Ricky The Remarkable

Newsweek, April 26, 1999

Baseball's best all-round career in the last quarter century? The
case for Mr. Henderson.

By George F. Will

Mark McGwire's biceps symbolize big bang baseball. Rickey
Henderson's thighs, which are responsible for what still may be the
quickest first step in baseball, are the key to this: baseball's history is
written largely in numbers, and numbers say Henderson's may have been
the most impressive all-round career in the last quarter century.

His gaudiest number—1,299 stolen bases, and counting—is a record you
will never see broken. Here is another: 130 steals in a season (1982). He
already has 38.5 percent (361) more than the second greatest thief, Lou
Brock. With Oakland last year, Henderson led the American League with
66 stolen bases—four more than the Mets' team total. Joe DiMaggio, a
fine base runner, stole only 30 bases in a 13-year career. DiMaggio's
season high was six. Henderson has stolen five in a game.

For half a century after Babe Ruth made baseball homer-happy, and
especially in the 1950s, baseball became simple-minded. Most teams,
most of the time, just tried to get runners on base and then get a home run.
But in 1962 a small Dodgers infielder, Maury Wills, began helping
baseball rediscover the running game. Soon Brock's Cardinals, playing in
a big park with artificial turf, were winning by using speed to manufacture
runs. Then Henderson began his sprint to Cooperstown.

Henderson, who was McGwire's teammate in the Oakland A's salad days
of the late 1980s, is only 5 feet 10, 190 pounds, but his sculptured,
40-year-old body has about as much fat as a carrot. This year, his first
with his sixth team, he will be the Mets' ignition system. He is closing in on
two records set 71 and 64 years ago by two of the first five players voted
into the Hall of Fame in 1936 . Henderson has (through last Friday's
games) scored 2,026 runs, hot on the heels of Ty Cobb's 2,245. One
reason Henderson has scored so many runs is that he has walked 1,903
times, just 166 fewer than Ruth's 2,056.

That Henderson is the greatest leadoff man in history has little to do with
the record 73 times he has led off games with home runs. Rather,
something mundane makes him spectacular—the banality of the base on
balls. He knows how to "work the count." Last year he saw more pitches
per at- bat (4.33) than anyone else in baseball. In addition to all his walks,
he has 2,689 hits and a career on-base average of about .404.

Henderson's excellence involves a paradox. His career as a base runner
is a reminder, after last season's home run barrage, that baseball is a team
game: more often than not, and at its most interesting, scoring involves
more than one big blast. On the other hand, Henderson, more even than
a prodigious home run hitter like McGwire, demonstrates the pure
individualism that is possible within the team game. In basketball, one
man can take over a game. In baseball, no position player—no one other
than a pitcher on an unusually dominating day—can. But for many years,
Henderson has come close.

This will be the 20th season in which, when he reaches first base, the
complexion of the game changes. The middle infielders have to prepare
to cover second. The pitcher has to throw over to first, perhaps again
and again, to limit Henderson's lead. The next batters, the big boppers in
the heart of the lineup, can look for lots of fastballs from a pitcher who
wants to get the ball to the catcher as quickly as possible, in case the
catcher has to try to get it to second before Henderson gets there. To
hasten his delivery, the pitcher may go to a "slide step," not lifting his front
leg as high as he otherwise would—which costs the pitcher velocity.

Occasionally Henderson will stay at first just to make the pitcher do that:
imagine throwing slide-step fastballs to young Jose Canseco and Mark
McGwire with Henderson on base. That is what pitchers often had to do
when facing the 1989 A's, a team that might have been better than the
1998 Yankees. This year Henderson, by staying at first, will sometimes
make Mets catcher Mike Piazza an even better hitter.

People who say baseball is not a contact sport have never rounded third
at full tilt, hoping to hit the catcher—usually the sort of person who looks
as though he were designed by the people who designed
Stonehenge—just as a relay throw from an infielder hits the catcher's
mitt. And then there is contact with the solid earth of the infield.

To understand the toll base stealing takes on runners who slide head first,
imagine hurling yourself on your chest, onto packed dirt, from a car
traveling at about 20 miles an hour. Imagine doing that the 1,299 times
Henderson has done it successfully, and the 304 times he has done it
when he was caught stealing. Then add the 2,000 or so times he has
dived on his chest back into first base to beat throws from nervous
pitchers. Doesn't it make him ache just thinking about it? "No," he says,
"you learn to land smooth, like an airplane," and he sweeps his hand on a
gentle downward glide. (If you believe it is painless, hurl yourself from
your car.)

This year Henderson probably will become the second 40-year-old to
steal more bases than his years. (Davey Lopes stole 47 at 40.) When
relaxed and voluble, which he usually is around ballplayers and rarely is
among outsiders, he breaks into bursts of laughter and punctuates his
conversation with little spasms of his body, convulsions of energy akin to
faking a break for second base. Asked if, when he gets to first base, he
assumes he will soon be at second by his own effort, he laughs: "Ten
years ago I assumed." Then he heads for batting practice, radiating the
electricity and professionalism that have earned him two
world-championship rings—so far. Do not bet against Henderson's legs
propelling the Mets into the postseason.

He began this season briskly. In the Mets' opening three-game series he
reached base by hits or walks nine times, homered twice, doubled three
times, drove in four runs, scored five and, of course, stole a base. He half
expects to steal 50 when he is 50. Get out to see him this year. You will
not see his like again.