If you could name one player in baseball history who embodies the Platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, who would you name?

Rickey.

Even today, 21 years after Rickey Henderson’s last big league appearance and as news of his death reached us just four days before his 66th birthday, that first name is probably the immediate answer to the question. This is your answer whether you are a child of the generation

Rickey. If you have even a passing knowledge of baseball history, this name is enough to answer the question. The name sums up so much.

Put aside for a moment everything you know (or think you know) about Henderson as a unique individual and consider what he was on the field. He was unique there too, and not just because he threw with his left hand and hit with his right hand.

For any team, leadoff hitter is one of the most important roles on the roster – and Henderson played that role better than anyone before or since.

What Rickey did

Think about the critical qualities you want in a leadoff hitter: reaching base, stealing bases and scoring runs. Let’s put them in the correct order.

1. Entering the base.

Henderson is one of only 63 players to retire with a career on-base percentage above .400. Only three players reached base more times than a career total of 5,343: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Ty Cobb.

Henderson started 2,890 games during his quarter century in the majors. He batted in the lead in 2,875 of those games. Rose was a leadoff hitter for most of his career, but also started more than 1,100 games elsewhere. Bonds started out as a leadoff hitter, but is far better known for his performances further down the lineup. Cobb started only 29 games in the leadoff slot.

In other words, no leadoff hitter has ever reached base more times than Henderson.

And of course there wasn’t a player you wanted to keep off the bases more because he did so much damage there.

2. Steal bases.

Stealing is the category that will probably always be most associated with Henderson. He is the all-time leader in single-season steals (130 in 1982) and the career leader (1,406). This career total is almost exactly 50% higher than the second highest mark, Lou Brock’s 938.

It’s hard to describe how we viewed Henderson during his peak in the 1980s, a decade in which he picked 838 bags. It almost felt like he broke the baseball. Perhaps the perfect example of this: July 29, 1989, when Henderson played for Oakland and faced Seattle and future Hall of Fame lefty Randy Johnson started for the Mariners. Henderson played the entire game and did not record an official hit. Instead, he walked four times, stole five bases and scored four runs.

Every walk felt like at least a double walk, or maybe a triple walk; every single one did that too. The geometry of the sport didn’t seem to suit his abilities. One can’t help but wonder how many bases Henderson could steal now, with the new rules making stealing easier.

Let’s say a long-ball hitter dominated the home run category over his counterparts, just as Henderson dominated the stolen base category. This hitter would have hit around 1,143 home runs – or 1.5 times Bonds’ final tally.

When Henderson broke Brock’s all-time record in 1991, he still had more than a decade of his career left. He finished that season, his age-32 season, with 994 steals. From the age of 33, he achieved a further 412 points, which alone would rank 68th on the career list.

With so many things Henderson has done, the whole thing now takes on an air of mythology because he did it so well for so long. Henderson led the American League in steals for the first time in 1980 with 100 swipes; He was 21 years old. He last led the AL with 66 steals in 1998 – when he was 39 years old.

3. Races.

Despite all those stolen bases and all those times on bases, Henderson probably still saw those things as a means to his ultimate goal on every trip to the plate: scoring.

In 2009, around the time of his Hall of Fame induction, Henderson told reporters: “The most important thing for me was to make a splash and score some runs so we could win a ballgame.”

Nobody scored more runs. His 2,295 passes are a record, 50 more than Cobb and 68 more than Bonds. Only eight players have ever broken the 2,000-run barrier. The active leader — Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers, who played 15 years in the majors — is at 1,298, nearly 1,000 below the mark. It’s a staggering number.

What Rickey meant

For much of his career, much of what Henderson did beyond stealing bases was underrated. He played so long that he saw the perception of baseball’s value change more than ever before in the history of the sport, but for most of his years, batting average attracted more attention than on-base percentage, and RBIs had priority over the runs.

Proof of this came in 1985, when Henderson took over as manager for a Yankees team that featured that year’s MVP, Don Mattingly. It may have been Henderson’s best overall season: He batted .314 while drawing 99 walks, stealing 80 bases, hitting 24 home runs and scoring 146 runs – his career high, a mark tied for the fourth-highest total of the integration era.

If current analytics practices existed at the time, Henderson would have been the AL’s likely MVP, as he led the AL with 9.9 bWAR (dwarfing that of Mattingly, who won the award with 6.5). Henderson finished third in a closely contested race between himself, Mattingly and George Brett.

Mattingly’s 145 RBIs likely won him the votes he needed for this award, but he wouldn’t have reached that total without Henderson ahead of him: Donnie Baseball rickeyed 56 times that season. Henderson did win an MVP award in 1990 – but he probably should have won one or two more.

Eventually, analytics recognized Henderson’s greatness, and there are few who would dispute his stature at this point. We now have WAR, and Henderson’s total of 111.1 is the 19th highest in the history of a sport that dates back to 1871 – without a doubt one of the best to ever wear a uniform.

Still, he was more than his numbers. For legions of Generation X baseball fans, particularly on the West Coast, he represents childhood. Whether it was the mere act of stealing a base or imitating his graceful low-slung, upside-down ball sliding into the bag, he was one of those players you would pretend to be on the clay court she. He was one of those players, you desired That could be you.

If you were of that generation, you were about 10 years old when he arrived in Oakland in 1979. When he finally left the majors – not of his own accord, because Henderson would have continued playing if he could – you were in your mid-30s, had adult responsibilities and had virtually no memory of Major League Baseball without Rickey.

Henderson had almost no prior history, the only real historical comparison being the legendary Cool Papa Bell of the Negro Leagues. Whatever you may think of Henderson given his bizarre and often misinterpreted public persona, the man knew his story. He sometimes used “Cool Papa Bell” as an alias when checking into a hotel.

My favorite anecdote about Henderson may be apocryphal, at least in that I have no way of verifying it. But it’s harmless, so I’ll pass it on. There’s something beautiful about imagining it’s true.

When I was in Cooperstown a few years ago, I chatted with a man who was keeping a boat at one of the docks on Otsego Lake, which extends from the base of the hill on which Cooperstown sits.

The man told me that on the weekend that Henderson was taken, Rickey came up to him and asked him how much it would cost to take the man’s boat out. They agreed on a price and set off. Henderson was “totally dressed” and wore wraparound sunglasses.

The unlikely couple walked a little way out into the water and then stopped. Henderson sat looking back at the village, home of baseball’s immortals, lined up on the hillside. He didn’t speak. I just looked and swayed in the water. After a few minutes, Henderson asked to be taken back to shore. That was it. The man had no idea what Henderson was thinking about in those minutes.

That was in 2009, four years after Henderson played his final season of independent ball in 2005. In the previous 39 years, since his professional career began in the minors in 1976 at the age of 17, he did it his way, in his own perfect way.

In doing so, he became more than just a player, but an archetype. Rickey, the leader. No one will ever be better suited for a role on the baseball field than he is for this job. And no one will probably ever do it better.