BB On this Date ~ Events & Birthdays #2

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if you could name one player in the history of baseball who was the Platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, who would you name?

Rickey.

Even today, 21 years after Rickey Henderson's last big league appearance and as the news of his death just four days before his 66th birthday reached us, that first name is likely the immediate response to the question. That's your answer whether you're a Gen Xer who was a child when Henderson broke in with the Oakland Athletics, or a Gen Zer who was a child when he played his last game for the Los Angeles Dodgers 25 years later.

Rickey. If you have even a passing knowledge of baseball history, that name is all you need to answer the question. The name encapsulates so much.

Set aside for a second everything you know (or think you know) about Henderson as a one-of-a-kind personality and just consider what he was on the field. There, too, he was singular, and not just because he threw left-handed and batted righty.

For every team, the leadoff hitter is one of the most important roles on the roster -- and it was a role Henderson played better than anyone before or since.

What Rickey did
Think of the crucial traits you want in a leadoff hitter: getting on base, stealing bases and scoring runs. Let's take them in order.

1. Getting on base.

Henderson is one of just 63 players to retire with a career on-base percentage over .400. Only three players reached base more times than his career total of 5,343: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb.


'Greatest of all time' Rickey Henderson dies at 65
2dHoward Bryant and Jeff Passan

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  Rickey Henderson will always be a baseball, Oakland legend
  3dMarc J. Spears

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 the majority of his career, but he also started more than 1,100 games in other spots. Bonds started off as a leadoff hitter but is much better known for what he did further down in the lineup. Cobb started just 29 games in the leadoff slot.

In other words, no leadoff hitter has ever gotten on base more often than Henderson.

And of course, there was no player who you wanted to keep off the bases more, because he did so much damage once he was there.

2. Stealing bases.

Steals is the category that will likely always be most associated with Henderson. He's the all-time leader in single-season steals (130 in 1982) and the career leader (1,406). That career total is almost right at 50% above the second-highest mark, Lou Brock's 938.

It's hard to describe how we looked at Henderson during his apex in the 1980s, a decade in which he swiped 838 bags. It almost felt like he had broken baseball. Perhaps the perfect example of this: July 29, 1989, when Henderson was playing for Oakland and facing Seattle, with future Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson starting for the Mariners. Henderson played the full game and did not record an official at-bat. Instead, he walked four times, stole five bases and scored four runs.

Every walk felt like at least a double but perhaps a triple; so did every single. The geometry of the sport felt inadequate to accommodate his ability. You can't help but wonder how many bases Henderson might steal now, with the new set of steal-friendly rules in place.

Let's say a long-ball hitter dominated the home run category over his peers the way Henderson did the stolen base column. That slugger would have finished with around 1,143 homers -- or 1.5 times the final tally for Bonds.

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. From age 33 on, he tacked on another 412, a total which by itself would rank 68th on the career list.

With so many things Henderson did, the scope of it all now takes on an air of mythology, 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. He last led the AL in steals in 1998 with 66 -- when he was 39.

3. Scoring runs.

Despite all those stolen bases, and all those times on base, Henderson likely still saw those things as a means to his ultimate goal for any trip to the plate: scoring.

In 2009, around the time of his induction to the Hall of Fame, Henderson told reporters, "To me the most important thing was stirring things up and scoring some runs so we could win a ballgame."

No one scored more runs. His 2,295 times crossing the plate is the record, 50 more than Cobb and 68 more than Bonds. Only eight players have ever cracked the 2,000-run barrier. The active leader -- the Dodgers' Freddie Freeman, who has played 15 years in the majors -- is at 1,298, nearly 1,000 shy of the mark. It's a staggering figure.

What Rickey meant
For much of his career, a lot of what Henderson did beyond stealing bases was underappreciated. He played so long that he was around to see perceptions of baseball value shift more than in any time in the sport's history, but during most of his years, batting average earned more attention than on-base percentage, and RBIs held sway over runs.

The illustration of this came in 1985, when Henderson batted leadoff for a Yankees team that featured that year's MVP, Don Mattingly. It might have been Henderson's best overall season: He hit .314 while drawing 99 walks, stealing 80 bases, clubbing 24 homers and scoring 146 runs -- his career high, a figure tied for the fourth-highest total of the integration era.

If current analytical practices were in place then, Henderson would have been the likely AL MVP, as his 9.9 bWAR total led the AL (and dwarfed that of Mattingly, who won the award with 6.5). Henderson finished third in a hotly contested race among himself, Mattingly and George Brett.

