Rickey Henderson’s quest for respect and the dawn of MLB’s big money era

Baseball players weren’t regular guys, but in 1974 they earned only slightly more than three times what the average American family paying to watch them play brought home. That year, the same year Rickey Henderson turned 16, the median household income in the United States was $11,000. The average major league salary was $35,000. Hank Aaron was in the final year of a three-year, $600,000 contract that at signing had made him the highest-paid player in the history of the game at $200,000 per season. A year earlier, Willie Mays retired. Mays ended his spectacular 22-year career never making more than $180,000 a year. There were always the outliers – a few players who dwarfed what the average American worker brought home, like Babe Ruth, who earned $80,000 a year during the Great Depression years of 1930 and 1931.

The outliers were the Mount Olympus guys, however, guys like Aaron and Mays, DiMaggio and Williams, who were the best to ever play baseball – and who made their biggest money near or at the very end of their career.

Even though the players were the game, they didn’t share in the profits. The public was rarely sympathetic, however, because most fans would kill to be able to just once – just once! – hit a ball the way Reggie did at Tiger Stadium when he took Dock Ellis off the transformer at the 1971 All-Star Game, or to hear the crowd gasp for them the way it did for Rickey when his fingers waggled, his legs gave that predator’s twitch … and … bam! – he was gone.

The players got the fame, the girls, the cheers, and the whole world chanted their names. To the average Joe, the anonymous cog working in his miserable cubicle every day who literally had to beg just to get a lousy 25-buck-a-week raise, adulation was