Intro: Rickey Henderson is one of the all-time great baseball players, being in the MLB for over 24 years and posting the most career steals and runs of all time. Henderson is also part of the elite 3,000 hit club, and of course is an honorary member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Using Baseball Reference to scrape his career stats, I am going to see if Henderson’s performance ever wavered during his long career. Was Rickey always an elite player?
Link: The data I used for Henderson’s stats can be found through this link: https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/r/personal/reulet_xavier_edu/Documents/BAIS%20462/henderson_stats.csv
Scraping Note: To scrape the data, I had to create a loop and filter out many unnecessary data rows by selecting only the MLB teams that Henderson has played for in his career. Otherwise, there would be excess data showing his minor league stats and other Baseball Reference numbers.
The first batch of data we will look at are some of Rickey Henderson’s impressive career stats. We can highlight the important ones by using simple filtering of each individual stat using summarise:
Games - 3081
Hits - 3081
Runs - 2295
Steals - 1406
Walks - 2190
Strikeouts - 1694
OPS - 0.79579
Henderson is the all time leader in Runs and Steals in the MLB, records that are not even close to being broken. His career OPS, or On Base Plus Slugging Percentage, is very high at ~0.8, meaning he got on base a lot and had impactful hits. He almost averaged a hit a game, even though he played over 3,000, a feat impressive on its own. What’s most impressive is that he has about 500 more career walks than strikeouts, proving he’s a true generational slugger that you could count on to get on base.
Graph 1:
library(tidyverse)
henderson_complete <- read_csv("henderson_stats.csv")
ggplot(henderson_complete, aes(x = Year, y = SB)) +
geom_line() +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth() +
labs(title = "Number of Steals by Henderson Over Time",
x = "Year",
y = "Steals")
Henderson’s steal count was highest during the first 10-12 years of his career, and then his steal count per year tapered off a bit. This makes perfect sense, because as Henderson got older, he was probably more susceptible to injury (and aging) and was not likely to run and steal as much; however, it is still mighty impressive that Henderson was able to amass over 50 steals in during the 1997 season, his 18th year in the league. This breakout season towards the end of his career is interesting in itself, as it came during the boom of the steroid era…
Graph 2:
ggplot(henderson_complete, aes(x = Year, y = R)) +
geom_line() +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth() +
labs(title = "Number of Runs by Henderson Over Time",
x = "Year",
y = "Runs")
The line graph plotting Henderson’s runs per year is a bit less drastic in its decrease per year over time. While that also makes sense, given that as Rickey aged he was more susceptible to injury and just was getting in worse shape as one does naturally. What this graph tells more than that, however, is the drastic dips in runs in certain years, at least once a decade. We can test if these years represent times where Henderson was seriously injured in a season. Given that this seems to have happened multiple times, this just adds to the impressiveness of Henderson’s longevity and dedication to the game of baseball.
To test if Henderson’s dips in performance were due to injury, we can simply see how many games he played in per year:
Graph 3:
ggplot(henderson_complete, aes(x = Year, y = G)) +
geom_line() +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth() +
labs(title = "Number of Games Played by Henderson Over Time",
x = "Year",
y = "Games Played")
The years where Henderson had dips in the number of games played coincide with the same years he had dips in run totals. In all likelihood, he missed games and had lower stats those years because he was injured. His ability to bounce back tremendously in games played after each time he had a ‘hurt’ season is quite impressive, given the number of times its happened (it seems that he had 4 true ‘hurt’ seasons).
All in all, the graphs I created help to tell that Henderson did indeed have fluctuations in performance in his career, but that was mainly due to serious injury resulting in missing games. Henderson really is one of the all time greats, and his ability to stay in the MLB for 24 years even after getting hurt time and time again is a testament to his grit and determination to be one of the very best.