Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (29 page)

Lucchino liked that idea. The Red Sox agreed to pick up the tab on the suite Henderson was renting at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, which ran $10,000 a month.

Then there was the time….

Henderson was ready to sign a $1.1 million contract with Oakland in 1998 when he demanded a suite on the road. Athletics general manager Billy Beane told him it was club policy not to give such clauses. Henderson insisted.

“Tell you what,” Beane said. “As general manager I get a suite on the road. I don’t make a lot of trips. I’ll give you my suite whenever I don’t go.”

Henderson signed.

And while we’re on the subject of contracts….

After he signed a four-year, $12 million deal with Oakland in 1989, Henderson complained every spring about being underpaid. To underscore his unhappiness, he made a habit of reporting to spring training after the team’s reporting date, though before the mandatory date established by the Basic Agreement. Trouble was, one spring teammate and star rightfielder Jose Canseco adopted the same tactic.

“Rickey was in town,” traveling secretary Mickey Morabito says. “But he didn’t want to report before Jose did. So Rickey would drive into camp, and if he didn’t see Jose’s car parked there, he’d drive back out. Rickey made sure he was the last one to report.”

Rickey’s Favorite Pregame Routines

1. Flexing and swinging a bat naked or in his underwear in front of a full-length mirror, saying, “Rickey’s the best.”

2. Playing cards.

3. Playing dominos.

4. Ignoring meetings held to review opposing pitchers. Henderson prefers knowing nothing about what they throw.

HENDERSON HAS played for eight major league teams, including the Athletics, with whom he has had four stints. It’s easy for him to lose track of his teammates. “There’re countless guys that he’s been teammates with, he has no idea of their names—countless,” says Colorado Rockies bench coach Jamie Quirk, who played with Henderson for three years in Oakland. “It’s not like if you got brought up from Triple A and walked in the locker room, Rickey’s going to stick out his hand [to greet you].”

Henderson lockered next to Beane, then an outfielder for the Athletics, in 1989. Oakland sent Beane to the minor leagues. Six weeks later, Beane was called back to the Athletics.

“Hey, man, where have you been?” Henderson said. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

There was another time….

Art Kusnyer was a coach on the Athletics staff. One day during the season, after Kusnyer threw batting practice, Henderson told him, “You throw good BP. Are you comin’ on the road with us?”

A similar thing happened with the Mets….

In June 1999, when Henderson was playing for the Mets, the club fired hitting coach Tom Robson. Henderson saw reporters scurrying around the clubhouse and asked a teammate, “What happened?”

“They fired Robson,” was the reply.

“Robson?” Henderson said. “Who’s he?”

Which calls to mind another story about how, when Henderson joined the Mariners in 2000, he saw first baseman John Olerud, his former Mets teammate, fielding grounders while wearing a batting helmet and remarked, “That’s strange. I played with a guy in New York who did the same thing.” Alas, the story, though it appeared in many publications, is one of the rare Rickey tales that falls entirely on the side of Fiction, having been fabricated by members of the Mets’ training staff.

Then again, in San Diego….

Padres G.M. Towers is often called KT. Fred Uhlman Jr. is his assistant. The two of them would often walk into the clubhouse together to meet with manager Bruce Bochy. Whenever Henderson saw Towers and Uhlmann he would say to his two bosses, “Hi, Kevin. Hi, KT.”

There was another time in San Diego….

Henderson was boarding the team bus, walking toward the back to sit near Hoffman and catcher Brian Johnson. Tony Gwynn, seated near the front, stopped Henderson and said, “Rickey, you sit up here. You’ve got tenure.”

“Ten?” Henderson said defiantly. “Rickey got
20
years in the big leagues.”

Ah, yes. If Henderson is not best known for his speed or his strike zone (“Smaller than Hitler’s heart,” the late Jim Murray wrote), it must be his penchant for referring to himself as Rickey. Or as Rickey says, “A lot of times people talk about [how I use the] third party.”

One off-season, in search of a team, he left a message on Towers’s voice mail that went like this: “Kevin, this is Rickey. Calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball.”

“One time,” says Mariners catcher Ben Davis, who played with Henderson on the Padres, “Rickey came walking into the clubhouse with this denim outfit and big suede hat. And he says, ‘Rickey got a big ranch [in California]. Rickey got a big bull. Rickey got horses. Rickey got chickens and everything. And Rickey got a 20-gallon hat.’”

