Rickey Henderson: Best, Worst, Outliers, and Oddities

Issue #210

After a bout of pneumonia, Rickey Henderson died on December 20, 2024, just five days before his Christmas birthday when he would have been turning 66. He was an outstanding player—many would say a top-20 all-time player, certainly top-30 or top-40. But he was also a very interesting player in many ways, holding several all-time records that are not likely to every be broken, while also being a charismatic personality of the game.

As with some other players, I’ve done a little digging into Henderson’s career numbers. So this is the latest installment in my series of player profiles titled “Best, Worst, Outliers, and Oddities.”

Standard Numbers and Accolades

Before I get to that more unique analysis, here are some of the standard numbers and accolades (with some added details) that reviews of Rickey Henderson’s playing career variously include:

• Henderson is best known as the games all-time greatest base-stealer:

  • His 1,406 career SB are far more than Lou Brock’s 938 career SB—49.8% more in fact. The gap between Henderson and Brock is the same as the gap between Brock and 46th place Jimmy Rollins and his 470 career SB. The active leader in SB? That would be Starling Marte who through 2024 has 354 SB.

  • Henderson was generally quite efficient at stealing bases as well, with a 80.76% success rate (he is the all-time leader in CS with 335, but that is only marginally higher than Lou Brock’s 307). At Baseball-Reference.com his SB% only ranks 69th all-time—but that is if you include players with a mere 80+ attempts! He ranks 21st all-time if you increase the minimum attempts to 300 or more.

  • His 130 SB in 1982 set a new modern-era (post-1901) single-season record, surpassing Lou Brock’s 118 in 1974. He ran wild that year, as he was also caught 42 times, a bit more than Ty Cobb’s previous record of 38 in 1915.

  • He led his league in SB an amazing 12 times (a record), including seven consecutive seasons from 1980-86, and also at the age of 39 in 1998 when he still managed to swipe 66 bags.

  • Henderson had 71 regular-season games with 3+ SB, far more than Vince Coleman’s 43 games or Ty Cobb’s 37 games. Similarly, he had 19 games with 4+ steals, far more than Coleman’s 10 games or Cobb’s 7. He only had 5 steals in a game once, which came

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