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He didn't feel obligated to put himself out for the media, a fact that led to decades of gleeful revenge from the scribes who delighted in calling Rickey and his attitude a scourge of the game. Finished solving What Rickey Henderson often beat? I also assumed (correctly, as Howard Bryant points out in this book) that a lot of the negative attention Henderson received was due to racism. RICKEY, to borrow a phrase, is intensely and satisfyingly entertaining. Unfortunately, baseball has a code of unwritten rules that governs the game. The players we got for Rickey actually turned out pretty well. Jay Howell was an All Star reliever.
He is on the leaderboard of dozens of significant statistical categories. Who is Rickey Henderson? What's interesting about reading some of this biography is how much of it is colored by my views on baseball and the current climate of the game. Nevertheless, he chose the diamond and wound up in the bigs with his hometown Oakland Athletics in 1979. Also, for as much as Rickey's wife Pamela is quoted, there wasn't much about Rickey Henderson's home life. He is the only man in MLB history with more than 3, 000 hits and more than 2, 000 walks. The two of them apparently developed a bond. Bryant deftly places Henderson's career and personality in the milieu of baseball history and carefully compares and contrasts him with others, contemporary and in the past. Worst of all, he repeatedly slighted his wife and companion/partner since high school, Pamela.
Henderson had an OPS+ of 182, but his fellow stars on the three-time pennant winners had fallen prey to age and injury. He did plenty for the teams, of course, he really was one of the greatest of all time and surely the greatest lead-off hitter of all time. Second is Davey Lopes, who stole 47 bases for the Cubs in 1985, which was his age-40 season. Rickey barely goes into any depth on Henderson's post-playing career, and that is totally fine with me and illustrates the biggest problem I had with the book: I don't really fine Rickey Henderson that interesting.
He told the high school coach who put him on the JV baseball team as a freshman, "You must not know who I am. " He signed the long-term contract because he prioritized security over potential higher earnings. Ricky said "if they want to pay me like Mike Gallego, I'll play like Gallego".
Provide some prose about how dominant he was, don't just rely on quotes. Players didn't think Henderson had become a distraction but understood the reasoning. He was disruptive to opposing pitchers. And Rickey's drive for respect and recognition rubbed them the wrong way. It also describes Henderson's childhood growing up as a star football player (he mainly shifted his focus to baseball out of injury concerns and even contacted Raiders owner Al Davis for a tryout in the late 80s). Henderson read an account of the play in the New York Post and shouted at the reporter who wrote the story. Therefore, Henderson was often a culprit of breaking the unwritten rules of baseball. Jose Rijo was one of the finest pitching prospects in the game, though injuries kept him from reaching his potential until he arrived in Cincinnati. Along the way we meet important personages like Charles O. Finley, the controversial and innovative owner of the Oakland A's, Billy Martin, the abusive, racist, and brilliant manager of the team, Mike Norris, a pitcher who became Rickey's best friend along with numerous characters that dominated baseball during Rickey's career. Something's missing. You'll never know the real Rickey, but at least you'll know why.
I really enjoyed it. Rickey and Billy Martin are a big reason why I grew up an Oakland A's fan. Phillips said he didn't think there was anything he or Valentine could do to alter the behavior of Henderson, now in his 22nd major league season. But to those who really knew Henderson, they understood that he was just being himself. That means 13 different times, the team he was with decided it would be better off without him. It's Rickey being Rickey and Howard being Howard – what more do you want? Fast forward to the summer of 1989, and the Athletics were in a far different place when Henderson publicly expressed a desire to get out of New York. The quality of the writing doesn't do the subject justice, IMO, and I've enjoyed other books by Bryant. While things got really ridiculous at the tail end of his career when he basically played for a different team each year, even in his early days Henderson bounced around a bit. Rickey wouldn't hesitate to put on a show. Bryant's book is definitive of the history of Rickey.
Stan Javier was a good player.