No. 247: RICKEY HENDERSON & TED WILLIAMS / The secrets & mysteries of the nonpareil ballplayers
What they did had no precedent. Exactly how they got there & how they did it what they did baffled those who knew them best as much as the rest of us.
RICKEY HENDERSON died of pneumonia on the weekend at 65, far, far too soon. Hard to imagine Rickey even getting the sniffles, never mind deathly ill. Given his energy which was always high voltage and his physique which was the stuff of sculpted marble, you’d have banked on him reaching a ripe old age.
Old-Timers Games are a thing of the past, a tradition that lapsed, and their extinction deprived us of the joy of watching Rickey as a senior citizen stealing bases, which you know he would have done. I made a point of looking it up after his passing: Rickey last played for the Dodgers in 2003 and was 44 when he stole his last MLB base.on August 29 in a 6-4 win over Colorado in Chavez Ravine—Cory Vance was pitching and Gregg Zaun was behind the plate for the Rockies. Three AB, one hit, one run, one RBI, one BB, one SB, a pretty decent day at the office, batting second behind Dave Roberts for the home team.
Couldn’t find Rickey’s last SB, but here’s his last HR
In case you’re wondering, Rickey wasn’t particularly close to the oldest player to steal a base in a MLB game. Arlie Latham, age 49, stole a base for the New York Giants in 1909. That was his 742nd lifetime SB, which puts him No. 7 on the all-time list (one SB ahead of HOFer Eddie Collins).
Seeing that, I figured Rickey might have been in the hunt for No, 2 on the list of eldest base thieves, but no, I had forgotten all about the evergreen Julio Franco, who stayed on the scene and remained ridiculously productive at age 47 for the Mets back in 2006—that season Franco became the oldest pinch runner in MLB history, the oldest ballplayer to hit a grand slam, the oldest to hit a pinch-hit homer, the oldest to steal two bases in a game … the list goes on. You’d have thought all this record-book stuff would have prompted Rickey to come out of retirement.
MANY PEOPLE find it hard to process how an athlete can succumb to what seems like a treatable illness … but that would be the opinion of people who’ve never had their asses kicked by pneumonia. I’ve had a pneumonia a few times. The second bad bout in 2005 knocked my heart out of rhythm—with the imaging my heart looked like Rob Ford dancing to Bob Marley in a city council session. In 2019 another dose of it—bacterial pneumonia this time—caused my heart rate to fall to 29 beats a minute in emergency—I was drowning in the fluid in my lungs. Twelve days in hospital and took me months to straighten out—three weeks after my release I struggled to walk 100 yards. So, yeah, pneumonia ain’t the common cold.
I never got any closer to Rickey than the back of a post-game scrum in a clubhouse. He was in the Yankees’ clubhouse for one of my favourite SubStack entries. Rickey homered in the last game Billy Martin ever managed, which I happened to work back in June 1988. Alas, the greatest lead-off hitter in the history of the game didn’t figure in the narrative of my essay—as good as he was, there was no saving the tortured skipper’s run in New York. Behind the scenes other famous and semi-famous 80s legends wander in and out of the frame, including a great cameo from Don Mattingly. But Rickey didn’t seem to run with the gang that we bumped into away from the ballpark. Here’s the link to the piece (you’ll need a paid subscription to access it): No. 137: BILLY MARTIN / The Yankees went to Detroit in 1st place in June '88, but Martin had already entered the downward spiral. If you don’t have a subscription, here’s my impassioned plea.
There are dozens of tributes to Rickey out there and anecdotes will abound, likewise accounts of his greatest feats and amazing runs. As far as context goes, though, my friend Neil Paine draws on his redoubtable statistical and analytic chops and does a great job of showing Rickey’s influence on the modern game. Check out: Rickey Henderson Brought Baseball’s Past Into the Future. You can’t go wrong on any given day with Neil’s takes and insights into the games people play.
To my mind, Rickey Henderson almost defies straight statistical analysis—he was at once a tremendous athlete on a purely physical level, but also an unmatched baseball mind, picking up tells in pitcher’s deliveries to cue his thievery on the base paths. Others could run as fast or faster—he wouldn’t have even been the fastest ballplayer in Oakland history, not with Herb Washington having been a quirky signing with the big club back in the 70s. No matter. Speed was just one of the components of the art of the steal. Without the others, well, you’ve got Herb Washington.
I saw Mr Washington run at least a couple of times at the Maple Leaf Indoor Games back in the day—he was the best 50-yard and 60-yard guy in the era and undoubtedly would have benefited if second base had been 20 or 30 yards farther from first. No matter, he got a ring as a member of the ‘74 World Series champions without ever picking up a bat or holding a ball in his hand.
