Rickey Henderson

Leading off, of course: No. 24, Rickey Henderson.

On June 24, 1979, the A's dropped a doubleheader to Texas, forgettable enough in a terrible season, except for the fact that one of the greatest baseball players of all time made his debut in left field. In the first game, the 20-year-old went 2-for-4 with a double and a stolen base, a statistic that became synonymous with Henderson.

The one-time Oakland Tech football star would soon team with a new A's manager to turn the franchise's fortunes around — saving major-league baseball in the East Bay.

From his first moments, Rickey Henderson was in a hurry. He was born in the back seat of an Oldsmobile en route to the hospital in Chicago on Christmas Day, 1958.

In Henderson's autobiography with John Shea, Off Base, Confessions of a Thief, he credits his speed to chasing chickens as a small child at his grandmother's home in Alabama; after moving to Oakland, he raced city buses.

Baseball wasn't his early passion, though. Football was Henderson's game, and he had to be dragged to the diamond by his brother and by some neighborhood coaches who realized they needed the area's top athlete on their teams, even if they had to bribe him.

"I hated baseball," Henderson said from a distance of more than 40 years. "I played because of my brother; he loved it, but I hated the game. A baseball player was nowhere near what I wanted to be.

"But I had a couple of father figures who kept me playing. Because I was good at it, I was playing on two teams — they got me to play by bringing me cocoa and donuts to get me out of bed, or I never would have gone to the field. I'd play in Oakland and Berkeley, one game at 10:00 am and the next one at 2:00."

Henderson wound up playing with Louis Burrell, who like his brother, Stanley "MC Hammer" Burrell, worked in the A's clubhouse; Oakland players of the mid-70s remember Louis Burrell bringing Henderson around and telling them that here was a future big-leaguer. Another A's connection: Dave Stewart, the future Oakland star right-hander, was the catcher on Henderson and Burrell's Connie Mack team.

Henderson was, famously, cut from the varsity baseball team as a sophomore. He was a high school All American in football, however, and he received 20 scholarship offers, with USC and UCLA among the suitors.

"I was going to go to Arizona State because of Reggie Jackson and because I could play football and baseball," Henderson said. "My mom was the one who decided against football. She said, 'I want you to play baseball.' I said, 'Mom, I don't like baseball, I just did it to get away from my chores.'

"One scout told me I had a better chance at baseball. He said I was the best athlete he had ever seen and I was going to make it. A lot of teams didn't like me, though, because I hit right-handed and threw left-handed."

That's an unusual combo, with only a few dozen in the fraternity (including, lore has it, Eddie Gaedel, though the undersized pinch hitter never threw a baseball at the big-league level).

"When I got into baseball, I just looked to see what everyone else was doing, and they all hit on the right side," Henderson said. "So I did it from the right side, even though I'm left-handed. People to this day wonder why I wasn't a left-handed hitter, but it's only because I was watching the other kids.

"In single-A, they talked about having me switch hit, but Tom Trebelhorn was my manager and he said, 'You're hitting .380. Why mess with your swing?' We're talking a lot more hits if I'd hit left-handed because it always took me awhile to get out of the box. I'd have been two steps closer to first. Batting right-handed, I never got any infield hits because I got so tied up with my swing and getting out of the box."

The A's overlooked this oddity and selected Henderson in the fourth round of the 1976 draft.

In A-ball, in 1977, Henderson stole 95 bases. He was still perfecting his craft, however. He credits Trebelhorn with helping him learn to steal bases, but Henderson kept working on finding the right sliding style.

"When I went feet first, with all the pounding, it was wearing my legs down," Henderson said. "I asked [teammate] Mike Rodriguez to show me how to slide like he did and I ran down to second and pow! I crushed my behind. I hit the ground so hard, I hurt my butt. So I tried sliding head first and that hurt more than feet first."

Pitcher Mike Norris, on a rehab assignment at Double-A Jersey City, was...