Author of “Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston”
Before he was a somebody, Rickey Henderson was already a constituency of one.
Professional athletes are a different species, world-class talents whose sense of self and possibility do not often fit within the confines of the doubts and fears natural to the rest of us. But Rickey, the physical specimen who thought he could play baseball forever before he died at 65 on Friday night in Oakland, California, from complications with pneumonia and asthma, stood even beyond his most gilded peers on the confidence scale.
I once asked him when he knew he had the talent to play Major League Baseball, to be on the same field with Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan, to play the same game Willie Mays and Henry Aaron played. To live at the altitude of the gods. As easily as telling the time, Rickey answered, “I don’t know. Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade.”
When Henderson was a 10th grader at Oakland Technical High School, his new baseball coach, Bob Cryer, fanned the players out and pointed to those he wanted to report to the varsity and then junior varsity. Rickey was sent to the JV. The other kids protested, tried to tell the coach that Rickey, who might have looked smaller than everyone else, was a legend. The kids told the coach he was making a mistake.
Taking matters into his own hands, Rickey walked up to the new coach and said, “You must not know who I am.”
After he was a somebody, everybody knew who Rickey Henderson was. Start with the name. A one-namer. That meant he was a star. Ubiquitous. Baseball used to have one-namers — Ruth, Reggie, Willie, Pete, Rickey — now it’s so desperate for a show-stopper like them, the league is likely to put a security detail on Shohei Ohtani.
When it was done, Rickey had finished a 24-year career having scored more runs, stolen more bases, hit more home runs to lead off a game and drawn more walks than anyone who ever played. He had fulfilled his own prophecy to be one of the best who ever did it, the greatest ever when it came to hitting first and stealing bases.
We protect our own time, and for those who saw him, Rickey Henderson spanned time, from the early days when he and Billy Martin resurrected the A’s and put Rickey on the map, to the days when his iconoclasm chafed the old guard so much that many did not think he was the automatic Hall of Famer he would one day become.
Rickey amassed a career so big it was impossible to not concede that he knew what he was doing all along. The stories that were once proof that he was bad for the game became the nostalgia we missed, the personality we craved. His personality hadn’t necessarily changed; the numbers were simply too big to dispute. He wasn’t as good as he said he was. He was actually better.
Buck Showalter recalled a game in the early 1990s when the New York Yankees were in Oakland. Showalter was a coach on the Yankees’ staff, and late in the game, the manager was giving out instructions.
“Rickey was hitting against us, and he has us playing no-doubles defense,” Showalter said. “Guarding the lines. Don’t give up anything big. Don’t let him get in scoring position. Then Mattingly turns around and yells into the dugout, ‘What for? If he gets a single, it’s a double anyway!‘”
Wherever you look in baseball, there is Rickey. When you see Kyle Schwarber and Ohtani and Aaron Judge hitting leadoff, you see Rickey: It is because no true leadoff hitter has ever been able to replicate his power that the sport has resorted to letting cleanup hitters start the game.
When baseball laments its lack of action, capitulates to the truth that dry, analytical no-risk baseball has been a failure by enlarging the bases and just giving stolen bases away, you see Rickey, for there was nothing like Rickey leading off, stalking the pitcher, prowling … and attacking.
No one loved Rickey more than the analytics guys, because Rickey did everything they want, with a video-game efficiency.
Get on base more than 40 percent of the time? Check.
Hit for average? Check.
Hit for power? Check.
Hit for leadoff power? Double-check.
Steal bases at an 85 percent success rate? Check.
As a baseball player, Rickey was everything in one. As the analytics godfather Bill James once said, “If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”
There were so many moments. There was 1982, when Rickey shattered Lou Brock’s single-season record of 118 stolen bases with 130. There was his first season with the Yankees in 1985, when he scored 146 runs and believes he was robbed of the MVP. There was 1990, the year Rickey did win the MVP.
