Rickey Henderson: Hail to the Thief

Remembering baseball's base-stealing, run-scoring, myth-making Hall of Famer, who died Friday at age 65

- JASON GAY

It's likely no one loved playing baseball as much as Rickey Henderson did-at age 46, he stole 16 bases and drew 73 walks for the San Diego Surf Dawgs, helping them to a Golden Baseball League divisional title, because why not? Rickey didn't need the money. Goodness knows he didn't care about the attention. Rickey just wanted to play ball. Apparently he thought he could still get out there and swipe a few bags at age 55. Maybe 60. Nobody could do that, that's silly. But Rickey?

Henderson, who died Friday at age 65, was an undersized man who lived a big life as a baseball icon, ironman and entire, magical vibe. The wraparound Terminator shades; the comical third-person self-referencing; the impossible strike zone that tormented pitchers for decades-"smaller than Hitler's heart," is how sage Jim Murray once described Rickey's strike zone, even if it might have been a tad smaller than that.

Who of a certain age didn't try to imitate Rickey's hunched-over batting stance at one point, maybe hoping to draw a walk against a Little League fireballer, crouching lower and lower, until their elbows poked at their upper thighs? This was a batting stance from which Henderson got 3,055 major league hits? How did he even do it?

Same for the way Henderson snared a fly ball, slicing over the top of it like a swordsman, as if taunting it to fall out of the mitt. Henderson claimed he invented the style when he was catching the last out of a teammate's nohitter, because Rickey was Rickey, adding flair for a friend. (He caught it, of course.)