By Jayson Jenks, Stephen Nesbitt and James Fegan
One night in November 2010, Liam Hendriks was standing on the pitcher’s mound at an Australian football oval in Adelaide, Australia, glowering over the top of his glove. Beef had been brewing all game between Hendriks and the home-plate umpire. Hendriks had gotten squeezed on a two-strike slider to Adelaide slugger Quincy Latimore, then he hung the next slider. Latimore smoked it, popped his chains and slowly circled the bases.
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The next batter was the cleanup man, a Texan named Brandon Bantz. Hendriks fired a first-pitch fastball that struck Bantz squarely on the back side of his shoulder. Bantz dropped his bat and headed to first.
“Then all hell broke loose behind me,” Bantz said.
He was by now accustomed to brouhahas down under. “I didn’t realize this before I went to Australia,” Bantz said, “but every baseball player there is insanely fiery. They will throw down and clear the benches on virtually anything.” This time, the umpire had ejected Hendriks for an alleged beanball. The dugouts jawed back and forth. Hendriks was on tilt.
Eventually, Hendriks collected his things in the first-base dugout and considered his options. He could go around the backstop and through the crowd to get to the clubhouse. Or he could take the more direct route: straight through the infield. So Hendriks put his head down and dragged his roller bag between home plate and the pitcher’s mound all the way across the field.
“It was like that scene from ‘Pitch Perfect’ when they ask the girl to leave, so she drags her chair out of the meeting and it makes that noise the whole time,” Bantz said. “It was awesome.”
It was also quintessential Hendriks: ludicrous, pugnacious and with a serious screw you attitude.
Hendriks is both one of the best closers in baseball and a bit bananas. Every story about him is tinged with the outrageous. He is wildly entertaining, endlessly philanthropic and wonderfully profane, a madman with a mitt who builds Lego sets at his locker and drops F-bombs at himself on the mound.
He is relentless. The way people describe Hendriks tends to be the same whether they’re talking about his larger-than-life personality, his mentality on the mound, his transformation from failed starter to three-time All-Star closer, or how he’s spent this year throwing bullpen sessions between chemotherapy treatments while staring down Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
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“The first thing that comes to mind with Liam: He’s a fighter,” former A’s catcher Stephen Vogt said.
“That MFer in him, man,” former A’s utility man Chad Pinder said.
“He’s just such a force to be reckoned with,” Padres outfielder Adam Engel said.
In late March, Hendriks went to see “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania” with former reliever Marc Rzepczynski. Their friendship was forged in Oakland in 2016 when they bickered so much they had to be separated in the bullpen. “We fought like brothers,” Rzepczynski said. Over the years teammates nicknamed Rzepczynski “Scrabble.” Hendriks instead calls him “the clueless lefty.” Now they go to the theater together once a month in the offseason.
They sat halfway up, on the aisle, in an otherwise empty theater in Scottsdale, Ariz., for a 2 p.m. weekday showing and ordered popcorn, pretzels, Milk Duds and chicken fingers. As previews rolled, Rzepczynski asked Hendriks how he was feeling after three rounds of chemotherapy. Hendriks smiled.
“If this next round goes well,” he said, “I’ll be cleared.”
The baseball season hadn’t even begun, and here was Hendriks laying out his roadmap back to the majors, less than three months after starting treatment.
This Friday, Hendriks is scheduled for another simulated outing against his White Sox teammates in Detroit. It could be his last before he’s activated, setting him up to return to White Sox after missing not even a third of the season.
“I knew he was going to beat it,” Rzepczynski said. “I just didn’t know it was going to be this quick.”
When Hendriks arrived in Oakland in 2016, he had neither the edge nor the confidence that are his trademarks today. He’d been designated for assignment four times, claimed on waivers three times, traded three times and relegated to fringe-of-the-roster flotsam. A’s first baseman Yonder Alonso noticed Hendriks had nasty stuff but no confidence in it. So Alonso created a gimmick: Every time Hendriks struck out a batter, Alonso would give him an old ticket stub.
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“The word on it was: ‘I need tickets. I need tickets out of you,’” Alonso said. “So every day I would see him, we would look at each other, do our handshake and both shout, ‘Tickets!’”
Every mound visit, every bullpen entrance Alonso reminded Hendriks of his obligation: It’s tickets time.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” Alonso said. “We were just feeding a beast and then he turned into a monster.”
Hendriks started meeting with Rubi Sandoval, a tarot card reader and mindset coach, in 2018 after his wife, Kristi, found her on Instagram. “When I first met him, he had a cloud over him,” Sandoval said. Hendriks had just been DFA’d for a fifth time. He cleared waivers. His velocity was down. His career ERA was 4.83.
