Someone who knows about wearing the number 24 former Seattle Mariner Ken Griffey Jr pays tribute to former Oakland A’s great the late Rickey Henderson at the Oakland Arena on Sat Feb 1, 2025 (AP News photo)
Saturday, February 1, 2025
By Lewis Rubman
OAKLAND–There were many Rickey Henderson’s. Setting aside his various personae before he reached the major leagues, there was as a different Rickey each time he ping ponged between the Oakland Athletics, for whom he played in 1979-84, 1989-93, 1994-95), and 1998), and the New York Yankees (1985-89), Toronto Blue Jays (1993 until his mid-season return to the A’s in ’94), San Diego Padres (1996-97 and 2001), Anaheim Angels (1997), New York Mets (1999-2000), Seattle Mariners ((2000), Boston Red Sox (2002), and Los Angeles Dodgers (2023).
This afternoon, a crowd that filled at least 95% of the Oakland Arena, across Championship Plaza from what had been Rickey Henderson Field. met to celebrate the life and honor of the multifarious Rickey Henderson That geographic irony didn’t go unmentioned by the long list of speakers who eulogized the different Rickeys.
The raw 20 year old 1979, morphed into the superstar of 1980-84 who first broke the major league record for stolen bases in 1982 and kept on breaking it with each bag he pilfered until he retired with 1,406, a record that still stands.
A lead off hitter who still managed to blast 297 lifetime home runs and drive in 1,115 runs., The Man of Steal, patented the Rickey Run, and left the game having come home safely 2,295 times. Rickey also was the retired major leaguer who wouldn’t quit, the one time hot dog who doggedly kept playing into his mid forties in the independent Atlantic and Golden Leagues and became a respected mentor of the generations of A’s who followed him.
There also was Rickey Henderson who cared more about having his worth recognized more than he cared about the riches that recognition brought with it.. Rather than cash his million dollar bonus check for the 1983 season, he framed it and kept it hanging on the wall until the A’s business office phoned him to ask if he’d ever received the document
There was the Rickey who, upon setting a new record in 1982 for career stolen bases infamously said, Lou Brock was a great base stealer but today I am the greatest.” His critics (I was one until I learned more) conveniently overlooked Rickey qualifying introductory phrase. Then there was the Rickey who closed his Hall of Fame speech by declaring “I am now in the class of the greatest players of all time. And at this moment, I am very, very humble.”
The assembled multitude was greeted by Shooty Babbit, an old teammate who served as the principal master of ceremonies. The commentator and scout lost no time in declaring Henderson the “greatest of all time” before introducing Bip Roberts, who remembered The Man of Steal as his “high school hero.” He recounted when, as an adolescent, he asked his hero for an autograph and the answer he got, “There’s a time and a place for everything.” As time went by, Bip Roberts came to think of Rickey as his ‘big brother who never spoke about how great he was.”
Next came Bishop Gregory Bernard Payton of the Greater St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, who ended his prayer by thanking God “for lending us Rickey this short time.” Bishop Payton’s son, NBA hall of famer and a friend of Rickey since childhood, emphasized at the close of his eulogy that Henderson had made his mark “here, in Oakland, California.”
Dave Winfield, a teammate on the Yankees, remembered telling Rickey, then still a prospect ,that he’d been tearing them up in the minors, to which Rickey replied, “I’m gonna tear ’em up here, too.” Winfield added, “Every day he came to work with joy.” It’s also been told, although Winfield didn’t mention it, that when Henderson was living in New York, he praised the view from his condo, which had a great view of “The Entire State Building.”
Sandy Alderson declared, “I don’t like to be known as the guy who traded Rickey Henderson [pause] twice. I’d like to be called the guy who brought him back.” The ex GM of the A’s got in a sly dig at the current ownership by adding as he closed, “in 1990, he was the highest paid player in baseball. Imagine that [another, more dramatic, pause] in Oakland.”
Ken Griffey, Jr. confided in his 20 some odd close friends of the afternoon, “Rickey was my brother, my older brother. Sometimes I think he was my , . . father,” concluding that he “changed baseball forever.”
Dave Stewart, recently returned to the Athletics’ fold as a special assistant for player development, commented, “Rickey had a way of making life more fun” and exhorted us to “Love him. live your life fully, because that’s what Rickey did.”
It was difficult to follow the long, emphatic memories of Rickey’s oldest friend, Fred Atkins, who shouted, sometimes into the microphone, sometimes moving out of its range. I was able to catch his declaration, “Rickey was a star on Broadway, in Oakland.”
The crowd booed when Renel Brooks-Moon, the one-time Giants public address announcer, who shared M.C.duties, reading the Henderson family’s thank you letter to the Athletics for organizing and hosting the afternoon’s commemoration, read “John Fisher. Brooks-Moon immediately shot back, “Not today! Not today! This is Rickey’s!” A class act that quieted the crowd and was, in itself, a tribute to Rickey Henderson and a rebuke to John Fisher.”
The festivities ended with the gospel singing of Charlie Finley’s protegge M.C. Hammer and his wife, Stephanie.
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