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If you could name one player in the history of baseball who was the Platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, who would you name?

Rickey.

Even today, 21 years after Rickey Henderson’s last big league appearance and as the news of his death just four days before his 66th birthday reached us, that first name is likely the immediate response to the question. That’s your answer whether you’re a Gen Xer who was a child when Henderson broke in with the Oakland Athletics, or a Gen Zer who was a child when he played his last game for the Los Angeles Dodgers 25 years later.

Rickey. If you have even a passing knowledge of baseball history, that name is all you need to answer the question. The name encapsulates so much.

Set aside for a second everything you know (or think you know) about Henderson as a one-of-a-kind personality and just consider what he was on the field. There, too, he was singular, and not just because he threw left-handed and batted righty.

For every team, the leadoff hitter is one of the most important roles on the roster — and it was a role Henderson played better than anyone before or since.

What Rickey did

Think of the crucial traits you want in a leadoff hitter: getting on base, stealing bases and scoring runs. Let’s take them in order.

1. Getting on base.

Henderson is one of just 63 players to retire with a career on-base percentage over .400. Only three players reached base more times than his career total of 5,343: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb.

Henderson started 2,890 games during his quarter century in the majors. He batted leadoff in 2,875 of those games. Rose was a leadoff hitter for the majority of his career, but he also started more than 1,100 games in other spots. Bonds started off as a leadoff hitter but is much better known for what he did further down in the lineup. Cobb started just 29 games in the leadoff slot.

In other words, no leadoff hitter has ever gotten on base more often than Henderson.

And of course, there was no player who you wanted to keep off the bases more, because he did so much damage once he was there.

2. Stealing bases.

Steals is the category that will likely always be most associated with Henderson. He’s the all-time leader in single-season steals (130 in 1982) and the career leader (1,406). That career total is almost right at 50% above the second-highest mark, Lou Brock’s 938.

It’s hard to describe how we looked at Henderson during his apex in the 1980s, a decade in which he swiped 838 bags. It almost felt like he had broken baseball. Perhaps the perfect example of this: July 29, 1989, when Henderson was playing for Oakland and facing Seattle, with future Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson starting for the Mariners. Henderson played the full game and did not record an official at-bat. Instead, he walked four times, stole five bases and scored four runs.

Every walk felt like at least a double but perhaps a triple; so did every single. The geometry of the sport felt inadequate to accommodate his ability. You can’t help but wonder how many bases Henderson might steal now, with the new set of steal-friendly rules in place.

Let’s say a long-ball hitter dominated the home run category over his peers the way Henderson did the stolen base column. That slugger would have finished with around 1,143 homers — or 1.5 times the final tally for Bonds.

When Henderson broke Brock’s all-time mark in 1991, he still had more than a decade left in his career. He finished that season, his age-32 campaign, with 994 steals. From age 33 on, he tacked on another 412, a total which by itself would rank 68th on the career list.

With so many things Henderson did, the scope of it all now takes on an air of mythology, because he did it so well for so long. Henderson first led the American League in steals with 100 swipes in 1980; he was 21. He last led the AL in steals in 1998 with 66 — when he was 39.

3. Scoring runs.

Despite all those stolen bases, and all those times on base, Henderson likely still saw those things as a means to his ultimate goal for any trip to the plate: scoring.

In 2009, around the time of his induction to the Hall of Fame, Henderson told reporters, “To me the most important thing was stirring things up and scoring some runs so we could win a ballgame.”

No one scored more runs. His 2,295 times crossing the plate is the record, 50 more than Cobb and 68 more than Bonds. Only eight players have ever cracked the 2,000-run barrier. The active leader — the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, who has played 15 years in the majors — is at 1,298, nearly 1,000 shy of the mark. It’s a staggering figure.

What Rickey meant

For much of his career, a lot of what Henderson did beyond stealing bases was underappreciated. He played so long that he was around to see perceptions of baseball value shift more than in any time in the sport’s history, but during most of his years, batting average earned more attention than on-base percentage, and RBIs held sway over runs.

The illustration of this came in 1985, when Henderson batted leadoff for a Yankees team that featured that year’s MVP, Don Mattingly. It might have been Henderson’s best overall season: He hit .314 while drawing 99 walks, stealing 80 bases, clubbing 24 homers and scoring 146 runs — his career high, a figure tied for the fourth-highest total of the integration era.

If current analytical practices were in place then, Henderson would have been the likely AL MVP, as his 9.9 bWAR total led the AL (and dwarfed that of Mattingly, who won the award with 6.5). Henderson finished third in a hotly contested race among himself, Mattingly and George Brett.

