Major league baseball legend Rickey Henderson passed away on Dec. 20, four days shy of his 66th birthday. 2024 has been a momentous year for baseball fans. First, we lost Willie Mays in June, then Pete Rose in September, and now Rickey. These three rank among the top 10 or 15 non-pitchers of all time, so to have three of them depart the human scene in a single calendar year is something that may never happen again.
A tiny confession: For me personally, the passing of Rickey Henderson felt different from the way I felt when I learned of the deaths of Mays and Rose. Why? Because the latter two were stars during my youth. I grew up watching them play baseball, and they became the kind of mythological characters that only the heroes of our youth can be. Henderson, on the other hand, was younger than I. He came on the baseball scene when I was already well into adulthood, preoccupied with the various demands of adult life and with sports no longer being the passion of my life.
This points to a truism: Our perspective on baseball greatness may be influenced by how old we were when various stars and superstars were in their heyday. We fans may be biased and more inclined to regard the legends of our youth as the greatest players of all time. How can we reduce, if not totally eliminate this bias? By referring to cold, hard statistics. These help us to quantify individual greatness in players.
Statistics shine a super-bright light on Rickey Henderson.
The basic format of baseball is ultra-simple: The team that scores more runs wins. Scoring runs is the name of the game, and Rickey Henderson scored more runs (2,295) than any other player in major league history.
Of course, to score runs, a player has to get on base. Over a 25-year career, Rickey got on base more times in his career than any player except Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, and Ty Cobb. He accomplished that feat by being in the elite 3,000 career hits club (3,055 hits — a total exceeded by only 24 players in all of major league baseball history) and by drawing 2,190 walks — second all-time, sandwiched in between Barry Bonds and Babe Ruth. Ranking with Rose, Bonds, Cobb, and Ruth definitively puts Henderson in baseball’s most exalted company.
The most famous and remarkable of Henderson’s baseball achievements was his prowess as a base stealer. He holds both the single-season record of 130 stolen bases and the career record of 1,406. The career mark is particularly noteworthy because of the huge gap between Henderson and the player with the second-most steals — the electric Lou Brock, who stole 938 bases in his illustrious career. Henderson’s total is almost 50 percent more than Brock’s. No other career leader in a baseball statistic comes anywhere close to such dominance. Career leaders in hits, home runs, runs, and runs batted in are within a few percent of each other. For a major league player to eclipse the career runner-up by such a staggering margin is unprecedented and probably never will be replicated.
With a .279 career batting average, an outstanding ability to draw walks, and his base-stealing skills, Henderson was the ideal leadoff batter. But Rickey came with a bonus for a leadoff batter: power. Indeed, Rickey broke the mold. He hit 297 home runs in his career and set the all-time record for leading off a game with a home run by connecting 81 times. Once again, the runner-up (George Springer with 60) isn’t even close. Similarly, Rickey had 1,100 career RBIs batting leadoff — the most in major league baseball history — with Rose a distant second with 803 RBIs as a leadoff batter.
One little anecdote about Rickey the person: He was born in a Chicago snowstorm. His mom didn’t even have time to get into the hospital before Rickey popped out in the back seat of the car in which Mom was riding just as it arrived at the hospital. Rickey frequently used the clever double entendre “I was born fast.”
In the years since Willie Mays and Pete Rose shone on the baseball diamond, analytics have become highly sophisticated by extrapolating the simple statistics with which we are all familiar — runs, hits, RBIs, home runs, stolen bases, etc. Preeminent among the new generation of statistics is WAR — wins above replacement. I don’t pretend to understand the formula, but WAR credits Rickey over the course of his career with bringing his team 111.1 victories over an average player. To put that in perspective, the only two players in the last half-century to have more WAR were Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Once again, we find Rickey Henderson in the most elite company at the pinnacle of his sport. No wonder he was a ten-time All-Star, a Most Valuable Player honoree, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
RIP, Rickey. You truly were one of a kind and one of the all-time greats.
READ MORE from Mark W. Hendrickson:
Pete Rose: A Baseball Icon With Feet of Clay
Shohei Ohtani: Major League Baseball’s Supernova
Roll the Dice With Trump or Go Down the Tubes With Harris
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