Rickey Henderson for all the Wrong Reasons

Rickey Henderson was awesome at baseball. I totally saw him play the Twins in 1991 before I retreated to my Mom's basement and stopped watching games because it's more fun to do equations and play with spreadsheets...and he was so good that it was almost enough to keep me from learning Excel and just hanging at the ballpark all day. Almost.

Despite failing at that, he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

It’s just that he doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame for the reason that Jayson Stark thinks he does:

Unless my calculator's busted, those numbers are telling me that 28 voters cast ballots that did not include the name of Rickey Henderson.

That is pretty shocking. Who are these people?

But at least it's great news for Corky Simpson, the retired writer from Tucson, Ariz., who has been getting hammered by much of North America for admitting in a column that he didn't vote for Henderson because he's "not a Rickey guy."

Question answered.

OK, so of the other 27 voters who couldn't find Rickey's box to check, two of those ballots were blank steroid protests.

Principle is principle, I guess.

But that still leaves 25 voters with other agendas…Seriously, by what standard is this man NOT a Hall of Famer?

You mean besides the “are you a Rickey guy” standard?

He scored more runs than any player in the history of baseball.



Do we even need to list ANY other qualifications?

Yes.

Jayson, here’s the thing: because baseball is a team game, the only way to ensure that a batter is going to score a run is to hit a home run. If you don’t hit a home run, you will not score unless your teammates do something, like get a hit, that will advance you to home. If you need to brush up, this is all in the rules.

Henderson hit 297 home runs, which is very impressive for the player nicknamed the Man of Steal, but still means that his teammates played a big role in this runs scored bull jive.

There are a myriad of things that Rickey Henderson did independent of his teammates that make his case for the Hall of Fame, things like steal more bases than anyone else ever, clock in with a .401 OBP and a 127 OPS+, etc and so on…so why are you focused on a meaningless statistic that shows little about Henderson’s actual ability?

It’s reasoning like that that makes it okay for Bert Blyleven not to be in the Hall of Fame yet.