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.
Once you were on base, Henderson said, the next step was taking a lead. Most players, he explained, mistakenly assume that you need a big lead. “That’s one of Rickey’s theories: Rickey takes only three steps from the bag,” he said. “If you’re taking a big lead, you’re going to be all tense out there. Then everyone knows you’re going. Just like you read the pitcher, the pitcher and catcher have read you.”
He spread his legs again and pretended to stare at the pitcher. “O.K., you’ve taken your lead; now you’re ready to find that one part of the pitcher’s body that you already know tells you he’s throwing home. The second you see the sign, then, boom, you’re gone.” He lifted his knees and dashed toward second base. After he stopped, he said, “I’ll tell you another of Rickey’s theories.” Nearly all base stealers, he explained, begin their run by crossing their left foot in front of their right, as they turn their bodies toward second. That was also a mistake. “If you cross over, it forces you to stand straight up to get into your stride,” he said. “That’s the worst thing you can do as a runner. You want to start out low and explode.”
As Henderson was conducting his demonstration, members of the opposing team arrived and began to look on. He said that the final touch was the slide. Before Henderson, the great base stealers typically went feet first. Henderson decided that it would be faster-not to mention more daring and stylish-to go in head first, the way Pete Rose, who was never a major base stealer, occasionally did. Yet each time Henderson tried the head-first slide he would bounce violently, brutally pounding his body. Then, one day, while he was flying to a game, he noticed that the pilot landed the plane in turbulence without a single bump. Henderson recalled, “I asked the pilot, I said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said the key is coming in low to the ground, rather than dropping suddenly. I was, like, ‘Dang. That’s it!’” After that, Henderson said, he lowered his body gradually to the ground, like an airplane.
Henderson concluded by saying that if the base runner studied the pitcher, made a good jump, and slid well, he should beat the throw nearly every time. And, if for some reason he was caught, the moment he got back on base he should try to steal again. As Henderson put it to me, “To steal a base, you need to think you’re invincible.”