A Candle for Rickey | Baseball Prospectus

I learned so much from watching Rickey Henderson. I learned essential truths about baseball, about the sang-froid that allows for casual greatness, about my own father and his susceptibility to surface-level propaganda. I learned to watch my pen. A writer without a pen is like a hitter without a bat, and Rickey had taken mine.

My only personal interaction with Henderson—and it was barely that—came one grey morning when the Yankees’ Old Timers Day festivities had been delayed by rain. The baseball grampas had retired to the auxiliary clubhouse (really the original locker room, the pre-renovation den of Ruth and Gehrig) and were just killing time, sometimes in conversation with me. I wanted to chat with Henderson—Rickey—not because there was a specific topic I was pursuing, but because I had never before had the chance to engage with the player who had dominated the baseball of my New York-area youth, and I wasn’t going to pass up the chance. The problem was that Rickey wasn’t all that interested, so I stood next to him with my recorder, pad, and pen at the ready, and like Christopher Reeve playing Clark Kent, shuffled my feet and stuttered in his general direction, ineffectually trying to get his attention.

What Rickey really wanted to do was play hearts. He knelt on the floor and (if I recall correctly) Ken Griffey père and Jesse Barfield joined him as he shuffled cards. As Rickey began to deal, Griffey reminded him that they had no way to keep score. The greatest leadoff man of all time looked up, saw me, saw my pen and pad, and extended his hand. Reflexively—who was I to say no to a God of the Game?—I handed over both. He tore a piece of paper and handed back the pad. He kept the pen.

I watched as Rickey wrote out the names of the players on the page. Did I politely wait out a game of hearts, or give up? Then an amazing thing happened: I witnessed the Rickeyness of Rickey. Someone walked past—I never saw who—and shouted, “Hey, Rickey!” Whoever it was must have mattered to him, because he smiled and answered in kind. Somehow the momentary distraction completely derailed his train of thought. It seemed to me that for a moment he had no idea what he had been doing just seconds earlier. He looked at the pen in his hand as if he had no comprehension of how it had gotten there. He looked down at the piece of paper with a similarly bemused expression. He looked up at me, waiting. He drew a logical conclusion: He autographed the page and handed it to me.

I hesitated for a crucial moment. Although I had seen other writers ask players to sign things, I understood that this was considered a spectacularly unprofessional thing to do, an act that would get your press pass revoked if you were observed. The page hovered between us for a long second, quivering in the air. My resolve not to take it weakened; I unclenched my hand and—but no, for in that moment, Rickey remembered. Shaking his head like he was clearing an Etch-a-Sketch, he withdrew his hand, flipped the page over to the blank side, and rewrote the names of the players. I watched, bereft of both pen and Hall of Fame signature, as the game of hearts began. I never did get either one of them back.

***

If you followed Rickey’s career in real time, then you’re probably familiar with the sort of story I just told. Coverage tended to be split between acknowledgements of his greatness and jokes about his eccentric, seemingly airheaded tendencies. What was rarely considered, if at all, was that one was predicated on the other. Rickey’s personality and his multifarious areas of excellence between the foul lines went hand in hand. You could no more divorce his talent from his personality and expect him to have been the same player than you could subtract Ty Cobb’s intensity and retain the 12 batting titles, or extract Babe Ruth’s joie de vivre and keep the 12 home-run crowns. This was a player who participated in more major-league ballgames than anyone in history except for Pete Rose, Carl Yastrzemski, and Henry Aaron, and unlike Rose he didn’t have the privilege of putting himself in the lineup. He simply took himself from team to team, a new one almost every year from the mid-1990s on, no longer an All-Star or an MVP candidate but still retaining enough of his old skills to be playable into his forties. Have bat, will travel—the stress could eat you alive if you let it. He didn’t, and if any of it ever got to him he didn’t let it show.

Rickey was not above self-aggrandizement—he wasn’t exactly humble on the day he broke Lou Brock’s career stolen-base record, and he probably shouldn’t have been—but in an age in which some in public life are constantly reminding us of how great they are, the idea that one could just play the game at a high level without indulging in any performative nonsense about how they were slogging their way through a grinding, joyless war is retroactively refreshing. Besides, Rickey didn’t slog and he didn’t trudge. He burst. He almost certainly wasn’t the fastest player in the game based on raw running speed, but no one was ever faster on their first step out of their lead. Even the best baserunners need to bank up a head of steam before reaching their maximum. Rickey got there instantly. That was the 1,406-stolen base difference.