Mattingly's 145 RBIs likely won the votes he needed for that award, but he wouldn't have reached that total without Henderson in front of him: Donnie Baseball drove in Rickey 56 times that season. Henderson did win an MVP award in 1990 -- but he probably should have won one or two more.

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Eventually, the analytics caught up with Henderson's greatness, and there are few who would dispute his stature at this point. We have WAR at our disposal now, and Henderson's total of 111.1 is the 19th highest in the history of a sport that dates to 1871 -- without a doubt, among the very best who ever put on a uniform.

Still, he was more than his numbers. For legions of Gen X baseball fans, especially those on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was the mere act of stealing a base or imitating his sleek, low-slung, head-first slide into the bag, he was one of those players you would pretend to be on the sandlot. He was one of those players you wished you could be.

If you were of that generation, you were about 10 years old when he arrived in Oakland in 1979. By the time he finally left the majors -- not of his own volition, as Henderson would have played on and on if it were up to him -- you were in your mid-30s, with adult responsibilities and virtually no memory of Major League Baseball without Rickey.

Henderson was almost without antecedent, the only real historical comparison being the legendary Cool Papa Bell of the Negro Leagues. Whatever you might think of Henderson given his quirky and often misinterpreted public persona, the man knew his history. He would sometimes use "Cool Papa Bell" as an alias when checking into a hotel.

My favorite anecdote about Henderson might be apocryphal, at least in that I have no way to verify it. But it's harmless, so I'll pass it along. There's something beautiful in imagining it to be true.

A few years ago when I was in Cooperstown, I was chatting with a man who kept a boat on one of the docks of Otsego Lake, which spreads away from the bottom of the hill on which Cooperstown resides.

The man told me that during the weekend on which Henderson was inducted, Rickey approached him and asked how much it would cost to be taken out in the man's boat. They agreed to a price and headed out. Henderson was "dressed to the nines" and wearing wraparound sunglasses.

The unlikely pair went out into the water a ways, then stopped. Henderson sat there looking back at the village, home to baseball's immortals, arrayed along the hillside. He didn't speak. Just looked, swaying with the water. After a few minutes, Henderson asked to be taken back to shore. That was it. The man had no idea what Henderson was thinking about during those minutes.

That was in 2009, four years after Henderson played his last season in independent ball in 2005. For the 39 years before that, since his pro career began in the minors in 1976 when he was 17, he did it his way, which was the perfect way.

In doing so, he became more than a player, but an archetype. Rickey, the leadoff man. No one will ever be more suited for a role on the baseball field than he was for that job. And no one is likely to ever do it better.

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BASEBALL BIRTHDAYS 12.25.24

1856 James "Pud" Galvin HOF pitcher (MLB's first 300-game winner; no-hitters 1880, 84; Buffalo Bisons)


1908 Jo-Jo Moore left fielder (MLB All Star 1934–38, 40; World Series 1933; NY Giants)


1927 Nellie Fox Hall of Fame infielder (15 x MLB All Star; AL MVP 1959; Chicago White Sox),


1946 Gene Lamont catcher (Detroit Tigers) and manager (Manager of the Year 1993 Chicago White Sox; Pittsburgh Pirates


1950 Manny Trillo second baseman. 1973-89 (4 × MLB All-Star; World Series Champion 1980; 3 × Gold Glove; Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago, and 5 other teams


1958 HOF Rickey Henderson outfielder (10 × MLB All-Star; World Series 1989 Oakland A's, 1993 Toronto Blue Jays; AL MVP 1990; MLB stolen bases record 1,406)


1975 Hideki Okajima, Japanese baseball pitcher (3 × NPB All-Star; MLB All Star 2007; first Japanese-born pitcher to play in World Series, Game 2 2007 Boston Red Sox; Yomiuri Giants)

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Today in Baseball History
December 25th​

1888 In front of 2,000 spectators, the first indoor baseball game ever played takes place at the Philadelphia State Fairground Building. The Downtowners beat the Uptowners, 6-1, with the teams using a larger-than-usual ball, a crude bat, and their bare hands.

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1927 Future Hall of Famer second baseman Jacob Nelson Fox is born in St. Thomas, Pennsylvania. 'Nellie,' a .288 career hitter playing for the A's, White Sox, and Astros during his 19 seasons in the big leagues, will become the last active major league player to have Connie Mack as a manager.

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1958 All-time career stolen base leader outfielder Rickey Henderson is born in Chicago. The 'Man of Steal' will end his 25-year Hall of Fame career with 1406 thefts.

