The Man of Steal gets the jump in a 1990 game, as then-Angels infielder Johnny Ray looks as though the right move was premeditated surrender.

“To me,” Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson once said, “the most important thing was stirring things up and scoring some runs so we could win a ballgame.” In more ways than one, he was a virtuoso at both. He made a cliché of the maxim that when he led off his team had a man on second going in. He also had to have the uniform torn off his back after slightly more than a quarter century of professional baseball.

On Friday night, at age 65, pneumonia plus asthma tore the Man of Steal from earthly life. Rest assured that even the Elysian Fields might be hard pressed to contain him, though God and His servant Stengel might be entertained above and beyond expectations.

Once upon a time, the Yardbirds’ drummer Jim McCarty wrote in an album liner note, “It’s been said that Jeff Beck is one of the world’s leading guitarists and I’m inclined to agree with him.” Well, now. It was (and is) said (and how!) that Henderson is the greatest leadoff hitter in major league history, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

So was just about all of baseball world, and it didn’t wait until his death to say it, either. But with the news of his death, here was Howard Bryant, a Henderson biographer, writing for ESPN: “He wasn’t as good as he said he was. He was actually better.”

“Rickey Henderson,” said Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, “was a dream to hit behind as teammate and a nightmare for a catcher as an opponent.” And, a joy to fans who loved watching him turn baseball games into Olympic track and field meets.

Henderson was so prolific at reaching base you almost thought he’d become the first to steal first legitimately. Once he did get aboard, you could pretty much bank the run scoring by hook, crook, and anything else Henderson could think of, short of shooting the infielders and the catchers with tranquiliser darts.

The basics would be his 3,118 major league hits, his 1,406 stolen bases, his 298 major league home runs, scoring fifty runs more than Ty Cobb, and stealing about five hundred more bases than Hall of Famers Cobb, Lou Brock, or anyone else making his living with basepath theft. Not to mention the batting stance—damn near a catcher’s crouch, prompting baseball writing legend Jim Murray to suggest his strike zone was the size of Hitler’s heart.

This wiry guy who sometimes checked into hotels using Negro Leagues legend and Hall of Famer Cool Papa Bell’s name as an alias is thought of first for breaking both the single-season and lifetime stolen base records, each held then by Brock. But neither Brock nor anyone else walked 796 times leading off any inning.

The Man of Steal’s 394 game-opening walks is staggering enough. You can think of players who didn’t or won’t walk that often in their entire baseball lives. But 796 walks leading off innings? That’s as surrealistic as a Dali painting, a Kafka novel, or an extremely early Pink Floyd composition. Cobb did it a mere 153 times.

“I’m 69 years old,” dance and film legend Bill (Bojangles) Robinson told an Ebbets Field crowd on Jackie Robinson Day in 1947, “but never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d stand face-to-face with Ty Cobb in Technicolour.” Mr. Bojangles should have lived to see Henderson. He’d have beamed about standing face-to-face with Funkadelic in spikes.

Henderson’s 81 lifetime game-opening home runs and his 293 bombs batting first in the order were (and remain) impressive enough. His 142 inning-opening home runs might be even more so. Whomever else Henderson had behind him in the lineup, it might have been most true that to beat those teams you had to get through him first, last, and always.

He went to eight postseasons with five teams and posted an .831 OPS. You guessed it: there have been and there are players thought to be heftier hitters who didn’t and won’t post .831 OPSes in their whole careers. By any measure, his 1989 postseason was his personal best, winning the American League Championship Series MVP and posting a 1.514 OPS over that ALCS and the (Earthquake) World Series.

The intentional walk is usually handed to a fellow whose bat should be registered as a lethal weapon. Henderson had 61 free passes in 25 major league seasons, an average of three per year. He didn’t lack long ball power, of course, but neither was he guaranteed to lead off every inning he checked in at the plate beyond the first inning.

