A couple days after Rickey Henderson made his major league debut on June 24, 1979, a silver station wagon pulled up to a yellow house, awaiting moving vans that wouldn’t fully arrive for a week or two.
In that moment, there was zero chance some sort of cosmic connection was made, that Rickey would eventually become My Guy, that a sparsely-populated ballpark in Oakland would become a sun-splashed refuge, and that someday all involved parties would depart the premises.
Some 35 years later – the same jersey number he wore in that debut – the cycle is complete. Rickey Henderson passed away Friday, just 65 years old, and by “just” we mean this is an athlete who always looked like he’d live forever…