at all, except that Andrew caught the card collecting bug from him. Turns that Jon has become the nuttiest of memorabilia collectors. If you suddenly remember an actor from who is out of circulation like Richard Benjamin, Jon will tell you that Benjamin married Paula Prentiss and they were both in movies about robots that look like people — Westworld and The Stepford Wives, respectively — and they've been together 60 years and he has an original print of their wedding photo signed by both.



You can't get Lou Klimchock's autograph to complete your 1966 Mets collection, because Lou never appears in public and his address isn't listed? Jon has you covered, as he tracked Lou down through one of his old marine buddies and has been to his house. Stuff like that.



Turns out the prize of his Rickey Henderson collection — and you just know he has a Rickey Henderson collection — is the yearbook from Rickey's 1976 senior year at Oakland Technical High School. (Go, Bulldogs!). And he of course got Rickey's signature.



And so we learn that Rickey was a Capricorn.



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[whippoorwill]

As was Jesus.



Cool story!

[DocTee]

Two interesting (to me) things about that yearbook:



1. They spell his name without the E

2. They don't list his membership on the team for the sport in which he would eventually be enshrined in the HoF

[Benjamin Grimm]

Ricky Nelson didn't have the E either.



Strange that the yearbook gives everyone's Zodiac sign.



And I wonder if Kenneth Humphrey still has the hairdo and the bowtie.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Rickey was way into football. Bryant's book clears up the name issue, forget exactly what went down.

[smg58]

Frayed Knot wrote: He was named after Rickey Nelson. The fact that he played for nine different clubs, including the Yanquis twice, the Padres twice, and Oakland four times ... kind of made him a Travelin' Man, didn't it? He was really, really really named after Rickey Nelson. His middle name was Nelson.

Well his attitude could be summed up as "you see you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself."

[Edgy MD]

The way I remember it, Rickey's dream gig was to be a halfback on the Oakland Raiders, but despite a bunch of football scholarship offers, his mom convinced him that baseball players have longer careers.

[G-Fafif]

On the eve of what should have been his 66th birthday, a remembrance of https://www.faithandfearinflushing.com/2024/12/24/rickey-henderson-singular/Rickey Henderson, New York Met.

[metirish]

This is behind a paywall, poor taste to say the least from Mushnick

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, the NY Post moved Mushnick's column, and those of several others, behind a paywall recently.

I've been a mostly regular reader of his column for a while now (guess I won't be going forward though). Liked his stuff more often than not and have exchanged occasional emails with him about what he's written, mostly positive, sometimes not. Is he a curmudgeon yelling at clouds and at kids to get off his lawn? Oh hell yes.



But with the obvious caveat that I haven't/can't read what he wrote about Rickey here, I essentially know what it says because Mushnick tends to hammer the same points so often.

So I'm going with the assumption that just because Rickey is the most prolific base stealer of all time Mushnick is saying that doesn't make him the best base runner of all time. Because while Pete Rose made a career of turning singles into doubles and doubles into triples, Rickey, through his styling and sometimes just plain lack of hustle, would occasionally do the opposite. The primo example that most of us here should remember was his final hit as a Met, a ball he smoked to deep left. Rickey was sure it was out jogged to 1st with his head down the entire time only to find out when he got there that the ball didn't even reach the warning track (too much topspin) meaning the 'best baserunner ever' had just singled off the LF wall. He didn't help his cause after the game when he denied that he needed to be on 2nd base there since he hit the ball hard enough to go out therefore it wasn't his fault that it failed to clear the fence. It's just one example but it was hardly the only one. Lou Piniella, one of his Yanqui managers, accused him of not hustling on multiple occasions ("jaking it" was the term he used).

Also, how does someone with all that speed wind up with just 66 career triples, a mere 19 more than Rusty Staub* despite 2,000 more plate appearances?

Rickey out-SB'd Rusty by 1,300+ but only out-3B'd him by 19?



Anyway, I'm sure examples like those are at the heart of Phil's point. And while I suspect he likely overstates things, it doesn't make him wrong. Nor do I think bringing this all up is in poor taste. The death of someone in the public eye is a time for a review of their life. That doesn't mean the summary needs to be whitewashed.











* Staub's and Henderson's offensive stats are remarkably similar except for the obvious areas of SBs and Rickey's prodigious walk rate.

OPS+ 127 v 124; XBH: 873 v 838; HRs: 297 v 292; 2Bs: 510 v 499

[batmagadanleadoff]

Frayed Knot wrote: Nor do I think bringing this all up is in poor taste. The death of someone in the public eye is a time for a review of their life. That doesn't mean the summary needs to be whitewashed.

Totally agree. Besides, we're talking about public figures here. Celebrities. People that have lived their whole lives in the public eye. And presumably, none of us knew them on a personal level. So of course it's fair game. This is such an annoying pet peeve of mine. What? We shouldn't have said bad things about Charles Manson, either, right after he died? Ninny talk. OOOOOh. What bad taste! I'm with the Vipers! Everybody's an angel that goes to Heaven. So show me where Heaven is. Like on a fucking map. Thank you.

[metirish]

I take back my poor taste jibe , in fact it was poor taste from me having not read the actual article, so here it is , agree with above, a curmudgeon for sure , I remember him years ago railing against sports teams adopting black jerseys , on the Vince McMahon doc he comes across as the one person actually looking into the WWF and McMahon back in the 80s