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1989 Billy Martin dies in an automobile accident as a passenger on an icy road near his home in Binghamton, New York. An unconfirmed rumor, denied by George Steinbrenner, had the 61-year-old ready to become the Yankees' manager for a sixth time, replacing Bucky Dent if the team faltered at the start of the 1990 season.

 

2001 Signing a one-year, $4.7 million contract to play for the Yomiuri Giants, Hideki Matsui became the highest-paid player in Japanese baseball history. The outfielder's salary surpasses the $4 million mark the Orix Blue Wave gave Ichiro Suzuki for the 2000 season.

2019 Edwin Encarnacion and the White Sox agree to a one-year, $12 million deal with a club option for an additional season. The 36-year-old infielder/DH plays 44 games in the COVID-shorten season before ending his 16-year career with a .260 lifetime batting average.
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12/26/24
BASEBALL BIRTHDAYS

1927 Stu Miller pitcher, 1952-68 (St. Louis Cardinals; New York/San Francisco Giants, and 3 other teams)


1940 Ray Sadecki (St. Louis Cardinals)


1947 Carlton Fisk HOF catcher (11 x MLB All Star; AL Rookie of the Year 1972; Boston Red Sox, White Sox


1948 Chris Chambliss 1st baseman (MLB All Star 1976; World Series 1977, 78 NY Yankees; AL Rookie of the Year 1971 Cleveland Indians)


1954 Ozzie Smith Hall of Fame infielder (15 x MLB All-Star; 13 x Gold Glove Award; World Series 1982; NL Silver Slugger Award 1987; NLCS MVP 1985; SD Padres, St Louis Cardinals


1964 Jeff King infielder (Pittsburgh Pirates),

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This Day in Baseball History
December 26th​

1906 National League umpire Hank O'Day suggests using white rubber strips to mark the batter's box to prevent hitters from rubbing out chalk lines. The former right-handed hurler and future Hall of Famer will interrupt his 30-year umpiring career to pilot the Reds in 1912 and the Cubs in 1914, becoming the only person ever to play, manage, and umpire for a full season in the major leagues.

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1919 Although not official until January, the Yankees buy Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, who won the World Series with their carousing star in 1915, 1916, and 1918, for $125,000 and guaranteed a $300,000 loan with Fenway Park as collateral. The sale of the 25-year-old southpaw and soon-to-be slugger will be the start of the 'Curse of the Bambino,' a spell of bad luck that will last for 86 years, ending in 2004 when Boston wins its next Fall Classic.

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1934 Commissioner Judge Landis denies the Dodgers' claim to Johnny Vander Meer's services, stating Brooklyn was guilty of waiting until the team could determine how good the southpaw was before lodging a protest. Brooklyn had assigned the left-handed free agent had signed to the independently-owned Daytona Ducks, the team that traded him to the Scranton Miners, the Braves' Class A in the New York-Penn League.

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1950 With a large portion going to the players' pension fund, outgoing Commissioner Happy Chandler announces the Gillette Razor Company has purchased the television rights to the All-Star Game for six years for six million dollars.

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1964 The Seattle Angels select 45-year-old Bob Lemon as the club's manager for the upcoming season. After capturing the circuit's championship, the future big-league skipper, named The Sporting News Manager of the Year in 1966, will pilot the team for two seasons before piloting the Royals, White Sox, and Yankees in the American League.

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1990 The Fort Myers Sun Sox franchise of the Senior Professional Association League folds due to its owners' financial disagreement. The monetary dispute will lead to the collapse of the circuit in the middle of its second season.

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2001 The Angels sign Seattle free agent Aaron Sele (15-5, 3.60) to a three-year, $24 million contract. The 31-year-old right-hander has compiled a 107-68 career record pitching for the Red Sox, Rangers, and Mariners during his major league nine-year tenure.


2007 With the acquisition of Mark Prior, the Padres add another pitcher to the staff who will start next season coming off shoulder surgery, joining southpaw Randy Wolf. The 27-year-old former Cub right-hander signs a one-year, $1 million deal, which can be worth more with performance bonuses.

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2008 Randy Johnson (11-10, 3.91), a five-time Cy Young Award recipient, signs a one-year, $8 million deal with the Giants. The 45-year-old southpaw, five victories shy of 300, joins a staff that includes Tim Lincecum (2008) and Barry Zito (2002), who have also won the prestigious pitching prize.

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Roberto Clemente and Willie McCovey
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Ozzie Smith. The HOFer had 15 All Star selections & 13 straight Gold Gloves. He won a World Series title in 1982 & was NLCS MVP in 1985. He collected 2,460 hits & 580 steals in his career. Here is a complete career run of his Topps base cards

 

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