The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (34 page)

His mere presence on the base paths was a force of psychic disruption. Distracted infielders made errors, and pitchers, finding themselves unable to concentrate, gave up easy hits to subsequent batters. As the former Yankee captain Don Mattingly has said, “Basically, he terrorizes a team.” Henderson would score in ways that made his heroics nearly invisible: he would often get a walk, then steal second, then advance to third on a ground ball, and, finally, come home on a routine fly ball to the outfield. In other words, he regularly scored when neither he nor his teammates registered a single hit.

But there was also something out of control about Henderson. A base stealer takes his team’s fortunes into his own hands; if he decides to run and gets thrown out, he can devastate a team’s chances for a big inning. In 1982, Henderson didn’t merely set a season record for steals; he also set one for being caught (forty-two times). The very traits that won him praise—bravado, guile, defiance—also made him despised. During a 1982 game against the Detroit Tigers, when he needed only one more base to tie Brock’s record, he singled but had no chance to steal, because there was a slow base runner on second. Violating every norm of the game, Billy Martin ordered the man on second to take such a big lead that he would get picked off. Henderson’s path was now clear, and he took off, sure that he was safe at second, but the umpire called him out, allegedly muttering, “You got to earn it.”

Baseball has an unspoken etiquette about lopsided games, and Henderson’s habit of stealing when his team was already trouncing an opponent was widely seen as unsportsmanlike. In 2001, while Henderson was playing with the San Diego Padres in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, he took off in the seventh inning, when his team was leading by seven runs. The Brewers’ manager, Davey Lopes, who had been one of the most aggressive base stealers of his day, was so incensed that he stormed onto the field, yelling that the next time Henderson came up to bat the pitcher was going to “drill” him. The threat was clearly in earnest, and Henderson was removed from the game. “We’re old school,” Lopes said later.

And it wasn’t just the way Henderson ran the bases that irked traditionalists. In 1985, after being traded to the Yankees, he was asked what it would be like to play on the same field that once knew Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, and he replied, “I don’t care about them. . . . It’s Rickey time.” When he hit a home run, he would stop and watch it go over the fence, then arc ostentatiously around first base, one elbow outstretched like a bird’s wing. Instead of simply catching a ball, he would make a show of snatching it out of the air. “I don’t appreciate that hot-dog garbage in my ballpark,” the former Orioles catcher Rick Dempsey, who once had to be restrained by an umpire from attacking Henderson, said.

Henderson earned a reputation for creating tumult off the field as well. He held general managers hostage with his contractual demands. “I’ve got to have my money guaranteed,” he’d say. Or, in one of his more Yogi Berra-like phrases, “All I’m asking for is what I want.” Once, when he couldn’t find his limousine upon leaving a ballpark, he was heard saying, “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.” In 1989, the A’s signed him to a four-year contract worth twelve million dollars, which made him the highest-paid player in the game; but less than two years later, after several players surpassed that sum, he demanded a new contract. The pitcher Goose Gossage, who played with Henderson on the A’s, once said, “Henderson set a new standard for selfishness. He made Jose Canseco look like a social worker.” By the end of his career in the majors, Henderson was recognized as one of the best players of all time, but, in the view of many players and sportswriters, he was also “greedy,” “egomaniacal,” “Tropical Storm Rickey,” “the classic baseball mercenary,” and “the King of I.” In other words, he was the last player anyone thought would join the Golden Baseball League.

  “I can’t be late,” Henderson said.

He was at the Los Angeles airport, waiting for a morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where, for a July game against the Scorpions, the Golden Baseball League was hosting Rickey Henderson Night. (The first thousand fans to arrive at the game would receive Rickey Henderson bobble-head dolls.) The league, realizing that Henderson helped give it legitimacy, had offered him various perks to sign on, and, unlike the rest of the players, he didn’t have to endure long bus rides to away games—he flew by commercial airplane. And so, while the team was spending five hours on a bus to Yuma, Henderson picked up his bags and boarded the plane. He was wearing an elegant tan shirt and matching pants, and a gold Rolex studded with diamonds. During his career, he has earned more than forty million dollars in salary alone. He owns dozens of rental properties, as well as a hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch, near Yosemite National Park, where he spent time in the off-season with his wife and their daughters. He also has a Porsche, a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a BMW, a Mercedes, a Cadillac, a G.M. truck, a T-bird, and a Ferrari. “I’ve told major-league clubs, ‘Don’t worry about your bank account—I’ll play for free,’” Henderson said. “This ain’t about my portfolio.”