But his Mount Everest for me was the 1989 postseason, starting with the American League Championship Series destruction of Toronto in which he hit .400 with two home runs and scored eight runs in five games to earn series MVP. Rickey followed it up with a World Series in which he hit .474 as the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants.
Over those nine games, Rickey went 15-for-34, scored 12 runs, hit three home runs, walked nine times (with only two strikeouts) and stole 11 of 12 bases. The numbers were impressive but the value was in Rickey proving, at long last, that he was a championship-level ballplayer, a winning ballplayer. As remarkable as it sounds, there was once a belief in the game that Rickey did not always make a team better. The 1989 playoffs erased any doubt that Rickey was one of the great impact players of his time.
His toughness had always been underrated, and that toughness destroyed the Blue Jays. It was what his Oakland teammate Dennis Eckersley said made him so dangerous. He could not be intimidated.
It reminded me of the time Rickey and I were sitting in the dugout in spring training in Mesa, Arizona, talking about competition and he suddenly said, “Did I ever tell you the time I punched Richard Dotson in the face?”
The date was Sept. 10, 1984, A’s-White Sox at the Oakland Coliseum. Dotson was a serviceable major league pitcher for the better part of his 12-year career, mostly with the White Sox. He even won 22 games in 1983 and finished fourth on the Cy Young ballot. In the summer of 1984, he made his first and only All-Star team, on which he and Rickey were teammates.
But later that season, neither team was going anywhere. In the bottom of the first, Dotson starts Rickey off with a fastball … right under his chin, dropping him to one knee. Rickey eventually flies out to right, but not before Dotson throws another one near his cheekbone.
“Next time up,” Rickey says, “I’m standing two steps in front of the plate, damn near standing on the plate, begging this Mother Hubbard to hit me. So he throws four balls way, way outside. OK, I take my walk, but I’m not jogging to first base. I’m strolling to first. I’m jangling to first. I’m taking my sweet time to first. Then I take off for second. Boom. Steal second.”
Rickey is on second in the bottom of the third with one out, and Dotson is angry. Rickey stretches out, like he’s about to take third. Dotson is so worried about Rickey, he walks Dwayne Murphy.
With Dotson facing Dave Kingman, the giant slugger who never took a check swing in his life, Rickey taunts him, threatening to steal third. Kingman takes two enormous hacks; insulted, Dotson drills Kingman with a fastball to the body. Rickey is watching the whole thing from second base.
“Dave walks to first. Everything’s cool — and then he jets to the mound and punches Dotson. Just unloads on him. Now everybody coming off the bench. Both benches. And here we go. I’m on second base and I come in flying and BOOM! I pop Dotson right in his face.”
Home plate umpire Vic Voltaggio ejects Kingman. (Rickey got free punches on Dotson; Voltaggio doesn’t toss him.) White Sox manager Tony La Russa, leaves Dotson in the game. First pissed, now punched, Dotson walks Bruce Bochte, scoring Rickey for the only run of the game. The A’s win 1-0, all because Rickey performed mental surgery on Dotson. Other than Kingman and Rickey tattooing Dotson’s face, Oakland never even got a hit in the inning.
Nobody on the Chicago bench was more enraged than La Russa. The next night, Rickey was chopping it up with another East Bay legend, White Sox leadoff man Rudy Law, who was grim-faced.
“He tells me, ‘Rickey, Tony held a meeting, and the meeting wasn’t about the fight. It was all about you.’ And I was like, ‘Me? It wasn’t about the team, or Kingman?’ Rudy said, ‘No, it was all about getting you.’
“OK, so now, it’s fight day. And I said to everybody, ‘If anything happens, I better see everybody out there, or after I’m done whipping their ass, anyone on our team I see on the bench or slow to get out there, I’m whipping your asses, too.'”
Just before the first pitch, Rickey had one last message to deliver.
“I run over to their dugout and I say to Tony, ‘If anything happens out there today, I’m not coming to the mound for the pitcher. I’m coming straight here, right to the dugout — to get you.'”