“In 2000,” says Texas shortstop Alex Rodriguez, who played with Henderson that season in Seattle, “Rickey was scuffling down the stretch, and there was some speculation that he wouldn’t even be on the postseason roster. Rickey would say, ‘Don’t worry about Rickey. Rickey’s an October player. Rickey’s a postseason player.’ And he was. He helped us beat Chicago.

“Sometimes he’d come back to the dugout after an umpire called him out, and I’d say, ‘Rickey, was that a strike?’ And he’d say, ‘Maybe, but not to Rickey.’”

Rickey’s Rules for a Long Career

1. Run three to five miles every other day. “Some guys, once the season starts, they relax, eat, do nothing. I feel sluggish that way. I got to get up and do something, get the blood back circulating and get the oxygen back in my body.”

2. Do 200 sit-ups and 100 push-ups a day. “I don’t do a lot of weights. Some guys, they want to be Hulk Hogan. Not me.”

3. Stretch before bedtime. “Do your stretching before you sleep. That way you wake up loose.”

4. Eat plenty of ice cream. “I like to eat ice cream at night. I got to have something sweet before I go to sleep.”

Late one night, after a game in New York, Henderson ordered room service, but the order wound up going to Bochy’s room. “I couldn’t believe it,” the manager says. “A huge bowl of ice cream and a big slab of cheesecake with sauce on it. I’m thinking, Where does it go?”

HENDERSON LED the league in stolen bases at age 39, the oldest player to do so, with 66. (The Marlins’ two-time stolen base champ Luis Castillo, 27, has never had that many in a season.) When Rickey was 40, his on-base percentage was .423. He has played 24 big league seasons; no outfielder has played more. At 44, according to Bears teammate Mike Piercy, 26, “His flexibility is amazing. I’d get hurt if I tried to stretch like him. He’s like Bruce Lee. I grew up idolizing him. And he doesn’t look any different now.”

Henderson’s durability is remarkable considering the pounding his body has taken from his baserunning and hundreds of headfirst slides using a technique borrowed from … commercial airliners.

“It was really like a dream,” he says. “I learned that the more closer to the ground [you are], the less pounding you take. We were going to Kansas City in an airplane, and we came in and bounced. Boom, boom, boom. Then we left there, came in I don’t know where, and the plane came in smooth. I thought [the pilot] got lower to the ground, and that’s how I developed my slide. I started to see how low I could get to the ground.”

Tony La Russa managed Henderson for parts of seven seasons in Oakland. He reached an agreement with Rickey: Henderson would tell him directly, rather than through the trainers, when he needed a day off.

“He rises to the occasion—the big moment—better than anybody I’ve ever seen,” La Russa says. “But when he was tapped, he’d take a couple of days off. One day [in 1993] he came in and said, ‘My head’s not right.’ It turns out he was mad about the rumors he was getting traded. I wasn’t going to push him. If you pushed him and he didn’t want to play, he played like a cigar-store Indian. He’d take an 0 for 4, and you were better off playing
me
.”

HENDERSON IS an avowed card shark and competition junkie. He will play almost anything with scoring, especially if it involves a friendly wager. Two years ago Shooty Babitt, a former Oakland teammate and current Diamondbacks scout, chided him for not playing well in spring training.

“Next thing you know we’re playing Strikeout [a simple pitcher-versus-batter game] on the tennis court next to where he was staying,” Babitt says. “He challenged me. We played for an hour—with a tennis ball. And he still owes me 50 bucks for a game of H-O-R-S-E we played.”

“Every day,” says Yankees third baseman Robin Ventura, who played with Henderson on the Mets, “there would be a big argument in the clubhouse, with guys accusing Rickey of cheating at cards. He’d get up and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m always winning.’”

That Christmas morning when Rickey was born in the backseat? His mother, Bobbie, had gone into labor late on Christmas Eve. It was snowing in Chicago. She telephoned her husband, John Henley, to come home and drive her to the hospital. John said no, he didn’t want to rush home right away.

Rickey’s father was playing poker—and he was winning big.

