Thursday, May 15, 2008
Say what you will about his attitude, he walks the walk. And in the last few days he's walked right into the record books -- twice.
Oct 9, 2001 | For years I've had this ritual. Every morning, I log onto my computer, check for desperate e-mails from desperate editors, then open the bookmark for Rickey Henderson's career stats. I scroll down to the runs-scored column and see if, based on last night's action, the number has inched closer to 2,245.
It's the kind of guilty pleasure only a baseball fan can understand. Baseball is the only sport where stats really resonate, where you can forge a connection with your favorite player based on a page full of numbers. It was about eight years ago that I first noticed that Henderson had a legitimate shot at breaking the longest-standing major hitting record on the books: Ty Cobb's mark of 2,245 runs scored. And this is the week that he finally did it.
Being a Rickey Henderson fan is a guilty pleasure in itself. Friends -- smart baseball fans, some even baseball writers -- view any mention of my Rickey Watch as an open invitation to trash him. "He is the biggest jerk," goes the chorus. No, it's not personal -- he didn't refuse to sign an autograph or blow off an interview. It's simply a style thing: '80s retro notwithstanding the snatch catches, the wraparound sunglasses, his "I am the greatest of all time" speech, they simply rub people the wrong way.
But as Ty Cobb -- or was it Freud? -- once said, "It ain't braggin' if you can back it up." Say what you will about Henderson's 'tude, he walks the walk. When he burst onto the scene with the Oakland A's in '79 (around the time that Bill James earned a place beside Henry James on my bookshelf), he was the epitome of the postmodern baseball player. His genius was subtle, and to appreciate it took an aficionado's eye -- it was the baseball equivalent of touting Tobe Hooper as an auteur. Henderson's batting average may be average (.280 career), but look at that .403 on-base percentage. Sure he steals bases (1,395 to date) better than anyone ever, but he'd be a Hall of Famer without a single sack swiped. He was, inarguably, the best leadoff man ever, and I didn't have to read about him in Total Baseball, I could watch him on the Game of the Week. The Ali-like swagger was merely a bonus.
And for a little while, I got to see Henderson every day, his rock-solid physique poured into skintight Yankee pinstripes in a way that surely made Joe DiMaggio blush. I relished the way he worked a pitcher, sinking into his Eddie Gaedel crouch, shrinking further as the high fastball approached the plate. And then, inevitably, the desperate pitcher would lay in a 3-0 fastball, and Rickey would uncoil and drive the ball into the left center field bleachers. Four pitches, 1-0. And the Rickey Rally -- a walk, two stolen bases and a sacrifice fly -- was purist baseball at its best. Scoring runs, after all, is baseball's bottom line, and no one's better at it than Rickey Henderson.
In 1985, playing for the Yankees, he had one of the great seasons in baseball history, scoring 146 runs in 143 games. And then he lost the MVP to the guy who drove him in, the paler and more palatable Don Mattingly. When Henderson moved on to Oakland, Toronto and points west, I dutifully followed his exploits in the morning's box scores.
His stay at Shea? It wasn't an easy time to be a Henderson fan. The sports-talk callers were ready to burn him in effigy for allegedly playing cards in the Mets clubhouse with Bobby Bonilla after he was lifted from Game 6 of the 1999 National League Championship Series. Everyone seemed to forget that the Mets wouldn't have even made the postseason sans Henderson. Then early the next spring, Rickey broke into a home run trot only to have the ball bounce off the wall. Rickey got no further than first. "I hit it out, but it didn't go out," he said sheepishly, only hours before he got his walking papers.
That goes with the territory. Ruth drank. Cobb was a virulent racist. Henderson marches to the beat of his own inner Elvin Jones. Rickey talks to himself. ("That's not how Rickey swings.") He talks to his bats. ("Which one of you bad boys got some hits in you?") He talks about himself in the third person. ("This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey.") Hell, he even throws left and bats right.
Indeed, Henderson has become something of a fin-de-millennium Yogi Berra. During his first go-round with the San Diego Padres, he was looking for a seat on the team bus and teammate Steve Finley said, "Sit anywhere you want, you got tenure."
"Ten years? What are you talking about? Rickey got 16, 17 years." The bus broke up.
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