Simple enough answer: No pitcher who hadn’t yet lost his marble (singular) wanted to hand Henderson a premeditated base because they knew it meant guaranteeing him three bases on the house before the inning ended. Henderson had 5,356 plate appearances in which he led off an inning and he was never handed an intentional walk in those.

He got his walks the old fashioned way: he earned them. No player was better at reading pitchers and catchers preparing for a day’s larceny. He averaged only 89 strikeouts a season at the plate but 115 walks. Keeping the Man of Steal off base and off the top of baseball’s ten most wanted grand theft suspects compared to keeping a politician from putting his or her foot in his or her mouth.

Henderson was more than a base thief—he hit 81 lifetime game-opening home runs, 142 inning-opening homers, and 293 bombs when listed in the lineup at the number one spot.

No player or man is perfect, and Henderson’s imperfect sides could and did drive players and managers on his own teams as well as the opposition to drink or thoughts of manslaughter, whichever came first. His tendency to whine and fume when he thought he was being underpaid steamed his front offices. His tendency to think of sitting it out when he wasn’t feeling a hundred percent physically caused too many to think he was a born goldbrick or worse.

Just ask Tony La Russa, the Hall of Fame manager who managed against him before getting to manage him. Once when managing the White Sox the first time around, La Russa had to bear Henderson getting in his face and telling him the next time his White Sox decided to brawl with Henderson’s A’s, Henderson was coming for him first.

“Rickey knew his body better than anybody else,” La Russa later told Bryant. “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.

When Henderson re-joined La Russa, re-joining the A’s for a third tour after winning a World Series with the 1993 Blue Jays, the A’s team bus passed a Toronto billboard showing Joe Carter’s jubilant tour around the bases after hitting the ’93 Series-winning three-run homer. (Henderson and fellow Hall of Famer Paul Molitor were on base when Carter connected.) Bryant wrote that only one voice came from the rear of the bus.

The voice was Henderson’s. “I was on second base!” the Man of Steal crowed.

Yes, he was as funny as he could be infuriating. But as Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley told Bryant, “Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it—those days when he really wanted to play —there was nobody better.”

“It ain’t bragging if you can do it,” the ancient saying goes. Henderson on the field was the braggart who backed it up. When he spoke to the crowd after busting Brock’s record, he made people fume as well as cheer when he said, “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing. But today I am the greatest of all time.” It turned out that Brock himself helped Henderson write his day’s remarks. Well.

Henderson even proved at least once that one Hall of Famer had to one-up another Hall of Famer to set an all-time record as unlikely (at this writing) to be broken as his 1,406 stolen bases. He proved it when he turned up as Nolan Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout victim, with then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in the house, “ticking off at least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.” (So said the New York Times‘s George Vecsey.)

That was the summer in which the bulk of Giamatti’s too-brief term in office was consumed with the Pete Rose investigation, which didn’t allow him as much time at the ballparks as he would have loved. But bank on this: Had Giamatti lived to be in the house the day Henderson stood to pass Brock, two years later, there’d have been a Brewer or three carping that they thought they detected Giamatti rooting for Henderson.

Even the larger-than-life need anchorage. Henderson had his wife. “Pamela Henderson never received the credit,” wrote another ESPN scribe, Bradford Doolittle. “While he was building his masterpiece, some players didn’t even know Rickey was married, but she was both the anchor and the captain of the yacht.” You don’t stay together since high school and stay married 41 years without a captain and an anchor. It was as if Henderson’s wife and the mother of his three children reassured herself, “Let him have his fun. When he gets home, we’ll remind him who’s on this bridge.”

Maybe one of Henderson’s true problems was that he really did love the game too much to let it go. After a quarter century plus, most players are long retired to their post-playing lives. At age 45, he was busy stealing 37 bases for the independent Newark Bears. When it all shook out, he probably deserved more than two decades plus a near-year more of life after the batter’s box and the basepaths.

He died five days before his 66th birthday. Somehow, it’s appropriate that he should have been a Christmas baby. At his best, the Man of Steal made every game he played feel like Christmas to his teams.

First published at Sports Central.