Book Review: Rickey by Howard Bryant

Release Date: June 10, 2022

I came into Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original with a bit of trepidation. The book’s author, ESPN writer Howard Bryant, deftly explores the intersection of sports with race, history, and culture in his books and articles and was a former A’s beat writer during Henderson’s tenure with the team. No concerns there. But was Rickey Henderson an interesting enough subject to hold my engagement for over 400 pages? I like baseball well enough but I never was a huge A’s or Rickey Henderson fan and I mainly remember him from playing forever, stealing a ton of bases, and being portrayed as a prickly and aloof personality by the media. In the end, my reluctance was somewhat justified but I’m still glad I read Rickey. It doesn’t shed much new light on Henderson’s personality or private life (and I’m fine with that), but it does chronicle the life of a stellar athlete (Bill James once said splitting Rickey in half would leave you with two Hall of Famers) and places his career in context.  

The book is structured into 3 roughly equally-sized sections. Its opening chapters cover Henderson’s early years and the impact the Great Migration of blacks from the south to northern and western cities had on Henderson’s family and Oakland in general. Completely understandably, this portion was the heaviest on non-sports content and at times reads more like a history of Oakland and black migration (think something akin to Boom Town by Sam Anderson). It also describes Henderson’s childhood growing up as a star football player (he mainly shifted his focus to baseball out of injury concerns and even contacted Raiders owner Al Davis for a tryout in the late 80s). Henderson was also carelessly hurtled through the Oakland public school system, leaving him unable to properly read a newspaper until he was 20. This left Rickey remarkably self-conscious about his vocabulary and being seen as unintelligent by the media which helped drive his perpetually rocky relationship with representatives of the fourth estate. Rickey was drafted out of high school by his hometown A’s and after some up-and-down experiences in the minor leagues made it to the majors in 1979. The first section concludes with the 1981 MLB season, when the Athletics won the AL West and Rickey earned his second consecutive All-Star nod and finished as runner-up in the MVP voting to reliever Rollie Fingers (which seems so weird in retrospect). 

Sports biographies often run the risk of becoming monotonous once the player’s pro career gets going, and Bryant faces this issue with part two of Rickey. Athletes play the same sport in roughly the same fashion day after day and year after year. Once the reader has passed the requisite “childhood and developmental athletic career” portion and gets to the meaty area where the subject is in the big leagues, these biographies sometimes descend into a player’s Baseball Reference page with a few anecdotes and a photograph section thrown in. And Henderson, who played more seasons than any player who began their career in the 20th century, offers an especially large risk here. Bryant navigates this by focusing the middle of Rickey on Henderson’s prime productive years from 1982-1994 in great detail and then fast-forwarding through his final years and post-playing career in the final third. 

I believe Bryant did a decent job of avoiding the aforementioned monotony pitfall. Yes, he chronologically reviews each season, but he adds enough detail and analysis (benefitting considerably from lots of snippets of articles about Rickey back when beat and national writers tremendously shaped popular hardball opinion) and interviews with teammates and opponents and friends of Rickey. Bryant mentions that Rickey wasn’t terribly excited about the prospect of a biography where he didn’t have final say (the project was instead primarily driven by Rickey’s longtime wife Pamela) but Rickey did sit down for some extended interviews and Bryant draws from comments from a plethora of people who were in Rickey’s social orbit throughout his entire life. The reader also benefits from Henderson’s peripatetic career. While things got really ridiculous at the tail end of his career when he basically played for a different team each year, even in his early days Henderson bounced around a bit. Playing in Toronto and Oakland is different from playing in the media fishbowl that is New York and it helps keep the seasons from blending into each other. Henderson had a reputation of being icy with the media and he comes off as quite a private individual, and that leaves Bryant basically avoiding much of his non-baseball life entirely. He seems to have a complicated relationship with his wife (who he had been dating since he was 14 years old) with some infidelity and public slights but perhaps due to Bryant’s close relationship with Pamela, Rickey barely touches upon that, as well as the time in 1994 when Rickey’s half-sister claimed that he raped her when he was a teenager.  

The last third of Rickey breezes through the remainder of his career from 1995 onwards, when Rickey played for 8 teams (not including the Newark Bears and other minor league teams he was affiliated with after his MLB career) and then examines his legacy. It’s pretty amazing that Henderson was able to stick around for so long given his game was highly predicated on speed, but he also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of all things baserunning, and he was able to be an impactful player into his 40s. Once Rickey finally retired, he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer and if anything his legacy has been heightened by baseball’s embrace of advanced metrics. Sabermetrics hasn’t been kind to stolen bases (especially the wanton “permanent greenlight” approach taken by Henderson when he was gunning for Lou Brock’s single-season steal record) but with his uncanny knack for getting on base and drawing walks, Rickey looks quite strong and in February 2022 ESPN listed Henderson as the 23rd best ballplayer ever. Rickey barely goes into any depth on Henderson’s post-playing career, and that is totally fine with me and illustrates the biggest problem I had with the book: I don’t really fine Rickey Henderson that interesting. Some biographies will send me immediately to Google to learn more about the subject and go down a ton of rabbit holes. Not this one. Rickey falls a little short for me for the same reason why I’d rather read a biography of Colin Kaepernick than a biography of Patrick Mahomes; Mahomes is undoubtedly more talented, but I’m already familiar with his on-field exploits and I’m not interested in what he’s done off the field. Rickey was a phenomenal player but he’s not the most engaging personality in the world and he also didn’t seem to want a ton to do with the book. I learned he was very competitive (there is an amusing story about Ricky calling up the teenaged scorekeeper of his AA team to berate him for scoring a “hit” for him as an error) and aloof and that was mostly it. So upon completing Rickey you feel both like you don’t fully know the “true” Rickey and also probably aren’t terribly broken up about that fact. 

Overall, I found Rickey an overall solid read. It’s not quite at the “get this for my Dad for Father’s Day” tier of baseball book (because I don’t think Henderson is that interesting a personality and he doesn’t offer the same kind of social/historical/civil rights “gristle” for Bryant as Hank Aaron did in his last baseball biography) but it’s still a mostly enjoyable and certainly well-written read. 

7/10