Mattingly’s 145 RBIs likely won the votes he needed for that award, but he wouldn’t have reached that total without Henderson in front of him: Donnie Baseball drove in Rickey 56 times that season. Henderson did win an MVP award in 1990 — but he probably should have won one or two more.

Eventually, the analytics caught up with Henderson’s greatness, and there are few who would dispute his stature at this point. We have WAR at our disposal now, and Henderson’s total of 111.1 is the 19th highest in the history of a sport that dates to 1871 — without a doubt, among the very best who ever put on a uniform.

Still, he was more than his numbers. For legions of Gen X baseball fans, especially those on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was the mere act of stealing a base or imitating his sleek, low-slung, head-first slide into the bag, he was one of those players you would pretend to be on the sandlot. He was one of those players you wished you could be.

If you were of that generation, you were about 10 years old when he arrived in Oakland in 1979. By the time he finally left the majors — not of his own volition, as Henderson would have played on and on if it were up to him — you were in your mid-30s, with adult responsibilities and virtually no memory of Major League Baseball without Rickey.

Henderson was almost without antecedent, the only real historical comparison being the legendary Cool Papa Bell of the Negro Leagues. Whatever you might think of Henderson given his quirky and often misinterpreted public persona, the man knew his history. He would sometimes use “Cool Papa Bell” as an alias when checking into a hotel.

My favorite anecdote about Henderson might be apocryphal, at least in that I have no way to verify it. But it’s harmless, so I’ll pass it along. There’s something beautiful in imagining it to be true.

A few years ago when I was in Cooperstown, I was chatting with a man who kept a boat on one of the docks of Otsego Lake, which spreads away from the bottom of the hill on which Cooperstown resides.

The man told me that during the weekend on which Henderson was inducted, Rickey approached him and asked how much it would cost to be taken out in the man’s boat. They agreed to a price and headed out. Henderson was “dressed to the nines” and wearing wraparound sunglasses.

The unlikely pair went out into the water a ways, then stopped. Henderson sat there looking back at the village, home to baseball’s immortals, arrayed along the hillside. He didn’t speak. Just looked, swaying with the water. After a few minutes, Henderson asked to be taken back to shore. That was it. The man had no idea what Henderson was thinking about during those minutes.

That was in 2009, four years after Henderson played his last season in independent ball in 2005. For the 39 years before that, since his pro career began in the minors in 1976 when he was 17, he did it his way, which was the perfect way.

In doing so, he became more than a player, but an archetype. Rickey, the leadoff man. No one will ever be more suited for a role on the baseball field than he was for that job. And no one is likely to ever do it better.

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Dodgers bring back Muncy, send Edman to IL

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Dodgers bring back Muncy, send Edman to IL

LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers activated third baseman Max Muncy off the injured list Monday and placed utility man Tommy Edman on the IL because of a right ankle injury.

Edman suffered what the Dodgers called a sprain while rounding first base in the fifth inning of Sunday’s road game against the Tampa Bay Rays. Edman, 30, missed the first two weeks of May because of a right ankle injury and had been struggling since he came back, slashing .214/.273/.323 over a 56-game stretch.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts didn’t provide a timeline for Edman’s return but said he would “be back at some point.” The Dodgers don’t want to bring him back until he is fully healed this time.

“Where we’re at on the calendar,” Roberts said, “we’ve got to make sure we do everything on the front end that we don’t have a setback.”

Muncy returned to his customary No. 5 spot for the opener of a three-game home series against the St. Louis Cardinals. He finished 0-for-3 and ended the game with a line out in the bottom of the ninth.

A little more than a month ago, he didn’t think he’d return to the field this year.

In the sixth inning on July 2, with Clayton Kershaw a strikeout away from 3,000, Chicago White Sox outfielder Michael A. Taylor slid headfirst into Muncy’s left knee. Muncy said his initial thought was, “I’ve got to get off this field so Kersh can keep pitching.” As he went down the tunnel, Muncy was convinced his season was finished.

With Muncy on the trainer’s table, the Dodgers’ medical personnel examined his left leg. He was told the knee felt strong, that the swelling wasn’t nearly as bad as anticipated. An MRI the following morning revealed no structural damage.

“As I was laying there on the ground that night, I thought for sure, ‘This is it,'” Muncy said. “At that time, obviously, you have a million things that start going through your mind. Obviously, they’re all the worst. It’s hard to stay positive in a moment like that. But just trying to be thankful and blessed to be able to get back on the baseball field this year. I’m going to try to enjoy every second of it knowing how close it was to not being there for me.”

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Guards’ Enright, battling cancer, earns first save

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Guards' Enright, battling cancer, earns first save

NEW YORK — The first career save for Nic Enright was a particularly meaningful one.

