A couple days after Rickey Henderson made his major league debut on June 24, 1979, a silver station wagon pulled up to a yellow house, awaiting moving vans that wouldn’t fully arrive for a week or two.
In that moment, there was zero chance some sort of cosmic connection was made, that Rickey would eventually become My Guy, that a sparsely-populated ballpark in Oakland would become a sun-splashed refuge, and that someday all involved parties would depart the premises.
Some 35 years later – the same jersey number he wore in that debut – the cycle is complete. Rickey Henderson passed away Friday, just 65 years old, and by “just” we mean this is an athlete who always looked like he’d live forever.
You saw it in his perfectly athletic frame, chiseled enough to star at running back in high school, disciplined enough to produce one of the most sublime statistical sets in baseball history – a record 1,406 stolen bases and 2,295 runs scored, 3,055 hits and 297 home runs from a 5-foot-10 player who seemingly scrunched to 5-4 when the count ran to three balls.
You saw it in his refusal to hang ‘em up, through a major league career that touched nine franchises, and a simple desire to play that saw his last game played not for the A’s or Red Sox or Dodgers but rather the San Diego Surf Dawgs of the independent Golden League.
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And you saw it in his post-playing career, as few could fill up a suit with the elan and charisma that Henderson brought to his Hall of Fame induction, his public appearances, his eternal role, simply, as Rickey.
The B-roll of career highlights will of course show his record-breaking steal of third base that nudged him past Lou Brock forever. His dominance of the 1989 postseason that resulted in his first World Series title and began one of the greatest 12-month stretches of baseball ever, culminating in his 1990 MVP award. His 10 All-Star turns, all as an Athletic or a Yankee.
Yet it’s easy to forget that when Henderson made his debut, it was in a forgettable Sunday doubleheader against the Texas Rangers that drew 4,752 fans to Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
The A’s were just five years removed from winning their third consecutive World Series title, but under Charles Finley’s stewardship, chaos, mismanagement and attempted player sell-offs were never far away. The club drew just 306,763 fans in Henderson’s debut season.
Yet there was something strangely inclusive about the Coliseum – perhaps the chain-link fencing that reminded one of a park down the street and not a palace where demigods played. Perhaps the wooden bleachers or sparsely populated three levels of seating that begged you to sit anywhere you like, or the iceplant that somehow made it feel like your own backyard.
It was within these humbling environs that Rickey began to cook.
Hard to imagine, even with the phony – er, loosened – stolen-base rules that exist today, that any player would swipe 100 bags in his first full season, at the tender age of 21, as Henderson did in 1980.
Or that, at 23, he’d obliterate Lou Brock’s single-season stolen base record of 118. The record was his by Aug. 27, and he’d finish with a still-unbroken 130 steals; the iconic Mizuno poster touting “119 and counting” came out much earlier.
Not bragging if you can back it up, right?
Back to those moving vans. My family had spent a little more than two seasons of exile in Houston, years that coincided with kindergarten and first grade, and then relocated north rather than to the L.A. basin from which we came.
The van with the pots and pans and plates did not arrive for more than a week, which meant days and nights of scarfing Foster’s Freeze hamburgers and various other exotic meals native to our new NorCal home. I’d eventually become an outlier, a Rickey guy in a family of Dodger fans eventually surrounded by friends who were occasionally irrational Giants backers.
I often wondered how that came to pass, sometimes ascribing it to purely visceral phenomena, like dot races on a medieval scoreboard or Chuck Mangione on a mellow day game sound mix, but it all makes sense in retrospect. Heck, Rickey rebuilt an entire franchise.
Hyperbole? Sure, the sale of the franchise from Finley to the Haas family helped stability. A surprise 1981 playoff run helped boost attendance to 1.7 million in a strike-shortened season.
Yet in 1982, there was little to lure the casual. The A’s lost 94 games, but Rickey’s chase for Brock’s single-season record helped draw a franchise record 1.74 million fans to the Coliseum – more than in the previous 81 seasons in Oakland, Kansas City and Philly.
Certainly, the Haas family, leery of Henderson’s advancing salary and potential free agency, nearly wrecked it all by trading Henderson to the Yankees before the 1985 season. Yet the timing was strangely ideal: While Henderson continued producing at elite levels for the Yankees, the A’s were developing Bash Brothers Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, reinvigorating ace Dave Stewart and luring eventual Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa. A World Series appearance came in 1988.
Reacquiring Henderson in the summer of ’89 was like lighter fluid; the A’s would win it all months after he rejoined the club.
They’d win just one Series together, but in 1990 won 103 games and drew a startling 2.9 million to the Coliseum, behind only the Dodgers and the Blue Jays, in their fresh SkyDome digs, in big league attendance.
By ’93, Henderson was gone again, this time to help the Jays win their second consecutive World Series title. Canseco was gone, McGwire was going, and the Coliseum, iceplant and all, was given a facelift not even Frankenstein could love in order to accommodate the Raiders’ return.
Now, it’s all history. The A’s are using Sacramento as a waystation on their way to Vegas, maneuvers that fulfill the franchise’s century-plus legacy of impermanence and more than occasional incompetence, even as it blasts away the last of a glorious foundation laid by Henderson and a spirited fan base.
On one hand, it’s strangely poetic that Rickey doesn’t have to put on for a franchise that departed his hometown. On the other, baseball lost a true 1 of 1, an almost accidental ambassador in his ability to veer off script yet dazzle the masses anyway.
Consider yourself lucky if you were able to see him play. Luckier still if you feel like you grew up with him.
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