La Russa and Rickey would win a championship together in that great year of 1989 and an American League pennant in 1990. In between, the two massive personalities would clash. La Russa was convinced that Rickey’s personality prevented him from being even greater.
It was a common sentiment, and it was true: Rickey Henderson understood the lessons of American capitalism better than his teachers. Money was the mode of currency to express all things — value, appreciation, power — and if anyone had more than he, they had better have the résumé to prove it. Even if they did, that might not be enough.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rickey would withhold his services if he felt the game was treating him unfairly — even when he was in the wrong, like the years he took the security of a long-term contract and then fumed when annual free agent deals would exceed his own.
The constant sparring over money convinced La Russa that Henderson, in his words, “wasn’t a great player.” Talented, yes. Game-changing, yes. But to La Russa, great players never allowed anything to come before winning, and Rickey did.
And yet Rickey went from one of the most disliked players in the game to one of the most beloved over the course of his career, in large part because of his flamboyant personality and style. Whether the Rickey stories were true or not stopped being the point. Even Rickey would begin to admit to stories that never happened because the legend was more important than the facts. The legends live on.
One story, which was definitely true, articulated Rickey’s arc. It occurred May 30, 1994, with the A’s making their first trip of the season to Toronto. The team bus left the Toronto Sheraton, rolled down Spadina Avenue, and as it rumbled to the SkyDome, it past a billboard on Blue Jays Way containing just three elements: a photo of an elated Joe Carter, the date of his epic home run, and the time it landed in the seats to give Toronto the championship in 1993. No other words.
The billboard sparked a question that bounced around the A’s bus as it pulled into the ballpark: “Where were you when Joe Carter hit the home run?” From the front to the back, players, coaches, and staff recalled their whereabouts during Canada’s most famous baseball moment. Dave Feldman, the statistician for KRON-TV, the A’s television affiliate, said he was sitting on the couch, watching the game in his San Francisco apartment, totally stunned. More voices followed, with more recollections.
Then, a lone voice boomed from the very back of the bus.
“I was on second base!”
It was Rickey.
The only thing that did more for Rickey’s reputation than his hilarity was his sheer dominance. “Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it — those days when he really wanted to play — there was nobody better,” Eckersley said.
Like the time in 1998, when Rickey was close to done. He was 39, and his manager, Art Howe, lamented that Rickey couldn’t get around on a fastball anymore. As proof, he would strike out 118 times that year, the most ever in a single season for him. That meant he was vulnerable, and the youngsters thought they could take him out.
“One time we were in Cleveland, and Kenny Lofton was leading the league in stolen bases,” recalled Ron Washington, the A’s third base coach at the time. “And here’s Lofton across the diamond chirping at Rickey: ‘See that old man on the other side of the field? There’s a new sheriff in town. That dude is done.’ And don’t you know, Rickey just went on a tear. Second — gone. Third — gone. He’d come back into the dugout and say, ‘If Rickey sleep, let Rickey sleep.’ He just took whatever he wanted. When you talked s— to him the way Kenny Lofton did, he reminded you that he was still Rickey Henderson.”
When it all coalesced into a titanic career, even La Russa had to reassess.
“Rickey knew his body better than anybody else,” La Russa later told me. “I have to admit I was wrong about him. As a manager, I would ask him how he felt and he would tell me, ’70 percent.’ Seventy percent wasn’t good enough for him to play, but I’d tell him 70 percent of Rickey Henderson was better than 100 percent of anybody else I had on the bench. There were times he did not play even when that 70 percent, I thought, could have benefited the team, but when you look at the end results of what he did, the totality of his career achievements cannot be argued.”
His detractors were not completely wrong. Rickey was difficult. Rickey was a force of his own making, for better and, for a manager, often for worse — especially when he saw himself as underpaid. But if the games are about numbers, as we are told they are, Rickey Henderson stood vindicated, and in the end, that is why he was loved.