As he waited for the plane to taxi to the runway, he checked his cell phone to see if his agent had called with any word from the majors. “Nothing,” he said. After holding power over general managers for so long, Henderson seemed uncertain what to do now that they held power over him. He had even considered crashing a Colorado Rockies tryout for high-school and college players. He knew that his reputation had probably hurt his chances of being brought onto a team as an elder statesman and bench player. “There’s always that concern: will Rickey be willing to come off the bench?” Henderson said. “I would. If you let me retire in a major-league uniform, you won’t hear a peep out of me.” Henderson regularly scoured the news reports for injuries and roster changes in the majors, to see if there might be an opening.

“Who’s that new guy they got playing center field for the Yankees?” Henderson asked me.

“Tony Womack,” I said.

“Womack, huh?” he said, then added in frustration, “My God, you mean to tell me I ain’t better than him?”

He placed a call on his cell phone, and began talking over the roar of the engine. The stewardess, who seemed unusually tense, asked him sharply to turn the phone off. He said that he would, but requested that she ask him nicely. Within moments, security officers had boarded the plane to remove him.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked.

“Is that Rickey Henderson?” a passenger asked.

“Look how cut he is,” another said. “I hear he never lifts weights—he only does pushups and situps.”

“You’ll have to come with us,” an officer told Henderson.

I stood up to get off with Henderson, and the officer asked who I was.

“That’s my biographer and lawyer,” Henderson said.

The passengers began to shout, “You can’t take Rickey!” But the stewardess wouldn’t relent, although Henderson said that if he had done something to offend her he was happy to apologize. The plane took off without us.

“See, man?” Henderson said to me. “I cause controversy even when I don’t do nothin’. That’s the way it’s always been.”

The airline, seemingly embarrassed by his removal, tried to find us another flight, but the next one to Yuma didn’t leave until the evening. “I gotta make my game,” Henderson said. “It’s Rickey Henderson Night.”

Eventually, the airline found us a flight to Imperial, California, which was about an hour’s drive from Yuma; from there, the airline said, it would provide a car to take us to the stadium. When we arrived at the Imperial airport, a middle-aged man standing in the baggage-claim area said, “Rickey, what brings you to Imperial?”

“Got a game tonight in Yuma.”

“In Yuma?”

“Playing in a new independent league over there.”

“You trying to make it back to the show?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, I sure wish they’d give you a shot. They never treat us old guys well.”

We drove in a van across the desert to Yuma, which is known primarily for a prison that once housed outlaws from the Wild West. When we reached Desert Sun Stadium, Henderson seemed taken aback—it was little more than a field with bleachers and a water tank looming over it. “It ain’t Yankee Stadium, is it?” he said.

The temperature was a hundred and nine degrees, and it was hard to breathe. Henderson signed autographs and posed for photographs with fans—“I’m, like, the Babe Ruth of the independent leagues,” he said—and then went into the clubhouse to suit up. The bus for the rest of the team had already arrived, and the players were lounging in their underwear; a few were chewing sunflower seeds and discussing a rumor that a scout from a major-league organization had appeared at a recent game.

By now, Henderson knew most of his teammates’ stories. There was Nick Guerra, a former college star who worked a construction job in the mornings to support his family. There was Scott Goodman, a slightly pear-shaped power hitter, who once hit eighteen home runs for a minor-league team affiliated with the Florida Marlins but was released anyway. And there was Adam Johnson, perhaps the most promising player on the team, a twenty-six-year-old starting pitcher who had lost only one game all season. The manager, Terry Kennedy, who had played fourteen years in the major leagues as a catcher, and whose father had played in the majors as well, told me, “I sometimes call this the Discovery League. Everybody here is trying to discover something about themselves—whether they should continue pursuing their dream or whether it’s time to finally let it go.”