Rickey’s Rankings on Alltime Lists

1. Runs: First (2,288)

2. Walks: First (2,179)

3. Stolen Bases: First (1,403)

4. Leadoff home runs: First (80)

5. Times on base: Third (5,316)

6. Games: Fourth (3,051)

BASEBALL IS designed to be an egalitarian sort of game in which one player among the 18 is not supposed to dominate. Basketball and football can stop the proceedings and design a play to put the ball in the hands of a chosen player. A starting pitcher, who begins the action in a game, takes four days off for every one he works. Yet in the past quarter century Henderson and Barry Bonds have come closest to dominating a baseball game the way Michael Jordan could a basketball game.

“If you’re one run down, there’s nobody you’d ever rather have up at the plate than Rickey,” says Mariners coach Rene Lachemann, a former Oakland coach. “You didn’t want to walk him, because that was a double—he’d steal second—but if you didn’t throw it over the plate, he wouldn’t swing. And if you
did
throw it over the plate, he could knock it out of the park.”

There was one time….

Henderson was taking a lead off first base when he held up two fingers toward Orioles third baseman Floyd Rayford. Rayford was perplexed … that is, until Rickey was standing next to him two stolen bases later.

And another time….

In the 1989 World Series, during which the A’s swept the Giants, Henderson reached base 11 times in the four games and stole three bases. Giants catcher Terry Kennedy grew so weary of seeing Rickey at first base that he grumbled, “Just go ahead and steal the base!”

With his showman’s style—he invented the snatch catch and the slo-mo home run trot—Henderson was hated as an opponent, beloved as a teammate.

“One of my favorite teammates of all time,” Brian Johnson says. “I grew up in Oakland, and he was an icon to me. When I was in San Diego I lockered next to him, and my biggest fear was that he was a bad guy. It was a breath of fresh air to find out he was the nicest guy, a genuine good guy and a great teammate.”

“One of the best teammates I’ve ever had,” Rodriguez says. “He made the game fun every day,”

Says La Russa, “In the clubhouse, on the plane, on the buses, Rickey was anything but the egotistical superstar who kept to himself. He was right in the middle of all the conversations, the cutting up. If you asked anybody on those Oakland teams, I would bet you’d find that everybody liked Rickey.”

“Let me tell you something,” Towers says. “I get e-mails daily from fans saying, ‘Sign Rickey.’ I get up to 100 a day. I get more calls and e-mails about him than anybody. I understand. We’ve had some special players come through San Diego. But there’s an aura about him nobody else has.”

Rickey’s Top Forrest Gump–like World Series Whereabouts

1. Joe Carter’s series-ending home run in 1993: on second base (which caused pitcher Mitch Williams to use a slide-step and hurry his delivery).

2. The 1989 earthquake: on a clubhouse toilet.

IT SHOULDN’T end like this for the Greatest Leadoff Hitter Ever, not here on Broad Street, not here with only about 1,000 people in the stands and kids in hot-dog costumes racing around the bases; not here, where players have to slip 75 cents into a vending machine if they want a soft drink in the clubhouse and the meal money is $18, which doesn’t make for a very exciting game of Pick It.

“I wish he wouldn’t have done it,” Quirk, Henderson’s former teammate, says of his signing with Newark. “I played with him three years. I wish he would retire, wait his five years and go to the Hall of Fame and live happily ever after. I don’t know why he needs to do what he’s doing. But who are we to say?”

Rickey played sparingly for Boston last year, getting 179 at bats. He hit .223 with five homers, 16 RBIs, eight stolen bases and a .369 on-base percentage. (The league average was .331.) John Vander Wal, Ron Coomer, Carlos Baerga and Lou Merloni all had similar seasons or worse. All of those veterans were invited to big league camps this spring and are still playing. No one offered Henderson that chance. His main team, the Athletics, invited Ron Gant (.338 OBP last year) to camp as a righthanded-hitting backup outfielder.

The word among G.M.’s was that Henderson’s bat had slowed and that he appeared to have trouble accepting a limited role after years of stardom. “His bat had slowed two years ago,” Towers says. “I think he’s a decent platoon player. But if he’s a part-time player playing once a week, people think he would have a hard time handling that. Rickey’s game has always been about being out there every day and putting on a show. It’s tough for him to sit and watch. We’re going with young players right now, but I can tell you I’d hate to see him go out the way he’s going out. If he’s still there in September, I’d like to think we could work something out to see him back in the big leagues.”

Rickey has interpreted the silence of the general managers differently. Instead of hearing a no-confidence vote on his skills, he heard them challenging him to a game of Strikeout.
Oh, yeah? Bring it on. I’ll show you
.