The all-time stolen base king, Rickey Henderson, naturally, was ahead of his time.
“Walks have been a lot underappreciated,” Henderson told the Union-Tribune on this date — April 25 — in 2001 as he passed Babe Ruth to become the all-time walks leader with 2,063 free passes. “It’s lost in the stat sheets. It lost its appeal somewhere. Another thing lost in the stats is on-base percentage. That’s the most important thing in baseball. If nobody’s on base, nobody scores.”
Henderson’s comments arrived more than two years before Michael Lewis’ best-selling “Moneyball” shined a light on such thinking.