Mood: The Perfect Walk-Up Song for Rickey Henderson
Shortstop Tony Fernandez and left-fielder Rickey Henderson were members of the 1993 Toronto Blue
Jays World Series winning team. That title occurred during the second of Fernandez's four stints ('83 - '90, '93, '98-'99, '01) with the Blue Jays.
Fernandez was traded in-season to the
Blue Jays that year as was Henderson.
It was Fernandez's first World Series win and Henderson's second. Four years earlier, Henderson won the '89 World
Series with the A's during the second of his four stints ('79 - '84, '89 - '93, '94 - '95, '98) with the team. Fernandez and
Henderson are two of only three players in MLB history (Rudy Seánez is the other) to have
exactly four stints with one franchise.
Bleacher Report believes that the
perfect entrance song for Henderson would be "Run It" by Chris Brown. I disagree: if the Bay Area native Henderson were playing
today, I believe that the best walkup song for him would be the hit song "Mood" by
Bay Area native
24kGoldn. No, it's not because of the perception that some sportswriters had that
Henderson was moody
during the prime of his career.
"Mood" is the right tune for Henderson because the song had
four stints as
the Billboard #1 song in the country. Henderson was almost always the first-place hitter in the batting lineup and
once famously called himself "The Greatest" (#1). Another reason why the
catchy song would be a good choice is that Henderson's jersey number was #24. When he was with the Blue Jays,
he once paid a teammate $25K for
the jersey number. Perhaps $24K would have been more appropriate! (For some athletes,
no amount of money is enough to
give up their jersey number.) Henderson was an MLB player for over twenty-four years and "Mood" was
a top 10 hit for over twenty-four weeks.
The only other song in Billboard history with four stints as the #1 song is the Drake song
"Nice for What".
(Drake is a Toronto native whose record "Back to Back" was about the Blue Jays' '92 and
'93 World Series teams, the second of which Henderson and Fernandez played on.) The record for the number of stints atop the Billboard Hot 100 is six and the record for the number of stints with one
franchise is five. Last year, the Mariah Carey holiday
hit "All I Want for Christmas Is You" set the record; Bobo Newsom had five (!!) stints with the Washington Senators.