“He was very much like, ‘I know what I want, but I don’t think I have the confidence to get there,’” Sandoval said.
Sandoval wanted Hendriks to tap into that fighter on the mound, the part of him that feeds off the anger and emotion but also believes in his own ability. Sandoval knew nothing about baseball. Hendriks liked that. Her advice dealt exclusively with his mind. He regained velocity with long toss and attacked hitters with high heat and sliders (his nickname, after all, is Slydah).
Hendriks returned from Triple A that September, threw 11 consecutive scoreless outings and started the Wild-Card Game for the A’s. “When he came back up and became who he is, it was just game over,” said former A’s third baseman Matt Chapman. By 2019, Pinder was struck by a “whole new Liam.”
“This different competitor came out of him,” Pinder said. “Every time he got on the mound, he just blacked out.”
In June 2019, Hendriks pitched in the ninth inning of a two-run game against the Rays. He struck out two and picked up his first save of the season (and second of his career). “That’s when I was like: This dude is a bad dude on the mound,’” Pinder said. Hendriks took over as A’s closer and never looked back. He had a 1.79 ERA across the 2019 and 2020 seasons.
“You could ask him now, ‘How do you think you’re going to do in this game?” Sandoval said recently. “And he’d be like: ‘I’m going to f—ing kick ass.’”
Before the ass kicking, though, there are Legos to build, teammates to chirp and Red Bulls to down. Hendriks’ pregame presence in the clubhouse is unmissable. He is notoriously loud, to the amusement of some teammates and the annoyance of others. “Loves to sit in his locker, read his books and talk s— to people,” Chapman said. His voice booms. His Legos and history books clutter his corner locker. His energy thrums with the aid of far, far too much coffee.
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“The amount of caffeine that guy puts in his body is legendary,” Vogt said.
Hendriks has a childlike obsession with Lego and $52 million in career earnings. His love language is Lego. Upon joining the White Sox in 2021, he ingratiated himself with his new teammates by buying and building a Lego version of Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet and beginning a ritual passing ownership of the gauntlet to whichever member of the bullpen had most recently struck out the side. In 2022, the gauntlet was replaced by Thor’s (Lego) hammer.
At his locker, Hendriks puts on headphones, downs his third or fourth coffee of the afternoon and gets to work on his latest creation.
“I like doing Legos with my kids,” White Sox reliever Joe Kelly said, “and I’ll say, ‘Hey did you see this new one?’ and he’ll be like, ‘Yup, already got it!’”
Lego time is interrupted only when it’s s—talking time. Hendriks chirps teammates. He chirps the opposition. When a pitcher on the other team throws a truly awful pitch, Hendriks will yell from the bullpen: “HOW DID YOU HOLD THAT?” The first time Hendriks faced hitters in live at-bats at spring training after signing with the White Sox in 2021, shortstop Tim Anderson scorched a line drive to the outfield and said, “Oh, so this the dude we gave the money to?” Hendriks beamed. A friendship was born.
“We just talk s— to each other,” Anderson said.
In Oakland, Alonso loved Red Bull, so Hendriks would take shots before games despite a distaste for the energy drink. “Liam is all game for everything,” Alonso said. Once, after one too many coffees, Hendriks became so upset during a contentious clubhouse cribbage game with teammates that he screamed his usual obscenities and stormed off for 20 minutes. “Over cribbage,” Vogt said. Other times Alonso would dare Hendriks to take his 18 vitamins in one gulp, to which Hendriks would oblige. “Then we’d scream out ‘Tickets!’” Alonso said.
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Even after the first pitch, Hendriks lets his playful side out. If Alonso struggled in his first at-bat or two during a game, Hendriks would sneak into the dugout with an offering to get him on track.
“He’d say, ‘I think it’s time for another Red Bull,’” Alonso said.
Then the bullpen phone rings and everything changes.
Hendriks transformation from clubhouse jokester to world-class closer is what Kristi likes to call “white line fever.” “He goes into another world,” former A’s reliever Aaron Loup said. The grin is gone, replaced by laser focus. “His eyes, his face, everything’s changed,” White Sox bullpen catcher Miguel González said.
“We’re afraid to talk to him because that’s how he takes care of business,” said Luis Sierra, the other White Sox bullpen catcher. “Everybody gets into game mode or locked in, but Liam is kinda scary.”
“By the time he took the rubber to warm up, it was like, look out,” said former A’s bullpen catcher Phil Pohl.
