The Chris Moeller Archives

Rickey's ready for the Hall of Fame

Rickey Henderson, the last Major League Baseball player that looked good in a fur coat, was inducted into the Hall of Fame this week, and it's worth a moment to praise his many accomplishments both on the field and off.

One can only have love for Rickey Henderson, one of baseball's few players to compete in four different decades. He developed the habit early in his career of referring to himself publicly-- and to himself-- in the third person and by his first name, as in "Rickey says Rickey." This inspired, if not the "Seinfeld" episode about the physical fitness trainer who does the same, then at least the series of Budweiser television advertisements early in the decade featuring a similar fictional professional athlete named Leon.

When Henderson-- from this point on referred to as Rickey-- became baseball's all-time stolen base king in 1991, surpassing Lou Brock, he told the crowd-- with Brock only a few feet away from him that "Lou Brock was a great base stealer, but today, I am the greatest of all-time. When he broke Ty Cobb's career record for runs scored, doing so on a home run, he took 45 seconds to circle the bases, then slid into home plate.

In the early 1980s, when the man who would become a 10-time all-star was still in the first of four tours of duty with the Oakland Athletics, the A's accounting department was in a panic over $1 million that had gone missing from their bank statements. Mystery solved when it turned out that Rickey had taken a $1 million signing bonus and, rather than cashing it, framed it and hung it on a wall at his home.

Rickey, who was born Rickey Nelson Henley (yes, he was named after singer/actor Ricky Nelson) and who was born on Christmas Day 1958 in the backseat of a '57 Chevy on the way to the hospital, once asked a teammate how long it would take him to drive to the Dominican Republic.

A teammate of Rickey's with the Seattle Mariners once heard him muttering to himself on the way back to the dugout after striking out, "Don't worry, Rickey, you're still the best." When a reporter asked him if he talked to himself, he said, "I never answer myself so how can I be talking to myself?"

Rickey broke baseball's all-time record for walks during his career, a record now held by Barry Bonds, but remarkably, the man widely considered to be baseball's all-time greatest leadoff hitter walked to lead off an inning 796 times in his career. That's more than the total number of career walks for more than 50 Hall-of-Famers.

Though he played for the New York Yankees for only five seasons (during the late '80s), he finished as their all-time stolen base leader. While living in New York City, he told a teammate that his condo had such a great view, "He could see the Entire State Building." After receiving a six-figure bonus check from the Yankees, he went several months without cashing it. A team staffer asked if there was a problem with the check. "No," he said, "I'm just waiting for the money market rates to go up."

When Rickey stopped getting Major League job offers after 25 big league seasons in 2003, he played two seasons with the minor league Newark Bears and then a year with the San Diego Surf Dawgs, leading the Surf Dawgs to the Golden Baseball League championship of 2005, posting a .456 on-base percentage with 73 walks over 73 games. In his first season with the San Diego Padres in 1996, he boarded a team bus one day and teammate Steve Finley told him he could sit wherever he wanted. "You've got tenure," Finley said. Rickey responded, "Ten years? Rickey's been playing at least 16, 17 years."

Despite playing during the so-called "steroid era" (long-time of the Bay Area A's, no less), Rickey, he of the rock-solid body, almost entirely escaped the media glare of alleged impropriety (probably because he didn't hit that many home runs). Rickey told a Baseball Weekly reporter about ten years ago that he was in the middle of a kind-of constant physical workout. Citing an example of this ethic, he said that if he was in a hotel room at night watching television, and a set of commercials would come on the screen, he would simply drop to the floor and do 50 push-ups. A reporter asked Rickey in 1996 if he believed Ken Caminiti's estimate that 50 percent of Major League players were doing steroids. "Well, Rickey's not one of them," he responded, "so that's 49 percent right there."

Rickey made going to the ballgame entertaining and enjoyable. Our friend, David Levenhagen, caught a foul ball off Rickey's bat when we were at a Mets/Cards game together in St. Louis in 1999. (I'm always keeping a scorecard, which puts me at a competitive disadvantage for foul flys.) During the same game, Rickey went to the mesh screen near the on-deck circle at one point to poke at and torment a grandstand heckler, and out in left field, when the light-hearted taunts of "Rick-ee, Rick-ee" reigned down on him, he made a fanning gesture with his glove to indicate that the fan's verbal needling was helping to cool him on a hot day.

Rickey's a marvelously deserving Hall-of-Famer, for whatever that's still worth, and I'm looking forward to one hell of an induction speech. If he's preparing for his big day the way he prepared for every game he played for 25 years, according to teammates, he's standing naked in front of a full-length mirror repeating the phrase, "Rickey's the best."

Indeed he was.

posted by CM @ 9:27 AM