RIP Willie Mays

He might be a seven-time MVP in today's game.

 

My Dad was a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan in his youth and when he woudl tell me about his love of the Dodgers and the rivalry with the other city teams, there was always going to be a spot where he said, 'the fact that a player so great and noble as Willie Mays played for the evil Giants is proof that the world was against me." Then he would laugh.

 

I loved Rickey as a kid. As much as I hate the Yankees, I didn't miss any games on WPIX that he played for them. And in the 1987 (??) ASG when Henderson led off against Doc Gooden, that was this 10-year-old peersonal heaven because there were many Doc vs. Rickey arguments amongs my elementary school friends. Doc and Rickey were the two guys in NYC baseball that controlled the game in the . Rickey with his amazing ability to get on base and make a pitcher's life hell and Doc's ability to keep everyone off base.

Rickey's stint with the Mets ended awfully, but in 1999, at 40 years old, the man hit .315 and stole 37 bases. Hit a home run in the tiebreaker game agaisnt the Reds. The way he played that year made you think he easily had 4-5 more good seasons in him.

As Joe Po from SI wrote about Rickey: "I'm about to give you one of my all-time favorite statistics: Rickey Henderson walked 796 times in his career LEADING OFF AN INNING. Think about this again. There would be nothing, absolutely nothing, a pitcher would want to avoid more than walking Rickey Henderson to lead off an inning. And yet he walked seven hundred ninety six times to lead off an inning. He walked more times just leading off in an inning than Lou Brock, Roberto Clemente, Luis Aparicio, Ernie Banks, Kirby Puckett, Ryne Sandberg and more than 50 other Hall of Famers walked in their entire careers ... I simply cannot imagine a baseball statistic more staggering."

 

Good player.

 

I don't think Rickey knew when to quit. I know I keep relying on WAR, but it's a convenient measurement. By that, he generated less value from a span of 1997-2003 than he did in one single year in 1980, 1985 or 1990.

 

Bob Dole thinks Rickey Henderson is the greatest ballplayer alive who refers to himself in the third person.

 

I remember very little. I grew up in Denver before the Rockies were created so my only exposure to Mays was the occasional Game of the Week telecast..

But I always thought that the Rockies should have built Coors Field to have a 500+center field like the old Polo Grounds. Then we could have watched balls flying through the thin air and centerfielders trying to be like Mays as they attempted to run the balls down.

 

This is fair. He was still a solid player, just not transcendental. Which is fine! He was in his late 30s and early 40s and not on the greatest steroids known to man.

Howard Bryant's bio of Rickey is terrific. Get a real look at why Rickey was the way he was, especially when it came to his contract negotiations and his desire to play forever.

 

Sounds great but to do that the power alleys would have to be way too deep. Unless you want the field to look like a bathtub, which the Polo Grounds was often described as resembling. Plus, the PG had thousands of bad seats for baseball, they were oriented toward the outfield, not the infield.

 

Ty Cobb never stole more than 35 bases in a season after he was 30 years old.

 

I don't know which Rickey stat is cooler:

--He stole 66 bases at age 39 in 1998, which is tied for the seventh-most SBs in a single season from 1998 through 2022 (I don't count any stolen bases since 2023...total joke). It's cool and neat he's tied with Roger Cedeno, who had 23 steals over parts of four seasons before playing with Rickey and swiping 66 bases for the Mets in 1999. (Roger had a pretty good 2001 w/the Tigers, for whom he stole 55 bases, but was otherise terrible after 1999)

--Rickey finished with 468 more steals than Lou Brock. That would tie him for 47th place all-time, and is 118 more stolen bases than active leader Starling Marte.