Over the years, Hendriks has perfected his game-day routine. He works out with weighted balls. He plays catch. He throws a flat-ground session with the pitches in a specific order — three fastballs, three sliders, three curveballs, repeat. “Every pitch, every time, every day is the same,” González said. When the bullpen door swings open in Chicago, Hendriks is like a wrestler making his entrance. The ballpark lights strobe. A “We Will Rock You” remix thunders through the speakers. Hendriks walks onto the warning track, slaps his thigh with his mitt, jogs to the mound and delivers his first pitch — all timed to the second.
So it was problematic for Hendriks during a 2021 game when his routine coincided with the White Sox dugout barking at home-plate umpire Will Little for a couple low strike calls on Yoán Moncada the previous half inning. “Those weren’t down,” Little snapped back. “You can go and check it.” White Sox starter Lucas Giolito pulled up a dugout iPad to check the pitches. Giolito held the iPad toward Little: “Will, we checked. They were down.”
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Little tossed Giolito.
As Giolito got his money’s worth with the umpire, Hendriks was like a caged bull on the mound. Then he reeled off a 1-2-3 ninth with two strikeouts. But he found Giolito in the clubhouse afterward and slapped him on the chest.
“What the hell, Gio?” he said. “You messed with my routine.”
Giolito couldn’t tell if Hendriks was serious or not.
The broader baseball world was introduced to Hendriks’ in-game intensity in the ninth inning of the 2021 All-Star Game, when Hendriks’ various vulgarities were aired on the national broadcast because he believed his microphone wasn’t working. “I’m sure that made for some interesting TV,” he said afterward. “I hope the bleep-er guy was on point.” The bleep-er guy was not.
Damn it!
F—!
F—ing finish!
“He demands greatness from himself,” Vogt said, “and it comes out in expletives.”
The cussing is as common while playing catch as it is in games. “The obscenities are all over the place,” former A’s catcher Sean Murphy said. One game with the A’s, Hendriks couldn’t throw a breaking ball without it bouncing before home plate. So he screamed: “One motherf—ing time! Land one motherf—ing slider!” He feeds off it. When Vogt first caught Hendriks, he thought Hendriks needed to calm down. He was huffing and puffing and cursing all over the place. But soon he realized that’s what Hendriks needed to do, so Vogt tried to amp up his own energy to mirror Hendriks.
“He’s just constantly red-lining out there,” Vogt said.
That’s white line fever.
When Hendriks and Kristi called in December to deliver the news of his cancer diagnosis, Sandoval, the tarot card reader, was devastated. She considers the couple her best friends. They spend holidays together. Her initial worry that all the work Hendriks had done to right his mind, to think positively but pitch angrily, would go out the window. Then she asked Hendriks how he felt.
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“I felt the warrior mentality come out of him,” she said.
The news shook Rzepczynski. He and his wife, Lindzey, had taken their annual vacation with the Hendriks in late November, spending a week on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii. In retrospect, Rzepczynski said, Hendriks seemed like he had less energy than usual on the trip, but he had chalked that up as that typical postseason fatigue, not Stage 4 cancer.
In late January, before his second round of chemotherapy, Hendriks spent a weekend in Sedona, Ariz., with Kristi, his parents, his sister and brother-in-law, and the Rzepczynskis. Rzepczynski drove Hendriks and his dad, Geoff, and that was the first time he heard about the severity of Hendriks’ diagnosis. “He’s been optimistic and positive the whole time,” Rzepczynski said. “But I’m looking at my friend going, hopefully he’s just here in six months.”
A few days after each of Hendriks’ chemotherapy treatments, the Rzepczynskis came over to cook dinner. Italian is Lindzey’s specialty. Hendriks would be a little tired, but he was otherwise as upbeat and entertaining as ever. His joking made the cancer easier to talk about. Hendriks never stopped throwing throughout the offseason. He was always intent on pitching as much of this season as he could. Rzepczynski swore he’d be there for Hendriks’ first game back.
“I’m just happy that I get to see my buddy pitch again,” Rzepczynski said.
Last week, as Hendriks completed his rehab assignment at Triple-A Charlotte, the closer’s corner locker in the home clubhouse at Guaranteed Rate Field sat perfectly preserved. There were completed Lego sets — a miniature Infinity Gauntlet, several Star Wars ships, a TIE fighter pilot helmet and a tiny Groot — and multiple dinosaur skeleton models.
Outfielder Gavin Sheets has sat three lockers down from Hendriks since being called up two years ago. He’s looking forward to the entirety of the Liam Hendriks experience returning: the Legos, the loudness, the laughing, and the way Hendriks locks in when the bullpen phone rings and Aussie accented curse words start flying through the air. It hasn’t been the same without Hendriks.
“A lot quieter,” Sheets said, “but it’s going to get back to normal here soon.”
This article also includes reporting by Dennis Lin, David O’Brien and Sam Blum
(Top image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)