Everything I know about being cool, I learned from Rickey Henderson

Rickey was the best ballplayer I ever saw and I can't believe he's gone

I’m pretty sure Rickey Henderson is the first famous person I was aware of. Yeah, I guess I was probably aware of Big Bird first, but Big Bird is terrible on the base path and has minimal power at the plate, so who cares about him? When I learned today that he had died at the age of 65 from a bout of pneumonia I was completely shocked.

There’s a story that has been told 10,000 times in my family that shows how enamored I was by Rickey as a toddler. I’m guessing it was around 1983, but I was watching the A’s game on TV while my mom was sitting at the nearby kitchen table with one of her friends. I was doing that thing little kids are wont to do — dancing around and grabbing my crotch because I needed to pee, but completely refusing to actually go to the bathroom. You see, Rickey Henderson was on first base and even a little kid like me understood that something exciting could happen at any second. My mom saw what I was doing and didn’t feel like dealing with her son micturating upon himself, so she told me to go to the bathroom.

“Tell me what Rickey does!” I demanded. “I need to know what happens!”

Relieved that I had run off to the bathroom, my mom assumed I was just being a weird little kid and went back to her conversation. Surely I wouldn’t remember that I needed to know what Rickey did, that’s not how toddlers work. They have thoughts, yell them out, then never consider them again. Well, not this toddler. I returned from the bathroom and Rickey was standing on third base. I asked what happened and was furious that my mom didn’t know. We’ve laughed about this story for years.

And while I don’t remember the date of the game, I don’t need to in order to know what probably happened. Rickey stole second. Then he stole third. Because that’s what Rickey did.

With the possible exception of my parents, no other human being is as responsible for my love of baseball as Rickey Henderson. As a little kid, I thought he was capable of absolutely anything. He was a real life Superman. He was so fast that it felt completely unfair that he was allowed to steal bases, like there needed to be a rule made to level the playing field.

As I went through tee-ball and Little League, I wanted to be exactly like Rickey despite being the slowest child in all of Contra Costa County. But there were two ways I could emulate my idol, both of which drove my coaches crazy. You see, Rickey was known for his speed, but when the man took a walk he took longer to reach first base than anybody else in the league. It was as if he needed to conserve every single bit of energy just to unleash it on the base paths. Drawing walks was one of my primary skills (I was unappreciated as a ballplayer in the late ‘80s, my OBP was astounding. Some say I was Billy Beane’s inspiration for Moneyball), so you can be damn sure I took about six minutes to get to first. Just dropped my bat on home plate and took a stroll.

The other way I copied Rickey was in the outfield. He had a way of settling under a fly ball, waiting for the very last second to get his glove up, then swiping to catch it, and banging his glove into his thigh as he did so. It was, and still is, so fucking cool to watch. Also, an absolute nightmare for a coach trying to get kids to learn their fundamentals.

I begged and begged to get the bright green Mizuno batting gloves. I cried my eyes out when Rickey was traded to the Yankees, and was nearly delirious when he came back to Oakland. I was at Candlestick for game four of the 1989 World Series when his leadoff homer essentially slammed the door on the Giants and won the series for Oakland. I’ve heard every single story about Rickey’s eccentricities and I love them all, even the ones that were completely apocryphal.

When Rickey finally retired in 2003 I was a bit shook by it. I had made it into adulthood without ever knowing a world where Rickey wasn’t driving pitchers insane, I wasn’t sure baseball could even exist without him. And when he failed to get into the Hall of Fame by a unanimous vote, I demanded that the 28 idiots who didn’t vote for him be stripped of their credentials forever.

This past September I made my final trip to the Oakland Coliseum (which I wrote about here) to see the A’s one last time before the world’s most inept owner moved them to Sacramento/Las Vegas. It was the first and last time I got to see a game played on what had been called Rickey Henderson Field since 2017, so naturally I bought this shirt off of a bootlegger on our way through the parking lot.

Rickey was born in Chicago, but he was from Oakland. He grew up there. He was drafted to play there. He became the greatest base-stealer of all time there. And now Oakland has lost the A’s and Rickey within a couple of months. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Just a couple of days ago, I was telling Kim about the Full Share story. For those who don’t know it, here it is from Mike Piazza’s biography:

“[He] was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out “Full Share!” We’d argue for a while, and he’d say, “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life.”

I couldn’t imagine baseball without Rickey Henderson in it, and it’s hard to imagine a world without him either. A lot of thieves don’t make it past the Pearly Gates, but even God himself doesn’t have a quick enough pickoff move to keep Rickey out. He really was the greatest.