By Dan Hirshberg

It was May of 1981 and I was working on a feature story on Rickey Henderson for the Daily Record out of Morris County. Henderson was with the Oakland A’s then, barely into his third year in the major leagues. The year before he had stolen 100 bases and was probably going to set a record breaker of a year for swipes in 1981 except that season was later interrupted by a player’s strike. He ended up with a mere 56 stolen bases, on his way though, to a Hall of Fame career that included 1406 steals in all, a record that may never fall.     

I had seen Henderson play baseball in Jersey City at Roosevelt Stadium a few years before I caught up with him at Yankee Stadium and was excited to have him relive some of the great memories he must have had there. 

I approached him in the A’s visiting clubhouse and I asked Henderson about those memories of playing for the Jersey City Indians (Double-A) in 1978. He stared at me and was momentarily speechless. Then he looked at me incredulously and said, “Jersey City!” and shook his head. What may have been fond memories for me certainly wasn’t for him.

Statistically, it wasn’t a bad year for Henderson. He batted .310 and stole 81 bases. Beyond that?

“Jersey City was a big ballpark,” said Henderson, who would steal 130 bases in 1982 to break the all-time season record for swipes. “It wasn’t really kept up neat and the lights were real, real bad. You could hardly see.”

Where once the ballpark was home to the New York Giants (baseball) AAA farm team, was where Jackie Robinson debuted as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers farm club, and where the Dodgers played a handful of National League games in the mid-50s before splitting for Los Angeles, had by the time Henderson arrived outlasted its viability as a professional ballpark. OK, some simply described it as a “dump.”

Henderson continued, “During twilight games you had to try and figure out where the ball was going. It was hard on hitters to hit there and hard to just concentrate on playing the game. Believe me, nobody liked it.”

In the recently published book, Rickey, by Howard Bryant, Henderson’s comments about Jersey City and in particular, his manager John Kennedy, are even harsher. 

“Kennedy was a redneck…a real redneck,” he said in the book. “He was on us (the Black players) for everything.”

Kennedy made it difficult in other ways, according to Henderson in the book. “He had all these rules,” he said. It was so bad for Henderson and his relationship with the manager that he threatened to pack up and go home if Kennedy didn’t back off, and called A’s owner Charlie Finley directly with the ultimatum.

“I tell (Finley) I cannot take this anymore,” Henderson said. He asked Finely to either sent him down to Single-A or up to Triple A or “I quit.” Finley apparently called Kennedy and read him the riot act because the next day Henderson indicated that everything “changed…My whole career. I was ready to quit, and it wasn’t no threat.”   

The book is more than about Jersey City, of course, highlighting Henderson’s roots growing up in Oakland, to his rise to fame from his earliest days to stints with a host of teams including the A’s, Yankees and Mets, to his last attempts of making back to the major leagues with two seasons playing for the independent league Newark Bears, to his Hall of Fame induction.   

For Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium, the end for minor league baseball officially came after that 1978 season (the year before the Cleveland Indians farm team played there). The old stadium enjoyed a few years afterwards as a major concert venue, with bands such as the Grateful Dead, The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, KISS, Grand Funk Railroad, and Santana gracing the stage.

For Rickey Henderson, though, Jersey City was no enjoyment and certainly no party.

*****

The New York Mets fell short of winning the National League pennant this year. Got you down? For those who want to relive their championship years of 1969 (World Series winners) and 1973 (NL winners), the recently published book, Coming Home, My Amazin’ Life with the New York Mets by Cleon Jones, highlights those two memorable years and more, in a look back at Jones’ career and what he’s up to these days.

*****

Dan Hirshberg is the former Sports Editor of The Star-Gazette when The Star-Gazette was a “real” paper.