Enright, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in late 2022 and is scheduled to complete his treatments later this year, allowed an unearned run in the 10th inning Monday night to close out the Cleveland Guardians‘ 7-6 win over the New York Mets.

“He was almost crying on the field just now,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “If you read his story, it’s pretty inspirational.”

Cleveland selected Enright in the 20th round of the 2019 amateur draft out of Virginia Tech. He received his diagnosis Dec. 22, 2022 — 15 days after the Miami Marlins took him in the Rule 5 draft.

After four rounds of immunotherapy in early 2023, Enright made nine minor league rehab appearances for the Marlins before being designated for assignment and returning to the Guardians in late May.

He missed most of last season due to a right shoulder strain, but went 2-1 with a 1.06 ERA in 16 appearances with Triple-A Columbus.

The right-hander has one more round of cancer treatment scheduled for November.

“I made the decision when I was diagnosed in 2022 with Hodgkin lymphoma that I wasn’t going to let that define my life and dictate how I was going to go about my life,” Enright said. “It’s something where, for anyone else who is going through anything similar, [it shows] I haven’t just holed up in my house and felt sorry for myself this whole time.”

Enright made his major league debut May 25 and has a 2.01 ERA in 19 appearances for the Guardians, whose bullpen is in flux with All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase on paid leave as part of a sports gambling investigation.

Hunter Gaddis and Cade Smith pitched the eighth and ninth innings Monday before Enright entered with a two-run lead. He gave up a two-out RBI single to Brett Baty before retiring Luis Torrens on a fly out to the warning track in right.

“I definitely held my breath as I saw Nolan [Jones] kind of keep running,” Enright said. “But I had faith. As he kind of got closer to the wall, I realized it was losing steam.”

Enright was showered with beer by teammates in the locker room.

“I was so happy, oh, I was going nuts in here,” Guardians starting pitcher Slade Cecconi said with a smile. “I was going absolutely berserk. He came in running up the stairs, smile on his face.”

Enright thanked his wife, his parents and the rest of his family for their support throughout an interview at his locker. He got the ball from the final out and plans to set aside his uniform and hat as well as a lineup card.

“Really, really cool,” Enright said. “These last couple of years, especially, I’ve gone through a lot of adversity and just everything that’s gone on. And so for me, it’s being able to reflect on those in these moments. I think that helps being able to slow the game down. Because it hasn’t exactly been a red-carpet rollout for my career trajectory.”

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New Cubs starter Soroka (shoulder) headed to IL

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New Cubs starter Soroka (shoulder) headed to IL

CHICAGO — New Chicago Cubs starter Michael Soroka left his first game with his new team with right shoulder discomfort and will require a stint on the injured list, the team announced on Monday after its 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds.

Soroka, who turned 28 on Monday, felt something grab in his shoulder after throwing a pitch in the second inning. He didn’t come out for the third.

“Went to go put a little extra on a fastball and it grabbed me a little bit,” Soroka said afterwards. “And it didn’t go away.”

Soroka was acquired last week from the Washington Nationals for two prospects and though he’s experienced a dip in velocity over the last month, he claimed he wasn’t in any pain as he took the mound for the first time as a Cub.

“There was no reason to believe there was anything wrong,” Soroka said.

The six-year veteran has been searching for answers to his drop in velocity, eventually getting an MRI before his last start before being traded. It came back clean, according to Soroka, so he stayed focused on his mechanics.

“Everyone knew the velocity hadn’t been there the last month,” he said. “I still had life on everything. The breaking ball was still playing like it did in the first [inning].”

Soroka struck out two in the first inning on Monday, displaying a nasty slurve to whiff TJ Friedl and Austin Hays, but then his velocity dipped in the second when he gave up a home run to Tyler Stephenson before leaving a few minutes later.

“You’re always concerned when you have to come out of the game,” Soroka stated. “It’s never fun. I’m embarrassed. You come to this org and hope to hit the ground running and two innings later, we’re having to pull the plug.”

The Cubs need fresh arms as Soroka was their lone addition to the starting rotation before MLB’s trade deadline last Thursday. Righties Jameson Taillon (calf) and Javier Assad (oblique) are on the mend and due back soon, but the team is still short in the starting staff.

Ben Brown took over for Soroka on Monday but he has been shaky as the every-fifth-day starter. They may need to turn to him again.

“We didn’t have any signs of it,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said of Soroka. “His velocity has gone backwards. He’s trying to figure out how to fix that. He was optimistic in the first couple days here that we could help him there and things could get better.

“This is unfortunate.”

Soroka was 3-8 with a 4.87 ERA for the Nationals before being traded for Single-A prospect Ronny Cruz and Triple-A outfielder Christian Franklin.

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