Rickey Henderson, who passed away yesterday at an age tragically out of step with the endurance and vibrance he brought to the game, may well have been the greatest baseball player of the modern era. This is a bold claim, yes, but it is neither hyperbole nor sentimentality. It is, simply, the truth.
Consider, if you will, his career WAR—111.1, a figure so vast it resides in the rarefied air of the game’s immortals, standing 19th all-time. For comparison, Derek Jeter, a first-ballot Hall of Famer whose place in baseball lore is unquestioned, amassed a career WAR of 71.3—a monumental number in its own right, yet Henderson eclipses it by over 50%. One might say, in the argot of the game, that Rickey’s WAR has more range than Jeter’s entire fielding career. Indeed, Henderson’s career WAR exceeds the combined totals of Jeter and Trevor Hoffman, himself a modern-day Hall of Fame closer.
And what of the others? Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod—names that linger like specters, their achievements inseparable from the credible and verified accusations of chemical enhancements. Henderson, untainted by scandal, outpaces even the likes of Mickey Mantle, Tom Seaver, Mike Schmidt, Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson—players whose names evoke an almost Pavlovian reverence. From the moment Henderson entered the league in the late 1970s, he established himself as the most singular force the game had known, and he remained so for decades.
He was not a mere compiler of statistics, though his numbers could fill a Hall of Fame exhibit. Henderson led the league in WAR three times, in runs scored five times, and in stolen bases—well, whenever he felt like it, which was often. But to focus solely on his numbers is to miss the essence of Rickey. He didn’t just steal bases; he stole moments, transforming games into his own Shakespearean dramas. He didn’t just score runs; he became runs, standing as the all-time leader in that most fundamental measure of baseball success.
At his peak—an astounding 10-year stretch—he averaged a WAR of 7.1, even accounting for a strike-shortened season. For a decade, he was a perennial MVP contender, a player whose very presence on the field tilted the odds. Compare that to Juan Soto, the $750 million man, who has averaged 5 WAR in his young and promising career. Or to Shohei Ohtani, whose superhuman feats on both mound and plate have earned him an average of 5.9 WAR. Rickey exceeded them both, and by a good margin.
Why, then, do we hesitate to name Henderson as the greatest of his era? Perhaps it is the bias of power—the thunderous home runs that captured imaginations in the gorilla-ball era, which began as Rickey’s career wound down. Perhaps it is the eccentricities: the third-person pronouncements, the playful bravado, the reluctance to conform to baseball’s unwritten codes. Or perhaps it is that he played before the advent of modern metrics, which now lay bare the ineffable genius of his productivity.
But to relegate Henderson to mere greatness is to do him, and baseball history, a disservice. He was not merely among the greatest of his generation; he stands, by the cold clarity of numbers and the warm glow of memory, as the single greatest of his generation. For Rickey was Rickey, and there will never be another quite like him.
