R.I.P. Rickey Henderson
The rest of MLB will be chasing him for a long, long time
Nearly a dozen years ago, I got my hands on a box of the newly-released 2013 Topps baseball cards, looking for whatever interesting things I might be able to find. I made a list of ten of them, sent them to my editor Jonathan Eig at the ChicagoSideSports website he was running at the time, and he directed me to focus on point #7, which I had titled as “Pete Rose is baseball’s Voldemort.”
To say that the results were explosive is putting it mildly. I saw my name in hyperlinks, which was something I hadn’t experienced before and haven’t since, either. It fizzled out after two or three days—as I knew it would—but it also showed me the power of the internet and social media to drive a story.
But there were nine other points from that piece that never saw the light of day, and one of them I’d like to revive in the wake of the shocking death of Rickey Henderson at the age of 65. I’ll start by pointing out that it was the third point on the list (presumably more notable than the Pete Rose point was), and the way I wrote it back in 2013 read as follows:
“All players are apparently chasing somebody, whether they know it or not. For instance, we are informed that the Cardinals’ Jason Motte (card #130) already has 54 saves, and needs 554 more saves to match Mariano Rivera’s career record. Assuming Motte can save 42 games every year, as he did in 2012, he’ll tie Rivera in 2055. May all of us live to see that. Likewise, the Yankee’s Melky Mesa (card #231) may justifiably be proud of his one big league hit, but he’s still got 4,256 more to go.”
The 4,256 was a reference to Pete Rose, and where Topps got tripped up was they cited the number of hits he had for his career, but didn’t mention him by name. The same wasn’t true of the career leaders in other statistical categories such as Home Runs (Barry Bonds with 762) or Wins by a pitcher (Cy Young with 511). For every player, from the newest rookies to the most established veterans in the game, Topps picked one statistic for their career—apparently at random—and stacked them up against the all-time leader in that category.
The back of the card for Mike Trout is shown above for an illustration of how that looks, all these years later. Mike Trout is an 11-time All-Star, has won three MVP awards, and is probably on track for Hall of Fame consideration when his playing days are over. He’s been injured the past few seasons, and his career numbers have suffered as a result. But he still has six years under contract, at upwards of $35 million a season, so there’s a lot of pressure to get him on track once again.
Even so, with all of the success he’s had, including four years of leading the league in Runs scored, he’s only the fifth leading active player in that category. And when it comes to the all-time leaders, up to and including Rickey Henderson, Mike Trout is not even on the radar screen. In fact, he would still need to score another run for every run he’s already scored, and even then he would still be behind Henderson. To update the Topps Career Chase line from a dozen years ago, he still trails Rickey Henderson by 1,172 runs.
I would argue that Runs is the ultimate quantifier of success at baseball. Every player who comes up to bat, in any game, anywhere at all, is aiming to either score a run themselves, or help a teammate to score a run. That’s how the results of a game are recorded for posterity; how wins and losses are determined. When my team scores more runs we win, and that’s what we want. When your team scores fewer runs you lose, and you have to move on and hope for a better result tomorrow.
Runs, runs, runs: that’s all baseball really is. And nobody who ever played at the game’s highest level scored more of them than Rickey Henderson. That’s an amazing feat, when you stop to think about it.
An all-time leader in any one statistical category can be certifiably be considered as great. Nolan Ryan in Strikeouts; Pete Rose in Hits; Henry Aaron in RBIs. Thousands have played the game, but just a handful can say, legitimately, that nobody accomplished something more than they did. It’s a painfully small group of players, and Rickey Henderson is in there not once, but twice. That’s just astonishing.
Consider the case of Jemile Weeks. In some ways, the only thing he and Mike Trout have in common, baseball-wise, is that Topps identified both of them as being Rickey Henderson chasers in their 2013 set. But after two seasons of what seemed like a promising start in Oakland—the same franchise that launched Henderson’s long career, by the way—Weeks was sent down to their triple-A affiliate in Sacramento during the 2012 season, spent most of the 2013 season there, and was traded away to Baltimore toward the end of that season. He bounced around after that, never finding one place to get acclimated in the way his older brother—who, ironically enough, is named Rickie—did in Milwaukee. As a result, Weeks added just five stolen bases onto his career total listed on the back of his 2013 card.
It seems, when reading the text on Weeks’s card above his statistics, that the A’s might have hoped Jemile Weeks would someday turn into the next Rickey Henderson. “A dynamic leadoff man” is certainly what Henderson was, but the reality is that there won’t be another one like him. Baseball has suffered a tremendous loss, and Henderson’s contributions to the game should be further appreciated by the fact that all major league players, both now and in the future, will be perpetually engaged in what appears to be a futile quest to catch up to him.