Henderson and Goodman went out to the batting cage together. Goodman, who was among the league leaders in home runs and R.B.I.s, had been struggling with his swing in recent games.

“How you feeling?” Henderson asked him.

“Last night, I wasn’t getting my bat out right.”

“I don’t mean last night. I’m not worried about last night. How do you feel now?”

“I don’t know,” Goodman said. “It’s like I’m not getting my weight behind anything.” He went into the cage and swung at several pitches.

“See your foot?” Henderson said. “You’re stepping too far in, instead of toward the pitcher.”

Goodman inspected the divot in the dirt where his front foot had landed. “You’re right,” he said. “I never noticed.”

Kennedy told me that he had initially worried how Henderson would fit in with the team, especially considering his perks. “I was never into guys who chirp,” he said. But, to his surprise, Henderson had gone out of his way to mentor other players. “I don’t want to go too deep into his head,” Kennedy said. “But something’s clearly going on in there. I think maybe he’s trying to show clubs that he’s willing to be a different player.”

After a while, Goodman and Henderson returned to the clubhouse.

They put on their road uniforms, which were gray and navy blue, and walked onto the field, their cleats leaving marks in the sticky grass. Despite the heat, more than four thousand people had come out for Rickey Henderson Night—the biggest crowd in Yuma since the opening night of the season. As Henderson took his position in center field, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, with a pair of rodent-like ears attached to its roof and a curly tail sticking out of its trunk, circled the grass. “It’s time to exterminate the competition,” the stadium announcer said. “Truly Nolen Pest Control—We get the bugs out for you.” After the first inning, Henderson sat on the bench, his uniform already soaked with sweat, while cheerleaders danced on the dugout roof over his head. The announcer said, “See if you can answer tonight’s trivia question! The question is: What year was Rickey Henderson originally drafted by the Oakland A’s?”

“Nineteen seventy-six,” one of Henderson’s teammates said.

“I wasn’t even born then,” another said.

At one point, with Henderson playing center field, a shot was hit over his head and he began to run, unleashing at least a memory of his speed. He looked back over his shoulder, trying to bring the ball into focus, and made a nice catch. “Thataway, Rickey!” his teammates yelled when he came back to the dugout.

Even though Henderson played well, with two singles and a walk, the Surf Dawgs lost, 5–0. His wife, who had come to see him play that weekend with two of their daughters, told the team’s general manager, “Why won’t he just quit and come home?” As he left the field, fireworks began to explode in the sky above him, the finale of Rickey Henderson Night.

  One afternoon before a home game, Kennedy approached Henderson at the ballpark and asked if he would teach the other players the art of stealing. Kennedy knew that, in recent years, base stealing had been all but forgotten in the major leagues. Team owners, convinced that home runs brought people to the stadium, had built smaller and smaller ballparks; at the same time, players made their muscles bigger and bigger with steroids. Since 1982, when Henderson broke the single-season record for steals, home-run totals had risen by sixty-one per cent, while the number of stolen bases had fallen nearly twenty per cent. But Kennedy knew how devastating stealing could be: he had been with the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series, when Henderson and the A’s swept the Giants in four games and Henderson set a post-season record, with eleven stolen bases.

Henderson agreed to give a demonstration, and there was a buzz as Goodman, Johnson, and the other players gathered around first base. Henderson stepped off the bag, spread his legs, and bent forward, wiggling his fingers. “The most important thing to being a good base stealer is you got to be fearless,” he said. “You know they’re all coming for you; everyone in the stadium knows they’re coming for you. And you got to say to yourself, ‘I don’t give a dang. I’m gone.’” He said that every pitcher has the equivalent of a poker player’s “tell,” something that tips the runner off when he’s going to throw home. Before a runner gets on base, he needs to identify that tell, so he can take advantage of it. “Sometimes a pitcher lifts a heel, or wiggles a shoulder, or cocks an elbow, or lifts his cap,” Henderson said, indicating each giveaway with a crisp gesture.