I’m sure a few Rickey’s former teammates, managers and opponents will try to explain how he did what he did, which was something no one else did before and only thought to try after he came on the scene. I’m sure all of them will come up short and most others will acknowledge it’s fruitless, because Rickey never quite gave up his method—trade secrets that he couldn’t copyright. Maybe that’s what at the heart of the nonpareil ballplayer, something that can’t be explained, something that mystifies even those who witness it up close and would appreciate the greatness far more than fan or scribe.
For me it brings to mind a conversation I had with Bobby Doerr in 2002 on the occasion of the passing of his good friend Ted Williams. I don’t know that Rickey and Terrible Ted get mentioned in the same sentence very much, but really it’s not out of line—they were two of the most compelling arguments for the idea that there should be a special exclusive penthouse in Cooperstown, residence limited to those who transcended “merely ordinary” Hall of Famers.
Ted Williams left, Bobby Doerr right
In bold below, you’ll land on an excerpt from my Audible memoir about my conversation with Bobby Doerr:
I was always a Red Sox fan. That dates back to Toronto’s old Triple A team in the International League, a Red Sox affiliate for a stretch, and the Impossible Dream season in ’67. Though I didn’t start to follow the game until after Ted Williams’s retirement, he occupied a treasured place in my psychic shrine of lore. Even for a child fan of the franchise, there were two historical pillars: Babe Ruth on the mound for the team until he was dispatched to the hated Yankees for $100,000 and a curse to be named later; and Williams, the last .400 hitter, the greatest hitter in game’s history, one who would have set career records that would never be matched, were it not for his five years of service when America went to war.
I didn’t get a chance to ever talk to Ted Williams. Not a great loss, really. He made a point of expressing little other than his contempt for reporters back in his day and never truly mellowed. That wasn’t a point I made much of when I had to write his obituary in July of 2002. Though he worked with ghostwriters on a few books about hitting and fishing, he never wrote an autobiography, never told the story of his life in his own words. He was the subject of biographies, a dozen or so, and if I wanted to mail it in, I could have hit the library and culled a gallery of anecdotes. That though would have been stenography, transparently so, and not writing. On deadline of a couple of hours, I had to figure out a way to do some original reporting on a player who had retired more than four decades ago.
Bobby Doerr, the Red Sox second baseman back in Williams’s early days, had served for a stretch as the Toronto Blue Jays’ hitting coach. On one broadcast, I’d heard that he’d retired to a remote hamlet in his native Oregon, where he wiled his days away fishing. I was able to track him down by directory assistance, and call him at his home. After a few minutes, it was clear to me that Bobby Doerr should have been writing his friend’s tribute, not me. His bona fides: He would in time be the last living major league alum to have place against Lou Gehrig; and he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, albeit thirty-six years after he played his last game in 1950.
Doerr figured Williams had often got a raw deal from the media and from fans, neither of them able to a fathom how someone who placed no value in the social graces and thus wouldn’t acknowledge their cheers, not even when he hit a home run in his final at bat at Fenway Park.
“Ted had been burned so many times by the media and he had been booed more than any of the great ballplayers. He took a lot more pride in the things that he did than the things people gave him. And what Ted did better than anyone else was hit. It gave him more pleasure than anything else in life. He was absolutely obsessed with it, and it would be what he wanted to be measured by.
“He re-invented hitting and was years ahead of his time. When everyone else was using 34-ounce bats he had 32-ounce bats made especially for him. ‘What’s the use of having all that wood if you can’t swing it,’ he’d say. If he picked up a bat, he could tell right away whether it was a quarter of an ounce too heavy or too light. He made a study of other pitchers and seemed to always know what they were going to do next. And his senses were so acute that he could pick up the seams of a ball coming out of a pitcher’s hand. He was so aware of things I saw him step out of the batter’s box to wait for a cloud to move.”
Bobby Doerr had seen Williams at work up close and appreciated him in a way that a layman couldn’t—and as it turned out, half a century later, he remained in a state of wonderment, as if he had seen not a hitter but a magician. Williams was at once Doerr’s friend and a mystery to him. Nothing that Williams ever said in self-explanation could have defined him better than that.
I don’t know who would rate as Rickey Henderson’s best friend in baseball. He wasn’t hanging with his Yankees teammates in the bar the night before Billy Martin was fired for the last time. He was Mr Independent, a lone wolf, the gunslinger who came to town. Whoever that best friend might be would have no better explanation of Rickey’s game than Bobby Doerr did for his buddy’s and therein lies the parallel between the Splendid Splinter and the Splendid Sprinter.