In late September, the Oakland A’s ended 57 years of Major League Baseball tradition in the city, playing their final game in the Oakland Coliseum. Three months later, the greatest player ever to wear an Oakland A’s uniform has died.  Rickey Henderson, who played four separate stints with the A’s in his 25-year career passed away on Friday, Dec. 20. Henderson, along with former A’s teammate Dave Stewart, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the A’s final game in Oakland. Henderson died at age 65, but he was just five days short of his 66th birthday. He was born with the name Rickey Nelson Henley on Christmas Day in 1958. According to family legend, he was delivered in a car when his mother, Bobbie, didn’t quite get all the way inside the hospital when she tried to rush there after going into labor.  Henderson embraced the story, always claiming that it proved he was “born fast.” And indeed, Henderson’s speed on the basepaths and unparalleled skill at stealing bases, more than any other aspect of his game, earned him a first-ballot election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009. With his mother and four brothers Henderson moved first to Arkansas at age three, and then when Rickey was 10, to Oakland in 1969. There, Bobbie remarried to Paul Henderson, whose surname Rickey adopted. It was 10 years later that Henderson made his Major League debut with the A’s, who had drafted him in 1976 directly out of Oakland Technical High School.  In that game, on June 24, 1979, at the Coliseum against the Texas Rangers, Henderson had two hits and stole the first of his all-time record 1,046 bases. His career total made Henderson the first and to date only base stealer to top the 1,000 mark. The previous record, held by Lou Brock was 938.  Henderson broke that record on May 1, 1991, during his second tenure with the A’s. He went on to play 12 more seasons and steal another 467 bases—almost half of Brock’s entire career total—including 109 after he turned 40 years old. He led the American League in steals 12 times, also a record and is one of only two players ever to steal at least 100 in three different seasons. Henderson did it in 1980, his first full season in the Majors, swiping an even 100 that year. He followed up with 130 in 1982 and 108 in 1983.  If not for a player’s strike shortening the 1981 season by 53 games, he may have hit the 100 mark that season as well. Instead, he led the AL with 56. Henderson’s base-stealing prowess struck the most fear into opposing teams, but it was far from the only area where he became an all-time great—called by another A’s legend, Reggie Jackson, “one of the top 10 to 12 players of all time.” He was also the best leadoff hitter ever, and in the words of longtime A’s general manager Billy Beane, “I’m not sure there’s a close second.” Henderson played 3,081 games in his Major League career. In 81 of those, he led off the game with a home run. That’s 21 more game-opening homers than the second player on the list, George Springer. Henderson is the only player ever to record at least 3,000 base hits (3,055) and 2,000 walks (2,190). Excluding intentional walks, Henderson finished with 2,129 free passes, another record (Barry Bonds holds the overall record with 2,558 but that includes a record 688 intentional walks).  The object of the game in baseball is to score runs and no one did that more than Henderson either. He crossed the plate 2,295 times, breaking Ty Cobb’s longstanding record by 50. While the numbers tell the story of Henderson’s on-field greatness, he was equally well known as a true baseball character, never shy when it came to boasting about his own accomplishments. He compared himself to Muhammad Ali in that regard. When he broke Brock’s stolen base record, he pulled the base out of the ground, held it over his head and declared, “Today, I am the greatest of all time!”  In an era when “showboating” was generally frowned upon as a violation of baseball’s unwritten rules of etiquette, Henderson took his sweet time rounding the bases after a home run, would “snap-catch” fly balls—grabbing the ball out of the air in a downward motion then slapping his glove against his hip—and when speaking referred to himself in the third person, simply as “Rickey.” His antics often got under the skin of baseball traditionalists and certainly annoyed opposing players. But there wasn’t much they could say about it because Henderson would unfailingly make them pay on the field.  Henderson played for the A’s from 1979 to 1984 when they traded him to the New York Yankees, mainly for financial reasons. The Yankees traded him back to Oakland in 1989. The A’s again traded Henderson, this time to the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993, but he signed back with the A’s as a free agent after that season and played another season and a half with the team before another trade to the San Diego Padres.  He spent one final year in an A’s uniform in 1998 before ending his career shuffling among the New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Padres (again), Boston Red Sox and finally, in 2003, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Henderson’s cause of death was not announced, though media reports said that he succumbed to pneumonia. In a statement, Henderson’s family thanked the incredible doctors and nurses at UCSF who cared for Rickey “with dedication and compassion.” He is survived by his wife Pamela, who he met in high school and married in 1983, and their three daughters.