Rickey Henderson

Rickey Henderson has died, four days short of what would have been his 66th birthday.

Henderson was the first superstar of the advanced stats era, in a rather complex way, in that his astounding stolen base totals were somewhat diminished in importance by the insights of the sabermetrics revolution, but his combination of a great on base average and slugging percentage were revealed by that same revolution to make him clearly the greatest player of the 1980s. And he ranks with Bonds, Schmidt, and ARod in the group of the greatest players of the last 50 years.

I was in a fantasy baseball league in the 1980s, and my team was called Needs to Draft Rickey Henderson.

RIP