Baseball’s stolen base king was born at high speed, on Christmas Day 1958, in the back of an Oldsmobile hurtling through a blizzard toward a Chicago-area hospital.
The man who would go on to swipe a record 1,406 bags would often joke about his wonderfully apropos origin story.
“I was already fast,” Rickey Henderson said about his birth in a 2009 MLB Network Documentary. “I couldn’t wait.”
Henderson, unequivocally the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, died Saturday at the age of 65. His wife and three daughters offered a statement, confirming his passing.
“A legend on and off the field, Rickey was a devoted son, dad, friend, grandfather, brother, uncle, and a truly humble soul,” the family statement read. “Rickey lived his life with integrity, and his love for baseball was paramount. Now, Rickey is at peace with the Lord, cherishing the extraordinary moments and achievements he leaves behind.”
Henderson was a statistical thunderstorm. His numbers befuddle, overwhelm. The Hall of Famer is one of only two position players to appear in 25 MLB seasons, playing 3,081 games over that span, fourth in MLB history. Across a quarter-century, Henderson compiled quite a résumé. He stole 468 more bases than anybody else. His 2,190 walks sit second all time, behind only Barry Bonds. Among position players to debut after integration in 1947, Henderson’s 111.1 bWAR ranks fifth, behind Bonds, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Alex Rodriguez.
He was, simply, one of the best to ever do it.
But Henderson’s legacy is so much more than the numbers. As a player, Henderson was magnificent, magnetic, game-changing. But Rickey, the character, was, as his biographer Howard Bryant wrote, an American original. He was disruptive, flamboyant, proudly unwilling to conform to baseball’s old-school, overwrought commitment to performative humility.
In an era in which players were reluctant to express themselves, Henderson wore neon-green batting gloves and a gold necklace with a diamond pendant emblazoned with the number 130, after his record-setting stolen-base total in 1982. He admired his home runs, punctuating them with the swaggering style of a showman well before his time. And, of course, Rickey famously referred to himself, on occasion, in the third person.
His was an unshakable confidence that was crafted and molded on the hardscrabble streets of Oakland, California, where Rickey relocated with his family as a 7-year-old in 1966. It was in Oakland, the birthplace of…