“Tell me something,” he once said to me during a discussion over malingering. “How in the hell you gonna steal 1,400 bases jaking it? How could you do what I did, for as long as I did it, and say I didn’t want to be out there?”
EDMONTON, Alberta — The Oilers switched goaltenders for Game 3 of their second-round playoff series against the Golden Knights, with Stuart Skinner replacing Calvin Pickard for Saturday night.
Pickard, who took over as Edmonton’s starter during a first-round series against the Los Angeles Kings, was day-to-day, Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said.
Pickard was stellar in Edmonton’s 5-4 overtime win in Game 2 with 28 saves, but he appeared uncomfortable in the third period and was seen shaking out his left leg.
He replaced regular-season starter Skinner when the Oilers trailed the Kings 2-0 in the first round. Edmonton won six in a row with Pickard in net and took a 2-0 series lead home from Las Vegas to Rogers Place. Skinner is 19-17 in career playoff games with the Oilers.
Also on Saturday, Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy told reporters that defenseman Brayden McNabb and forward Brandon Saad are both out of the lineup and considered day-to-day.
McNabb exited Game 2 after receiving a check to the boards by Oilers forward Viktor Arvidsson in overtime. Saad is being held out with an undisclosed ailment.
What will the series tally be in Caps-Canes when it heads back to D.C. — and will the Knights win at least one in Alberta so they even see a Game 5 back in Las Vegas?
Read on for game previews with statistical insights from ESPN Research, a recap of what went down in Friday’s games and the three stars of Friday from Arda Öcal.
With the Canes and Capitals tied up 1-1 heading to Raleigh for Games 3 and 4, ESPN BET has Carolina as the -215 series favorite. Washington is +180 to win the series.
Capitals defenseman John Carlson scored a power-play goal in Game 2, his 13th career playoff power-play goal, which breaks a tie with Brian Leetch for third for such goals by an American-born defenseman. He still trails Chris Chelios (14) and Brian Rafalski (17).
For the first time in his postseason career, Tom Wilson reached all of these thresholds: 2 points, 3 shots on goal, 2 hits and 2 blocked shots. His seven points this season is the most he has had in a playoff run since the Cup-winning year of 2018 (15).
The Hurricanes have not held an in-game lead since Game 4 of the first round against the Devils. They won the series in Game 5 in a double-overtime game, then won Game 1 of this series 2-1 in OT after trailing 1-0. Since that lead in Game 4 of the first round, they have trailed for 89:28 and been tied for 117:55.
Among qualified goaltenders this postseason, Frederik Andersen leads by a wide margin in goals-against average (1.55), and is second in save percentage, at .930. The netminder ahead of him in SV%? Washington’s Logan Thompson.
Following two wins by the Oilers in Vegas, ESPN BET now lists Edmonton as the -550 favorites to win this series, with the Golden Knights at +380. Edmonton is also the current favorite to win the Cup, at +300, narrowly ahead of the Stars, at +325. Vegas is now +1800, the longest odds of any team remaining in the playoffs.
Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid combined to score the game-winning OT goal in Game 2. It was the second OT goal this postseason for Draisaitl, and he is now tied for the most such goals in a single postseason in Oilers history with Esa Tikkanen in 1991.
McDavid is second among playoff scorers with 14 points through eight games, trailing only Mikko Rantanen‘s 15. McDavid’s 1.75 points per game this postseason is ahead of his rate in playoff seasons past (1.58) and well ahead of his rate during last year’s run to the Stanley Cup Final (1.36).
Victor Olofsson had two goals and an assist in a losing effort in Game 2. Both goals were on the power play, and he joins Jack Eichel as the only players in Knights history with multiple power-play goals in a single playoff game.
Speaking of Eichel, he finished with three assists, joining Shea Theodore and William Karlsson as the only players in Knights history with two three-assist playoff games on their résumé.
