There’s no way to sugarcoat it otherwise if you happen to be a fan of the team formerly known as the Oakland Athletics. Its been a pretty crappy 2024. You already lost your present and future when the team announced it was indeed leaving the eyesore known as the Oakland Coliseum after 57 seasons and yesterday, you found out you had also lost perhaps the poster child of your past. MLB.com’s Martin Gallegos was among the many who reported the sad news yesterday to a still-disbelieving world:
Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, considered the greatest leadoff hitter in history and MLB’s all-time leader in stolen bases, leadoff home runs and runs scored, has passed away. He was 65.
“For multiple generations of baseball fans, Rickey Henderson was the gold standard of base stealing and leadoff hitting,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “Rickey was one of the most accomplished and beloved Athletics of all-time. He also made an impact with many other Clubs during a quarter-century career like no other. He epitomized speed, power and entertainment in setting the tone at the top of the lineup. When we considered new rules for the game in recent years, we had the era of Rickey Henderson in mind.
“Rickey earned universal respect, admiration and awe from sports fans. On behalf of Major League Baseball, I send my deepest condolences to Rickey’s family, his friends and former teammates, A’s fans and baseball fans everywhere.”
If you came of age as a baseball fan in the ’80s or ’90s Henderson was as much of a constant as anyone in the game. He was a throwback to a bygone era of longevity, eventually playing 25 seasons. He was a worthy successor to Pete Rose, ironically someone else we lost in 2024, as a hustler and ego who backed up his bravado with unqualified and record-breaking excellence. Gallegos rattled off some of those records:
For his career, Henderson batted .279/.401/.419 with 3,055 hits, 510 doubles, 66 triples, 297 home runs and 1,115 RBIs. He posted a career .820 OPS and 127 OPS+.
His 1,406 stolen bases are 467 more than Lou Brock swiped, and his 2,295 runs scored are 50 more than Ty Cobb’s total. At the time of his death, Henderson also ranked in the top 10 in games played (fourth, 3,081), plate appearances (fourth, 13,346), walks (second, 2,190), leadoff home runs (first, 81) and unintentional walks (first, 2,129).
Henderson played for nine teams in a 25-year career that included the 1990 AL MVP Award, 10 All-Star selections, two World Series titles, three Silver Slugger Awards, one Gold Glove Award and the 1989 ALCS MVP Award. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2009, his first year of eligibility, appearing on 94.8 percent of ballots.
A pretty impressive track record, not far off Rose’s in many categories. But also like Rose, he was a flawed hero, though not to the fully self-destructive level that Pete’s “rose” to. He wore out his welcome in several of his many stops, most notably with the Mets, where after a triumphant return to the New York he left after a five-year, playoff-less stint with the Yankees where, as Gallegos also chronicled:
He hit .315/.423/.466 at the age with 37 steals in his age-40 season, helping the Mets reach the NLCS. He fell out of favor during the 2000 season and was released that May.
But it was Oakland that was both his hometown and what he embodied. On last night’s SPORTSCENTER veteran contributor and longtime Bay Area journalist Howard Bryant, who authored a no-holds-barred biography of Henderson two years, offered up some extremely detailed and personal observations as to why he not only wound up playing for the A’s on no less than four occasions, he was also one of the two personalities (along with Dave Stewart) to tread the field that was named for him in 2017 when it all closed down for good in Oaktown this past September:
It’s more than mere tragic irony that within less than three short months of each other, and arguably both far too prematurely, both the Oakland Athletics franchise and its de facto face are both gone.
Courage…