WE'LL NEVER SEE HIS LIKE AGAIN (profanity alert):

His diverse gifts are unmatched in any other single player. Only three men have stolen as many bases, and their landmarks--Ty Cobb, 892; Billy Hamilton, 937; and Lou Brock, 938--should fall by the middle of next season if Rickey stays healthy. His waist-high grabs of dying liners would be spectacular grabs for a slower left fielder, and underlying his base running is the slugging potential that means you could bat him anywhere from first to fourth. "He's an offense machine, the most dangerous Yankee," says Royals wise man Bob Boone. 

And yet, though Rickey occasionally proclaims his leadership, he seldom shows it. As he squats in the outfield stretching his hamstrings between pitches, he reinforces the idea that it's Rickey's world and the other uniformed guys out there are just visiting. Still there's something comfortably corny in the way he judges himself--he hears the fans first, before his manager, teammates, or agent. Infamous in Oakland for his verbal and body-English dialogues with fans, he once explained simply, "I get bored." Just watch when he has an easily stolen base and some candy-ass shortstop clouts him with a late tag--a flash of anger yields to consternation, condescension, imperial indifference, and finally, as he dusts his shirtfront and takes a lead, that kidlike joy he finds in making pitchers feel his cleats eagerly tapping the dirt behind them.

No contemporary works the count any harder. When the ump calls a bad strike, he'll stare fixedly at the spot where the ball passed by. He uses body language to nudge the whole ballpark into looking closely, and without being too obvious about it, he'll give the TV cameras some too.

"He's one of the rare players in any sport," says Milwaukee manager Tom Trebelhorn. "He can do things in a way that just draws attention to him--part of the entertainment package in our game." Trebelhorn should know. Even more than Billy Martin, he is Rickey's mentor--dating back to his second year managing pro ball in Boise, where 17-year-old phenom Rickey arrived late in the season, straight from the unkind streets of Oakland's Bush Rock Park district. 

Rickey's mother, Robbie, had raised him and six siblings alone. (Born in Chicago on Christmas Day in 1958, Rickey was the fourth child of a father who decamped when Rickey was quite young.) As a largely unmolested ballcarrier at Oakland Technical High, Rickey was recruited by USC as a tailback but took his mom's counsel and held his .716 high school batting average under the Oakland A's nose. He reported to the club in Idaho, says Trebelhorn, as "a fine young man with very good values. I think his mother did a marvelous job with him, instilling basic, common-sense values." Trebelhorn saw Henderson's hunger to succeed and was canny enough to immediately set to work on the one major league tool Rickey didn't arrive with, a threatening throwing arm. Raw speed gave him 29 steals in 46 games that first year, and Trebelhorn worked on the crouch that would give Rickey a minuscule 10-inch-high strike zone to draw walks with, but mostly they met around a fungo bat.

The next year he had 95 steals, and it was in his third year, at Jersey City in the Eastern League, that fellow Oakland prospect Mike Norris became his roommate. Norris would burn up his extravagant talent (22 and 9 for Oakland in 1980) with drug and alcohol bouts. He spoke recently by phone from Phoenix, where he was trying to pitch his way onto the A's Tacoma farm club. When they played together, Rickey hadn't yet married high school sweetheart Pamela Palmer (their daughter Angela is 2 now), but, says Norris, "He was never too much a partying type as far as going out into the city....I made those trips alone. He's very goal-oriented: he might say, 'Well, I need four bases this week, or four bases this night, to get to that number I'm trying to accomplish.'"

Ten seasons have changed Rickey some. He says he's stealing bases for the team now, and he and Roberto Kelly do make a nice, shiny hinge in the ninth and leadoff spots. Kelly sees juicy fastballs with Rickey up next, and Rickey sees fastballs because Kelly will steal you blind, too. The crouching strike zone Trebelhorn helped him perfect has inched open as he has tried to get his homers back to a 1986 high of 28, and the theatrically nonchalant "snatch" catch that appeared along the way ("Oh," says Trebelhorn, subtly eschewing any blame, "I think he's kind of added that") is not open to managerial discussion. Rickey compares it to the basket catches by another number 24, Willie Mays. "Does anyone," he asks, "think Mays was a hot dog?"

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