Öcal’s three stars from Friday
After a rough first round against the Blues, Hellebuyck shut out the Stars in Game 2. He made 21 saves en route to the fourth clean sheet of his postseason career.
Ehlers had his second career multigoal game and added an assist in a big Game 2 effort that tied Winnipeg’s series with Dallas 1-1.
The former Bruin continues to haunt the Maple Leafs, this time with the overtime winner to get the Panthers on the series board at 2-1. It was his fourth career playoff OT goal, and he extended his own NHL record for most consecutive postseasons with a game-winning goal (nine).
Toronto entered with a 2-0 series lead and got out to a 2-0 start in the game as well, with goals from Matthew Knies and John Tavares, before Aleksander Barkov drew the Panthers back to within a goal with his third goal of the postseason. Tavares added a power-play tally at 2:52 of the second period on a slick deflection, before the Panthers ripped off two goals in quick succession to tie the score. The first was thanks to Sam Reinhart poking the puck in during a wild scramble in the Leafs’ crease, the second after a superb pass from Sam Bennett to Carter Verhaeghe. Jonah Gadjovich put the home squad up 4-3, but Morgan Rielly tied things up midway through the third. It took until the final five minutes of the first OT, but Brad Marchand came through with another game-winning goal. Full recap.
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Brad Marchand’s OT winner sparks pandemonium from Panthers crowd
Brad Marchand scores a massive overtime goal to deliver the Panthers a 5-4 win over the Maple Leafs.
If this is the kind of goaltending the Jets will now get from Connor Hellebuyck, the Stars (and the rest of the NHL) are in trouble. Hellebuyck stopped all 21 shots sent on the Jets’ goal en route to his fourth career postseason shutout. On the offensive side, Gabriel Vilardi and Nikolaj Ehlers got the party started in the first. Adam Lowry added his fourth goal of the postseason in the second, and that 3-0 lead stood until 16:20 of the third, when Ehlers capped off the festivities with an empty-net goal. Full recap.
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Nikolaj Ehlers rolls in an empty-net goal for Winnipeg
Nikolaj Ehlers scores his second goal of the game to pad the Jets’ lead late in the third period vs. the Stars.
Kristen Shilton is a national NHL reporter for ESPN.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Maple Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz continues to work his way back but doesn’t appear close to a return in Toronto’s second-round Eastern Conference playoff series against the Florida Panthers.
“He’s progressing in the right direction,” Maple Leafs coach Craig Berube said Saturday. “But he has not skated yet [since getting hurt].”
Stolarz was injured during Game 1 on Monday. The goaltender took a puck off his mask and an elbow to the head from Panthers forward Sam Bennett in the second period, exiting shortly after the Bennett hit. Stolarz, who was ill on Toronto’s bench before he left the game, was later transported to a hospital for evaluation.
The veteran was able to rejoin his teammates Tuesday at their facility but did not travel with the Maple Leafs to Florida ahead of Friday’s Game 3.
Joseph Woll took over the starting duties from Stolarz and helped stake Toronto to a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series. But Woll struggled in Game 3, recording an .861 save percentage as the Panthers mounted two multigoal comebacks to down the Maple Leafs 5-4 in overtime.
Berube said after the loss that he “thought [Woll] was really good” but that he didn’t love when Panthers fourth-liner Jonah Gadjovich beat the goaltender cleanly from outside the right faceoff circle to give Florida its first lead of the game at 4-3.
Woll also has been adjusting to playing the puck amid Florida’s smothering forecheck.
“They rim a lot of pucks,” Woll said Friday. “I’m just trying to do my best to help us break out.”
Florida hasn’t made it easy on Toronto in that respect. Berube anticipates Woll can learn from Friday’s mistakes and improve, though.
“It’s difficult,” Berube said. “A lot of those rims are up; they’re not on the ice. And that’s designed. If they can get a good lick on it, they’re going to get it on the glass. It’s pretty tough for him to come out and play those. He did get to a lot of them. But they’re coming hard. He’s going to have to move it quick.”