“Retroactively” is key, because at the time, particularly in the Yankees years but occasionally at other times as well, Rickey received a great deal of grief for not wanting to play—because his hamstrings were sore, or he had a headache, or he wasn’t mentally prepared. I don’t know (and don’t care) if Lou Piniella was a Hall of Fame manager or not, but if his treatment of Henderson in 1987 is keeping him out of Cooperstown that would be a just reward. In 1987 the hot new baseball term, courtesy of Piniella and George Steinbrenner, was “jaking it,” faking an injury.

“I want to play,” Henderson said, “but my leg doesn’t let me play.” That should have been it—no one ever questioned Don Mattingly’s back the way they questioned Henderson’s hamstrings—but the papers and the talk radio hosts turned against him. The temptation is to see the difference in terms of complexion, one of those reflexive facts of American life that some commentators were probably conscious of and some were not, but it acted upon their perceptions nevertheless.

The mid-1980s were unsure economic times. My father, immigrant striver, well-compensated when he worked but struggling to stay afloat in an unstable field as middle age and changing technology put him on the edge of obsolescence, absorbed some of that hostility. He didn’t follow the game closely but he absorbed the anti-Rickey commentary because it was unavoidable. He would come upon me watching that day’s Yankees game, see Rickey plainly enjoying himself, and think he was getting away with something. He would ask me why this jerk who clearly didn’t care about his profession was making $1.5 or $2 million a year—approximately $1.5 or $2 million a year more than he was making—when he worked so hard.

I always tried to explain. I told my father how good Rickey was. At other times I pulled back the camera and said that ballplayers are like movie stars, and if 50,000 people a day bought tickets to watch my dad work then he would be compensated at a higher level too. He would seem to get it—and then Rickey would laugh in the dugout, stick out his tongue for no particular reason, make a snatch-catch, or spend half an inning arguing with the fans in the left-field stands—and then my father would start the argument all over again.

That was a quirk of my father’s personality; he tended not to lose arguments because even when he seemed to lose a point he would press some sort of mental reset button and make you argue it all over again. This spring, nearly 40 years later, as my father was dying, I tried to resolve this argument. Rickey meant a lot to me as a baseball fan, but I don’t think he mattered to me so much that I took the battle up again because I needed my father to validate my opinion—I know I was right. It was, I think, more about the need to find one more patch of common ground before we parted forever. I told him the now-famous Mike Piazza story about Rickey’s generosity with postseason shares—“Full share! Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”—and ask him if that changed his opinion. He couldn’t say; his illness had so degraded his memory that he no longer remembered who Rickey was, or—more painfully for me—our many, many conversations about him.

***

Some moments of grace remain forever beyond us, but it is pleasing to think of everything that Rickey did after 1987 as his revenge, his rejoinder to Piniella and the New York media. An overdue MVP award came after that, a whole book full of records, Hall of Fame enshrinement, and 1,899 more games—more than Piniella played in his entire career. (Sweet Lou finally learned to appreciate Rickey more than a decade later, when he arrived at midseason to shore up an ALCS-bound 2000 Mariners club. After Rickey left, Piniella discovered what a true head case looked like, in new starter Al Martin.) Didn’t want to play? He wanted to play so damned badly that he stuck around until he was 44 and then went to the independent Newark Bears and the San Diego Surf Dawgs. His dedication wasn’t reluctant, it was sublime.

I learned so much more from Rickey, including the contextual nature of the RBI (Don Mattingly in 1985 and 1986: Roughly the same player. Rickey had an off-year in the latter season and Donnie Baseball dropped 32 RBI; how do we account for this?) and a batting stance I futilely tried to imitate in neighborhood ballgames (it’s not just crouching so that you have a strike-zone, as Bill James said, the size of a cigarette packet; you also have to have a lot of ability). I miss him as a player so very badly, not in the usual way, because I also miss my youth, but because there is no one else like him. There have been other great players, but given his unique qualities no one has been great in the same way.

I miss the duck under a high pitch that would have been at the letters for anyone else, the sudden explosion of the bat from a position seemingly too compactly coiled to produce a leadoff home run, yet so often did. I miss my father. I miss my pen. This losing and missing is in the nature of things until such time as it is one’s turn to join the lost and the missed. Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Were the universe just, time would never have caught Rickey stealing. It’s hard to imagine that he would have acknowledged that it had any power over him at all. That in the end it did is not a surprise, but so stark a reminder of inevitable fate is almost too much to bear.